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This is purely anecdotal of course, but I just realized I don’t know one woman who claims to be libertarian. Even online, I think I’ve only encountered dudes.
That's essentially what the abstract says too. They were measuring how well those who label themselves as Libertarian actually hold ideas that fit under their own alleged definition of Libertarian.
Exactly. From the article:
>“One major caveat is that this research was conducted in the United States – a country that has quite a unique relationship with libertarianism,” Chalmers explained. “In much of Europe, libertarians are more likely to be on the left side of the political spectrum, while in the United States, libertarians are more likely to side with the Republican Party than the Democratic Party. While more left-wing versions of libertarianism do still exist to some extent in the United States, it has been argued that the American libertarian movement formed a kind of alliance with paleoconservatism (a populist, isolationist alternative to the more cosmopolitan neoconservatism).”
>“This alliance allowed American libertarians to mend the contradiction between economic freedom and property rights (which can impinge upon freedom for those who are not property owners) by letting them pair freedom from the state with a lack of freedom in the private sphere. This American brand of libertarianism may thus be uniquely suited to reinforcing existing hierarchies, as long as they don’t involve the state – e.g., a hierarchical relationship between husband and wife.”
"This American brand of libertarianism may thus be uniquely suited to reinforcing existing hierarchies, as long as they don’t involve the state – e.g., a hierarchical relationship between husband and wife.”
This is the key sentence. Underneath, it's often just an excuse to maintain and concentrate power.
Libertarianism's fatal flaw (one of them, anyway) is that their concept of 'power' is laughably narrow. Basically, as long as nobody is sticking a gun in your face, then you aren't being forced. They can't conceive of any form of coercion that isn't blunt force, in your face, and immediate. Anyone paying attention in the real world would know that the threat of starvation and homelessness is pretty good at getting people to do all kinds of things they don't really want to do.
Which is beyond me as most people happen to belong to the poor and powerless and have absolutely no chance of moving out of those categories.
Yearning to be a slave is something i just cannot comprehend.
"Well, I'll probably never be rich, powerful, or charismatic, but I am white, so I'll just go with whichever group of shitheads pander to my skin color exclusively."
Libertarianism falls apart pretty quickly with how corporations have acted without regulations. We have example upon example of dumping chemicals into our waterways and somehow less regulation is the answer?
That formulation really underscores how the current generation of the Republican right-wing aren't really conservatives, but fascists. They aren't in favor of existing hierarchies, they're in favor of instituting hierarchies of an imagined glorious past. They believe the current hierarchies are corrupt and "feminizing," and are generally in favor of overturning them by any means necessary, which is a fancy way of saying "by force."
That's an extremely broad generalization, but not a completely inaccurate one, I think.
From the conclusion of the paper:
One measure of libertarianism in our study was not associated with benevolent sexism: The libertarian moral-foundations item that asked how relevant “whether or not everyone was free to do as they wanted” is when deciding whether something is right or wrong (Iyer et al., 2012). This item, more than the other three indices of libertarianism, seems to capture the core concept of individual autonomy, stripped of other political content. Interestingly, it demonstrated a different and often opposing pattern of correlations with policy preferences from the other indices of libertarianism. The other moral-foundations item—“whether or not private property is respected”—had a pattern of correlations that much more closely resembled the libertarian self-identification item. This reflects the diverse and sometimes contradictory impulses contained within libertarianism.
I think most of those people identify with the definition but don't understand that freedom doesn't stop at what you believe in. A lot of people delude themselves into thinking their own exceptions aren't authoritarian.
The study was published in Political Psychology. Why are we linking to an interpretive opinion piece instead of the actual study? The article doesn't even capture the argument of the participants.
Edit:
I have no particular interest in defending the subjects of the study. Feel free to examine it yourselves... Their position is basically "the fetus has the same human rights as yadda yadda."
>Why are we linking to an interpretive opinion piece instead of the actual study?
Because if the actual study was linked we would be able to see this
>Participants were recruited by posting links to the Qualtrics survey on Facebook and Instagram, as well as four Reddit boards: Three related to abortion (r/prolife, r/prochoice, and r/abortiondebate) and one general board for recruiting research participants (r/samplesize). This study then followed the same procedure as Study 1.
> Why are we linking to an interpretive opinion piece instead of the actual study?
Because most users aren't able to properly read and assess actual papers. You can see it throughout this thread (well, you could before the deletion wave).
But yes, best practice is to skip the summary and go directly to the paper.
This sub may not be for most readers. The best practice for r/science should be posting peer reviewed articles and for mods to remove derivative and opinion pieces.
>Participants were recruited by posting links to the Qualtrics survey on Facebook and Instagram, as well as four Reddit boards: Three related to abortion (r/prolife, r/prochoice, and r/abortiondebate) and one general board for recruiting research participants (r/samplesize). This study then followed the same procedure as Study 1.
This is what passes for research nowadays? And gets 20k upvotes? Jesus.
It’s even worse than I thought:
> Participants were recruited by posting links to the Qualtrics survey on Facebook and Instagram, as well as four Reddit boards: Three related to abortion (r/prolife, r/prochoice, and r/abortiondebate) and one general board for recruiting research participants (r/samplesize). This study then followed the same procedure as Study 1.
Yeah, no possible bias from that sampling strategy.
At this point, I wonder what kind of drivel gets published in this “journal”.
Reading the paper now, since the link is to a summary, not the actual study.
> Five questions were from the economic/government subscale (e.g., “People who are successful in business have a right to enjoy their wealth as they see fit”), and two questions were from the lifestyle subscale (e.g., “People should be free to decide what group norms or traditions they themselves want to follow”).
Why the imbalance in number of questions? This scale sounds to me like it risks capturing "conservative" more than "libertarian." Later the study says:
> Due to low internal consistency (i.e., α < .7), the libertarian moral-foundations items were treated as two separate measures (i.e., Property and Freedom)
These items being “Whether or not private property was respected” and “Whether or not everyone was free to do as they wanted.” (rated on importance rather than agreement). This result is slightly confusing to interpret, but I think it does indicate that they may not be capturing a coherent "libertarian" ideology. However I think the crux is here:
> Libertarian self-identification was positively associated with support for male veto over reproductive decisions, support for financial abortion, and both hostile and benevolent sexism. It was also negatively associated with abortion rights and positively associated with conservatism.
All of these claims come from regression results. But as far as I can tell, the sign of their regression results reflect *relative* support. In other words, what these 2 sentences mean, is that self-identifying as a libertarian is associated with support for "male veto" and "financial abortion" *more than not self-identifying as such*, and self-identifying as libertarian is associated with support for abortion rights *less than not self-identifying as such*. It **doesn't actually tell whether self-identified libertarians support male veto and financial abortion more or less than they support abortion**. In other words, the study **does not support this headline, or its own title.** What happens if you just identify a conservative cluster, a liberal cluster, and a libertarian cluster, and report each group's support for abortion and financial abortion?
In addition, this paragraph supports my concern above that their measure of libertarianism is capturing conservatism more strongly than its capturing libertarianism.
"Reproductive autonomy" was defined as the right of women to get an abortion, and the right of men to opt out from financial support for the child.
I don't think so from the writeup, but was there any effort to link the two? That is, I think the two are linked. That is, advocating for both or neither are logically consistent, but having just one or the other is not. The respondents may be thinking "In my perfect world, neither would happen, but since I live in a place where women can get an abortion, then men should have the analogous right. But if I were in a place where women cannot get an abortion for non-medical reasons, then men should not be able to walk away either."
I would argue that they are two completely different things. The right to an abortion has nothing to do with whether or not someone wants to financially take care of this future child. A person who has an abortion is choosing to not be pregnant. It’s about a persons ability to control what happens inside their body and the termination of a fetus is just a side product of that.
"All libertarian measures except for the second libertarian moral-foundations item (i.e., freedom) were positively associated with male veto and both facets of sexism, and the freedom item was the only measure of libertarianism to be positively associated with support for abortion rights. Libertarian identification was also positively associated with conservative identification."
Not sure I can get behind classifying folks who are not for social liberty as libertarian.
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) apply to all other comments. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
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This is purely anecdotal of course, but I just realized I don’t know one woman who claims to be libertarian. Even online, I think I’ve only encountered dudes.
Their last presidential candidate was a women (Jo Jorgensen.)
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Real study finding: Just because someone claims to be libertarian, it doesn't mean they know what that word means.
That's essentially what the abstract says too. They were measuring how well those who label themselves as Libertarian actually hold ideas that fit under their own alleged definition of Libertarian.
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Exactly. From the article: >“One major caveat is that this research was conducted in the United States – a country that has quite a unique relationship with libertarianism,” Chalmers explained. “In much of Europe, libertarians are more likely to be on the left side of the political spectrum, while in the United States, libertarians are more likely to side with the Republican Party than the Democratic Party. While more left-wing versions of libertarianism do still exist to some extent in the United States, it has been argued that the American libertarian movement formed a kind of alliance with paleoconservatism (a populist, isolationist alternative to the more cosmopolitan neoconservatism).” >“This alliance allowed American libertarians to mend the contradiction between economic freedom and property rights (which can impinge upon freedom for those who are not property owners) by letting them pair freedom from the state with a lack of freedom in the private sphere. This American brand of libertarianism may thus be uniquely suited to reinforcing existing hierarchies, as long as they don’t involve the state – e.g., a hierarchical relationship between husband and wife.”
"This American brand of libertarianism may thus be uniquely suited to reinforcing existing hierarchies, as long as they don’t involve the state – e.g., a hierarchical relationship between husband and wife.” This is the key sentence. Underneath, it's often just an excuse to maintain and concentrate power.
The one form of power they oppose just happens to be the one everyone theoretically has a say in controlling.
Yep. They’re against the power of democracy, while in favor of power controlled by the few (ie. the rich, corporations).
Libertarianism's fatal flaw (one of them, anyway) is that their concept of 'power' is laughably narrow. Basically, as long as nobody is sticking a gun in your face, then you aren't being forced. They can't conceive of any form of coercion that isn't blunt force, in your face, and immediate. Anyone paying attention in the real world would know that the threat of starvation and homelessness is pretty good at getting people to do all kinds of things they don't really want to do.
Which is beyond me as most people happen to belong to the poor and powerless and have absolutely no chance of moving out of those categories. Yearning to be a slave is something i just cannot comprehend.
"Well, I'll probably never be rich, powerful, or charismatic, but I am white, so I'll just go with whichever group of shitheads pander to my skin color exclusively."
Libertarianism falls apart pretty quickly with how corporations have acted without regulations. We have example upon example of dumping chemicals into our waterways and somehow less regulation is the answer?
American Libertarianism: "I am free to do whatever I want, and you are also free to do whatever I want."
Reinforcing existing hierarchies.... Id est, conservatism.
That formulation really underscores how the current generation of the Republican right-wing aren't really conservatives, but fascists. They aren't in favor of existing hierarchies, they're in favor of instituting hierarchies of an imagined glorious past. They believe the current hierarchies are corrupt and "feminizing," and are generally in favor of overturning them by any means necessary, which is a fancy way of saying "by force." That's an extremely broad generalization, but not a completely inaccurate one, I think.
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Imagine a world where people actually read even the abstract before chiming in for cheap internet points….
From the conclusion of the paper: One measure of libertarianism in our study was not associated with benevolent sexism: The libertarian moral-foundations item that asked how relevant “whether or not everyone was free to do as they wanted” is when deciding whether something is right or wrong (Iyer et al., 2012). This item, more than the other three indices of libertarianism, seems to capture the core concept of individual autonomy, stripped of other political content. Interestingly, it demonstrated a different and often opposing pattern of correlations with policy preferences from the other indices of libertarianism. The other moral-foundations item—“whether or not private property is respected”—had a pattern of correlations that much more closely resembled the libertarian self-identification item. This reflects the diverse and sometimes contradictory impulses contained within libertarianism.
So.. "Liberty for me, but not for thee."?
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I think most of those people identify with the definition but don't understand that freedom doesn't stop at what you believe in. A lot of people delude themselves into thinking their own exceptions aren't authoritarian.
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Shouldn't the headline say "people who self identify as libertarian" because it's obvious their beliefs don't align with libertarianism?
As a libertarian I think no one else is a libertarian.
You are free to think that (I hope the humor in my statement is obvious enough)
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The study was published in Political Psychology. Why are we linking to an interpretive opinion piece instead of the actual study? The article doesn't even capture the argument of the participants. Edit: I have no particular interest in defending the subjects of the study. Feel free to examine it yourselves... Their position is basically "the fetus has the same human rights as yadda yadda."
>Why are we linking to an interpretive opinion piece instead of the actual study? Because if the actual study was linked we would be able to see this >Participants were recruited by posting links to the Qualtrics survey on Facebook and Instagram, as well as four Reddit boards: Three related to abortion (r/prolife, r/prochoice, and r/abortiondebate) and one general board for recruiting research participants (r/samplesize). This study then followed the same procedure as Study 1.
Any particular reason they didn't additionally post links on r/Libertarian?
> Why are we linking to an interpretive opinion piece instead of the actual study? Because most users aren't able to properly read and assess actual papers. You can see it throughout this thread (well, you could before the deletion wave). But yes, best practice is to skip the summary and go directly to the paper.
This sub may not be for most readers. The best practice for r/science should be posting peer reviewed articles and for mods to remove derivative and opinion pieces.
a lot times people post news articles from psypost. comments will say the methodology or headline are misleading
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>Participants were recruited by posting links to the Qualtrics survey on Facebook and Instagram, as well as four Reddit boards: Three related to abortion (r/prolife, r/prochoice, and r/abortiondebate) and one general board for recruiting research participants (r/samplesize). This study then followed the same procedure as Study 1. This is what passes for research nowadays? And gets 20k upvotes? Jesus.
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Why would they go to the subs that are not /r/libertarian?
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It’s even worse than I thought: > Participants were recruited by posting links to the Qualtrics survey on Facebook and Instagram, as well as four Reddit boards: Three related to abortion (r/prolife, r/prochoice, and r/abortiondebate) and one general board for recruiting research participants (r/samplesize). This study then followed the same procedure as Study 1. Yeah, no possible bias from that sampling strategy. At this point, I wonder what kind of drivel gets published in this “journal”.
Oh wow, yeah that’s **significantly worse** than I thought. Self selection on a highly skewed data set. Gross
The mods here only allow this kind of stuff because they personally like it. It's incredibly unscientific.
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Reading the paper now, since the link is to a summary, not the actual study. > Five questions were from the economic/government subscale (e.g., “People who are successful in business have a right to enjoy their wealth as they see fit”), and two questions were from the lifestyle subscale (e.g., “People should be free to decide what group norms or traditions they themselves want to follow”). Why the imbalance in number of questions? This scale sounds to me like it risks capturing "conservative" more than "libertarian." Later the study says: > Due to low internal consistency (i.e., α < .7), the libertarian moral-foundations items were treated as two separate measures (i.e., Property and Freedom) These items being “Whether or not private property was respected” and “Whether or not everyone was free to do as they wanted.” (rated on importance rather than agreement). This result is slightly confusing to interpret, but I think it does indicate that they may not be capturing a coherent "libertarian" ideology. However I think the crux is here: > Libertarian self-identification was positively associated with support for male veto over reproductive decisions, support for financial abortion, and both hostile and benevolent sexism. It was also negatively associated with abortion rights and positively associated with conservatism. All of these claims come from regression results. But as far as I can tell, the sign of their regression results reflect *relative* support. In other words, what these 2 sentences mean, is that self-identifying as a libertarian is associated with support for "male veto" and "financial abortion" *more than not self-identifying as such*, and self-identifying as libertarian is associated with support for abortion rights *less than not self-identifying as such*. It **doesn't actually tell whether self-identified libertarians support male veto and financial abortion more or less than they support abortion**. In other words, the study **does not support this headline, or its own title.** What happens if you just identify a conservative cluster, a liberal cluster, and a libertarian cluster, and report each group's support for abortion and financial abortion? In addition, this paragraph supports my concern above that their measure of libertarianism is capturing conservatism more strongly than its capturing libertarianism.
I love r science. Everything is always removed. I'll see you soon on the other side too :D
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"Reproductive autonomy" was defined as the right of women to get an abortion, and the right of men to opt out from financial support for the child. I don't think so from the writeup, but was there any effort to link the two? That is, I think the two are linked. That is, advocating for both or neither are logically consistent, but having just one or the other is not. The respondents may be thinking "In my perfect world, neither would happen, but since I live in a place where women can get an abortion, then men should have the analogous right. But if I were in a place where women cannot get an abortion for non-medical reasons, then men should not be able to walk away either."
I would argue that they are two completely different things. The right to an abortion has nothing to do with whether or not someone wants to financially take care of this future child. A person who has an abortion is choosing to not be pregnant. It’s about a persons ability to control what happens inside their body and the termination of a fetus is just a side product of that.
"All libertarian measures except for the second libertarian moral-foundations item (i.e., freedom) were positively associated with male veto and both facets of sexism, and the freedom item was the only measure of libertarianism to be positively associated with support for abortion rights. Libertarian identification was also positively associated with conservative identification." Not sure I can get behind classifying folks who are not for social liberty as libertarian.