More Loaded Dice

David Friedman looks at a couple of items -- one showing that conservatives are more authoritarian, and another showing people who watch Fox News are dumber.

More Loaded Dice: "Several years ago I had an exchange on this blog with Professor Robert Altemeyer over his claim that authoritarianism was more common on the political right than on the political left. I argued that the survey on which his claim was based was, probably not intentionally, loaded. Questions about respect for authority consistently referred to authorities more popular on the right than the left, questions about people bravely defying authority referred to forms of defiance more popular on the left than on the right, hence people on the left would appear, by their score on his questions, less authoritarian than they were, people on the right more. I recently encountered the same problem in a different context, this time an article describing a study that purported to show that people on the right are more often misinformed about public issues than people on the left.

The obvious way to rig the results of such a poll is to select questions where the answer you consider mistaken is more popular with one side than the other. Most people who believe Obama was not born in the U.S. are on the right. Most people who believe the Chamber of Commerce used foreign money to influence the most recent election are on the left. By my count, for at least seven of the eleven questions the answer that the study's authors considered misinformed was a view more popular with the right than the left. One—the Chamber of Commerce question—went the other way.

A second problem with the study was that, for at least three of its eleven questions (whether stimulus had saved several million jobs, whether the economy was recovering, whether Obamacare increased the deficit), the right answer was unclear. In none of the three did the study's authors provide adequate support for their view—which, in each case, coincided with the claims of the Administration.

And The American Spectator has a blog post on some of the flaws with this survey.

Professor Krosnick's polling results are so woeful that both Pew Research Center Survey and Gallup polling recently took the time to harshly reprimand him for his shoddy work.

And these comments at The American Thinker:

...The purpose of my polls was to quantify the impact of the media's remarkable pro-Obama and anti-Palin bias on the electorate for my documentary, Media Malpractice. What we found back then was that McCain voters and those "exposed" to Fox News and talk radio were far more likely to answer our simple multiple-choice questions correctly than Obama voters and those "exposed" to any other media outlet. The most dramatic example was that those voters "exposed" to "conservative" media were far more informed when it came to simply knowing that it was the Democratic Party which controlled congress at the time. This turned out to be rather determinative when it came to voters' presidential choice.

Conversely, we discovered that it was only when it came to knowing all the negative stories about Sarah Palin (an incredible 98% of those "exposed" to MSNBC knew that Palin was the candidate with the pregnant teenage daughter) that those consumers of the more liberal outlets excelled. Otherwise, fans of liberal media were far more likely to get our easy questions wrong.

....

I will be waiting with bated breath to see if Silver and his buddies on the left react in anywhere near the same way to this most recent poll from the University of Maryland. However, I will be sure not to hold that breath too long, because though the Maryland poll has far more holes in it than anything I or any other "conservative" could ever dream of getting away with, I am quite certain that it will not receive anywhere near the same kind of scrutiny and criticism from the elites in the "mainstream."