Low incomes make poor more conservative, study finds

[Joanne98]

You might think that in a time when more money is concentrated in fewer hands and incomes vary wildly from billions to subsistence, poor people might increase their support for government policies that offer some help.

Not in America.

New research findings add complexity to the basic assumption that humans act in their own economic self-interest. By analyzing hundreds of survey questions from 1952 to 2006, Peter Enns, assistant professor of government, and Nathan Kelly of the University of Tennessee found that as inequality rises, low income individuals' attitudes toward redistribution become more conservative. Their paper appears in the October issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

"It's a bit of a conundrum," Enns admits.

The researchers also examined public opinion data on the question: Should government increase spending on welfare, keep it the same or decrease it? "As inequality rose, the high- and low-income respondents on average become less supportive of spending on welfare," Enns said. "And this is not because low-income people are unaware of inequality; our results show they are more aware of it than most people."

The researchers found that higher levels of household income inequality in the United States generate more conservative public opinion. "We broke down pubic opinion by income group and found the high- and low-income groups responding in a similar way, both becoming more conservative when inequality rises," Enns said. "We were very surprised to observe that the self-reinforcing aspect of inequality holds for high- and low-income groups, and how they move together in parallel over time."

Previous economic models predicted that low-income individuals will consistently support government redistribution. "If anything, when inequality rises, low-income people should become more supportive, and that's not what we observe in the data," said Enns, a member of the Institute for Social Sciences theme project on Judgment, Decision Making, and Social Behavior and faculty director of the Cornell Prison Education Program.

http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-incomes-poor.html

This is easy to answer. The poorer people get the more they GO TO CHURCH!

Then all the FAKE preachers promote the "DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS" and tell the flock that POVERTY IS CAUSED BY SIN AND THE RICH NEED MORE TAX CUTS BECAUSE JESUS LOVES THEM THE MOST!

This is WHY Americans are the dumbest people on Earth. WE HAVE WAY TO MANY CHURCHES!

[LiberalFighter]

1. Yes we have way too many churches.

We also have way too many religions.

Too many people that believe the crap they preach too.

[queenjane]

7. Thank you!!! (n/t)

[Drale]

2. Where do you think the tea baggers came from

the either lost their jobs or they retired and all of a sudden they blame all the problems on the government and not on the corporations that cause the problems. Its bullshit really.

[marmar]

3. Not all the poor......Perhaps the Teabagger demographic.

nt

[rfranklin]

4. I would like to hear more about that "PUBIC OPINION"

THIS COULD GET A BIT HAIRY!

[jaksavage]

5. Church is a symptom

The source of the mental disorder is stress.

[Moosepoop]

6. Nope, it's the media.

At least, that's the only hypothesis mentioned in the article.

[BrklynLiberal]

8. You are right..It would seem that the dumbest population in the world today lives in this country.