Voter turnout tied to sense of identity

I'm very interested in general in the issue of how we describe ourselves , and what are goals are, influences what we actually do, so fascinating to see the effect in the realm of voting:
Voter Turnout Is Tied to Sense of Identity: Scientific American
"Boosting voter turnout could be as simple as making individuals see voting as part of who they are rather than as something they do. For the 2008 presidential election, the turnout rate was about 96 percent among registered voters who first filled out a survey asking “How important is it to you to be a voter?” compared with about 82 percent for those who were asked “How important is it to you to vote?” The study, led by Christopher Bryan of Stanford University, was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. “We offered people the prospect of claiming a desirable identity,” Bryan says. “That’s a very powerful thing.”

Observer Santorum profile

Rick Santorum:the apostle of America's right | Observer profile | From the Observer | The Observer

Another non-Romney surge, still Santorum...

Mitt Romney faces defeat in his family's home state of Michigan | World news | The Observer

The first Facebook election...

Obama, Facebook and the power of friendship: the 2012 data election | World news | guardian.co.uk
"Facebook is also being seen as a source of invaluable data on voters. The re-election team, Obama for America, will be inviting its supporters to log on to the campaign website via Facebook, thus allowing the campaign to access their personal data and add it to the central data store – the largest, most detailed and potentially most powerful in the history of political campaigns. If 2008 was all about social media, 2012 is destined to become the "data election".
"

The 'second Great Depression' saviour myth

 Dean Baker : "We're told that Fed officials and the Obama administration saved us from another 1930s-style slump. Nonsense"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/feb/16/second-great-depression-saviour-myth

However, it might be disingenous to compare the US to Argentina, since in the case of Agentina a collapsing currency must have made it more competetive and allow it to grow with exports to a still existing world economy, whereas if something similar happened the US and the dollar, that entire economy would be severly shaken.
And furthermore even if financial armegeddon was always unlikely, extreme chaos and misery could still have been possible.
Still - hyperbole should be shot down, on both sides of the political divide...so worth reposting...

Santorum back in the race after sweeping wins over Mitt Romney

Santorum won political caucuses in Colorado and Minnesota, along with beauty contest in Missouri securing triple victory
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/08/rick-santorum-victory-colorado-minnesota
"The big results for Santorum were Minnesota and Colorado, whose caucuses were about delivering delegates The potential turning point could be Super Tuesday on 6 March when 10 states hold elections. Gingrich and Santorum victories in some of these states and a share of delegates in others would doom Romney's chances of bringing the race to a close in April."

Obama campaign throws its weight behind Democrats' Super Pac

Head of Obama's campaign expresses concern that Republican candidates will be able to outspend president in 21012 race
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/07/obama-campaign-democrats-super-pac
"The Democratic party has watched aghast at not only the amounts raised by Republican presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney – who is favourite to take on Obama for the White House – but Republican Super PACs storing funds for the general election, such as Karl Rove's American Crossroads.
Messina said American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS raised $51m last year while comparable Democratic groups collected only $19m over the same period.
Until recently, it had been widely assumed that Obama would be the first candidate to have a record-breaking $1bn to fight a White House campaign and his Republican rival would be behind, with about $750m. But these calculations are being up-ended."

Why Mitt Romney is 'not concerned' about the poor

Given the recent (and ongoing) crisis of the western economic model, and the untold hardship for many, then I think wealth, and candidates attitudes to it, are an important topic for our times. It should be said that since Romney is under the spotlight at the moment, of course most articles will be about him, and I will try to seekout post and highlight any similar articles about the other candidates, and Obama.

It's not just that all politicians  are wealthy, it's what their worldview of wealth, and how it should be distributed that matters, since it will set the tone for how society progresses (and letting the market decide returns is just as much a mechanism of re-"distribution", a transfer of wealth from one bunch of people to another, as taxation is).

And several elements in the following article are (even if taken as they are here in isolation) I think particularly worrying about Romney (extracts below).

Why Mitt Romney is 'not concerned' about the poor
The Republican frontrunner rejects the politics of 'envy'. How convenient for the multimillionaire candidate of the 1%
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/feb/02/mitt-romney-not-concerned-about-poor

On the one hand he doesn't think the 'poor' are a group worth being focused on, despite this being an ever increasing section of US society, nor does he think there is anything wrong with siding with the 99% against the 1% who disproprotionately benefit from the current system, claiming, without any irony, that the mere thought of it is against the US ideal of 'one nation under God'. Maybe he means the '1% nation under God'.

Extracts : 

• According to the most recent figures available from the US Census Bureau, 46.2 million people lived in poverty in 2010, 15.1% of the population, the largest number in the 52 years the poverty estimates have been published. 2010 marked the fourth consecutive annual increase in the number of people in poverty

•  We will hear from the Democrat[ic] party the plight of the poor, and there's no question, it's not good being poor," he told CNN's Soledad O'Brien. "You could choose where to focus, you could focus on the rich, that's not my focus. You could focus on the very poor, that's not my focus. My focus is on middle-income Americans."

• Romney, in his victory speech in New Hampshire, said:

"This country already has a leader who divides us with the bitter politics of envy. We must offer an alternative vision. I stand ready to lead us down a different path, where we are lifted up by our desire to succeed, not dragged down by a resentment of success … We are one nation under God."

• The next morning, NBC's Matt Lauer challenged him, asking:

"Did you suggest that anyone who questions the policies and practices of Wall Street and financial institutions, anyone who has questions about the distribution of wealth and power in this country, is envious? Is it about jealousy, or fairness?"

• Romney doubled down, claiming:

"I think it's about envy. I think it's about class warfare. When you have a president encouraging the idea of dividing America based on the 99% versus 1% – and those people who have been most successful will be in the 1% … [it's] entirely inconsistent with the concept of one nation under God."

Socialists and conservatives may be born not made

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2012/jan/31/socialists-conservatives-born-not-made

This is not the first study I've read about which correlates political leanings to certain dispositions, but it's one that fits into a pet (and half in jest!) stereotyping of mine that people on the right worry more about the undeserving being treated too fairly, and people on the left worry more about the deserving being treated unfairly.

Both of these concerns are valid, since the drives to support and help those we feel as part of our society, and the drives to punish those who we feel act against it, are both I think equally important (and necessary) strands in a moral community. Doing good is not enough, for the system to work we need to also act against 'the bad', and there seems to be a lot of evidence that we have been hard wired by evolution for both these dispositions. While most people will agree about the former (that some people will and should help others despite cost to themselves), it is perhaps less widely known that studies show people will also accept a cost to themselves just to punish other people, and from similar righteous reasons (the classic example of this is the 'ultimatum' game ).

For me it's a bit like worrying which is worse - that nine guilty men go free, or one innocent man goes to jail. My view is that a lot of right wing politics is focused most on the travesty of the nine guilty escaping punishment, or as is more likely the case, nine welfare cheats  getting away with excessive benefits. Of course no one can disagree with being angry about this, and these are real problems which society has to work on, but the question is how important they are. In contrast, I would think it a more left-wing approach to focus most instead on what happens the one innocent, or the deserving welfare recipient who might lose out due to new 'tough' policies.  Of course no one on the right disagrees with this either, the point is not that one side is 'nasty' or the other 'soft' , both agree in principle, but disagree in priority.

The study mentioned in this article seem to indicate that right-leaning/left-leaning people differ in the magnitude of their responses to negative and positive stimuli, and I think this fits in with the theory above, namely that if one gets more charged up about negative things, e.g. moral outrage about cheats, one is more likely to favour a conservative platform, since these issues provoke a deeper response, and hence raise their relative priority. The converse is harder to show, since it's not clear absence of unfair punishment is really a sort of 'positive' stimulus, but my impression is there is something valid in this direction as well.

Given how passionate people can be about politics then the more psychological information we can gather the better, and studies such as this provide promising initial insights.

extract:

"The results showed those with right-wing beliefs had a relatively increased response to disgust and threat, whereas those who vote left-of-centre had a relatively increased response to pleasurable images.

This suggests that left-wing people are relatively more responsive to appetitive than aversive stimuli and that people who are right-of-centre are more responsive to aversive stimuli. Put another way, conservatives are more responsive to negative stimuli whereas those on the left are more responsive to positive stimuli.
The implication is that the same stimuli will evoke polarised responses depending on where you are on the aversive-appetitive spectrum. These different reactions to shared experiences will mean those of politically opposing viewpoints will automatically judge the other as wrong, and no amount of arguing in the House of Commons can change that."