Bell Curve

262 Cognitive CClses and Social Behavior Civility and Citizenship 263idea of an independent cognitive-ability effect" as part of the provedlink between socioeconomic status and political participation."We do not imagine that we have told the entire story of political participation.Age, sex, and ethnic identity are among the individual factorsthat we have omitted but that political scientists routinely examineagainst the background of voting laws, regional variations, historicalevents, and the general political climate of the country. In various periodsand to varying degrees, these other factors have been shown to beassociated with either the sheer level of political involvement or itscharacter. Older people, for example, are more likely to vote thanyounger people, up to the age at which the debilities of age intervene;women in the past participated less than men, but the gap has narrowedto the vanishing point (especially for educated men and women); differentethnic groups resonate to different political causes."Our focus on education and intelligence similarly gives insufficientattention to other personal traits that influence political participation.'7People vary in their sense of civic duty and in the strength of their partyaffiliations, apart from their educational or intellectual level; their personalvalues color their political allegiances and how intensely they arefelt. Their personalities are expressed not just in personal life but alsoin their political actions (or inactions).The bottom line, then, is not that political participation is simple todescribe hut that, despite its complexity, so narrow a range of individualfactors carries so large a burden of explanation. For example, thezero-order correlations between intelligence and the fourteen politicaldimensions in the study of high school students described above rangedfrom .O1 to .53, with an average of .22; the average correlation with theyoungsters' socioeconomic background was .09.j4 For the sentiment ofcivic duty-the closest approximation to civility in this particular setof dimensions-the correlation with intelligence was .4. As we cautionedabove, this may be an overestimate, but perhaps not by much:The zero-order correlation between scores on a brief vocabulary test andthe political sophistication of a sample of adults was .33.35 The coefficientsfor rated intelligence in a multivariate analysis of political sophisticationwere more than twice as large as for any of the othervariables examined, which included education, occupation, age, andparental interest in politics.36The coherence of the evidence linking IQ and political participationas a whole cannot be neglected. The continuity of the relationship overthe life span gives it a plausibility that no single study can command.The other chapters in Part I1 have shown that cognitive ability oftenaccounts for the importance of socioeconomic class and underlies muchof the variation that is usually attributed to education. It appears thatthe same holds for political participation.MIDDLE-CLASS VALUES: DATA FROM THE NLSYThe NLSY does not permit us to extend this discussion directly. Noneof the questions in the study asks about political participation or knowledge.Rut as we draw to the close of this long sequence of chapters aboutIQ and social behavior, we may use the NLSY to take another tack.For many years, "middle-class values" has been a topic of debate inAmerican public life. Many academic intellecti~als hold middle-classvalues in contempt. They have a better reputation among the public atlarge, however, where they are seen-rightly, in our view-as ways ofbehaving that produce social cohesion and order. To use the languageof this chapter, middle-class values are related to civility.Throughout Part 11, we have been examining departures from middle-classvalues: adolescents' dropping out of school, babies born out ofwedlock, men dropping out of the labor force or ending up in jail, womengoing on welfare. Let us now look at the glass as half full instead of halfempty, concentrating on the people who are doing everything right byconventional standards. And so, to conclude Part 11, we present theMiddle Class Values (MCV) Index. It has scores of "Yes" and "No." Aman in the NLSY got a "Yes" if by 1990 he had obtained a high schooldegree (or more), been in the labor force throughout 1989, never beeninterviewed in jail, and was still married to his first wife. A woman inthe NLSY got a "Yes" if she had obtained a high school degree, had nevergiven birth to a baby out of wedlock, had never been interviewed in jail,and was still married to her first husband. People who failed any one ofthe conditions were scored "No." Never-married people who met all theother conditions except the marital one were excluded from the analysis.We also excluded men who were not eligible for the labor force in1989 or 1990 because they were physically unable to work or in school.Note that the index does not demand economic success. A man canearn a "Yes" despite being unemployed if he stays in the labor force. Awoman can be on welfare and still earn a "Yes" if she bore her children