A few years ago it was shown that white America fertility correlated 0.86 to voting for George W. Bush in 2004 on a state by state level. What that means is pretty simple, if you have the 50 states + DC, and plot their white fertility on the X axis and % voting for George W. Bush on the Y axis the variation of X could predict about 3/4 of the variation of Y. That's pretty good. But what about on an individual level? The differences here aren't so stark. In short, those whites who voted for John F. Kerry wanted nearly as many children as those whites who voted for George W. Bush. They simply didn't have them. See charts derived from GSS data below the fold....
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Be the change we want to see...
Today is a big day for American Presidential politics, the so-called Super Tuesday when citizens in 24 states vote or caucus with their fellows to help select the candidates of the two main political parties. I live in one of those 24 states and Mrs. R. and I vote regular as clockwork.
I've been thinking about the Electoral College, that mechanism by which voters in the U.S. indirectly elect their president.
Are you registered? Do you know where to vote? You can find information and register (if you are not) here (this is an Obama site, but it works for everyone):
I'd love to see a graph of the mother's age at birth of first child, to see how much that explains the difference.
done.
Thanks for this.
Is the Democrat/ Republican difference in fertility explained by differences in religiousness, as Eric Kaufman of Birkbeck College, London has suggested?
http://www.sneps.net/RD/uploads/06prospect-Kaufmann.pdf
Would it be possible for you to introduce controls for religiousness?
i did a few queries. perhaps that is the difference. but it looks like that is a religion X politics interaction. conservative secularists don't have many fewer children than conservative fundies, but the variation across liberals is much bigger.
I'm a conservative secularist and I've got 4 kids. Simply put, I like children. No need for direction from On High.
Wait... nearly 20% of white Demograts had a kid before they hit 20? Is that right? Wow.
Also, not to be nitpicky, but I think the 2nd graph should be entitled "Actual Number of Children," not "Actually Number of Children." :-)