Trusting Social Science Too Much Can Backfire
Democrats may have blundered by accepting a book too blindly
As social scientists, we mostly see ourselves as observers and interpreters of what we see, rather than as political actors. In principle, the researcher has successfully made the “epistemological break,” has no political agenda, and is not participating in a political cause. The cause is theorizing successfully … and producing publishable research. Indeed, successful research usually ends with a call for even more research! On some level, we hope that research results in a better understanding of the world, and more informed policy, but conducting academic work is something of an end in itself.
Research, however, can have unexpected feedback on the subject under study, even when it is very theoretical and is not being driven by the researcher’s own biases. And a commentary in the New York Times points out that this seems to have happened in regard to the Democratic Party in the United States. Nate Cohn’s article argues that John Judis and Ruy Texeira’’s 2002 book The Emerging Democratic Majority, which argued that the gradual demographic shift of the United States to a “majority-minority” makeup (more simply, whites becoming less than half the American population), projected for later this century, would create a lasting Democratic electoral majority. Barack Obama’s victory in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections seemed to confirm this thesis, to the point that the Republican Party’s “Growth and Opportunity Project” published an “autopsy” of the 2012 election that concluded that the party could not win elections simply by dominating the white vote, and that it needed to win the votes of women and racialized groups in order to win national majorities going forward.
Judis and Texeira’’s work was mildly controversial, and also rested on a number of shaky assumptions. It assumed that demographic change would continue unchanged for several decades, and that voting patterns would not change. In particular, it assumed that the racial components of each party’s voting base would not change. By the time of Donald Trump’s election in 2016, the weaknesses of these assumptions began to show. The white working class could potentially consolidate behind the Republican Party, not disproving the Judis/Teixeira thesis as such, but stretching out the amount of time needed for the Democratic shift to happen. Minorities, as they assimilate into the American mainstream, could begin to spread themselves more evenly over the two parties, for example, as conservative Latinos vote Republican by ideology rather than Democratic by ethnic attachment.
While The Emerging Democratic Majority did not account for the potential emergence of Donald Trump as a political leader, or consider the further rightward movement of the Republicans, Cohn also says that the book disproportionately influenced the Democrats into thinking that “demography [was] destiny” and that the emerging majority was to be secured by leaning into Obama’s electoral coalition. A side effect was the increased power that educated urban professionals, many thinking that they spoke for minority groups, asserted within the Democratic Party. With whites on their way to being a smaller part of the American electorate, the white working class would be less necessary to the Democratic coalition, and the party could double down on diversity as the path to dominance later in the century. The Democrats are not completely there. Joe Biden won the presidential nomination and eventually the presidency by appealing to the white working class in the Northeast and the Midwest, but younger generations in the party seem more sympathetic to a Judis/Teixeira view of American politics.
What began as an attempt by two scholars to theorize about demographic change in the United States took on a life of its own when the Democrats read too much into it, accepted its thesis too uncritically, and changed their campaigning and messaging, believing it was true. Judis and Teixeira should not be faulted. Research is not perfect, and it is ultimately a trial and error process. Mistakes will happen, and researchers need to own up to them and learn from them, and acknowledge that, well, more research is needed. Teixeira, in particular, has done this. The moral in the story is for the reader. Social science research is not gospel truth, and it is meant for consumption by the critical thinker.
References:
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Emerging-Democratic-Majority/John-B-Judis/9780743238557
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/25/us/politics/ruy-teixeira-democrats.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/24/upshot/democratic-majority-book.html
http://cahiers.kingston.ac.uk/concepts/epistemological-break.html
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781627795401/listenliberal
https://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/RNCreport03182013.pdf
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-democrats-woes-with-hispanic-voters-11659625647
