In this work, we analyze the whole-exome sequences of French-Canadian individuals, a founder population with a unique demographic history that includes an original population bottleneck less than 20 generations ago, followed by a demographic explosion, and the whole exomes of French individuals sampled from France. We show that in less than 20 generations of genetic isolation from the French population, the genetic pool of French-Canadians shows reduced levels of diversity, higher homozygosity, and an excess of rare variants with low variant sharing with Europeans. Furthermore, the French-Canadian population contains a larger proportion of putatively damaging functional variants, which could partially explain the increased incidence of genetic disease in the province. Our results highlight the impact of population demography on genetic fitness and the contribution of rare variants to the human genetic variation landscape, emphasizing the need for deep cataloguing of genetic variants by resequencing worldwide human populations in order to truly assess disease risk.
Rare functional variants in French Canadians
Whole-Exome Sequencing Reveals a Rapid Change in the Frequency of Rare Functional Variants in a Founding Population of Humans
Charles Sumner, pre- and post-France
Charles Sumner, traveling in Maryland (February 24, 1834): "The whole country was barren and cheerless; houses were sprinkled very thinly on the road, and when they did appear they were little better than hovels [. . .] For the first time I saw slaves, and my worst preconception of their appearance and ignorance did not fall as low as their actual stupidity. They appear to be nothing more than moving masses of flesh, unendowed with any thing of intelligence above the brutes. I have now an idea of the blight upon that part of our country in which they live."
Charles Sumner, studying in Paris (January 13, 1838): "[The lecturer] had quite a large audience, among whom I noticed two or three blacks, or rather mulattoes,— two-thirds black, perhaps, — dressed quite a la mode, and having the easy, jaunty air of young men of fashion, who were well received by their fellow students. They were standing in the midst of a knot of young men; and their color seemed to be no objection to them. I was glad to see this; though, with American impressions, it seemed very strange. It must be, then, that the distance between free blacks and the whites among us is derived from education, and does not exist in the nature of things."
David McCullough, in The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris:
It was for Sumner a stunning revelation. Until this point he is not known to have shown any particular interest in the lives of black people, neither free blacks nor slaves. On his trip to Washington a few years earlier, traveling by rail through Maryland, he had seen slaves for the first time. They were working in the fields, and as he made clear in his journal, he felt only disdain for them. [. . .] He was to think that way no longer.It would be a while before Sumner's revelation--that attitudes about race in America were taught, not part of "the nature of things"--would take effect in his career, but when it did, the consequences would be profound. Indeed, of all that Americans were to "bring home" from their time in Paris in the form of newly acquired professional skills, new ideas, and new ways of seeing things, this insight was to be as important as any.
James Watson: reduce parental age
DNA pioneer James Watson's genetic prescription: Have kids early
Related: Paternal age and fitness in pre-industrial Finland (SMBE 2013)"If you add together all the mental diseases ... your chance of having a child with something bad is about 5 percent," Watson explained [. . .] So here's Watson's prescription: "You could reduce the frequency of this 5 percent — maybe down to one and a half percent, or 1 percent — if everyone had their children or if the DNA came from them when they were 15," he said.
Black men have lower sperm counts than white men
Semen parameters in fertile US men: the Study for Future Families
The Study for Future Families (SFF) recruited men who were partners of pregnant women attending prenatal clinics in Los Angeles CA, Minneapolis MN, Columbia MO, New York City NY and Iowa City IA. Semen samples were collected on site from 763 men (73% White, 15% Hispanic/Latino, 7% Black and 5% Asian or other ethnic group) using strict quality control and well-defined protocols. [. . .] Black men had significantly lower semen volume, sperm concentration and total motile sperm counts than White and Hispanic/Latino men.This is consistent with the other evidence I'm aware of. Lower sperm counts have been noted in Africa, and a study in Rochester, NY, that included a small number of American blacks similarly found:
All sperm parameters were significantly lower in the small subgroup (n = 7) of African-American men compared with other men in this population (p-values for sperm parameters, < 0.001 to 0.016).Also consistent with these results: the only autopsy studies I'm aware of (at least one of which Rushton knew of before he became selectively forgetful) both suggest black men have smaller/lighter testes than white men.
Estimating the proportion of Irish ancestry in the US and Massachusetts
[See Estimating the proportion of Puritan genes in America's white population for links to census data.]
"A Survey of Irish Surnames 1992-97" (pdf) lists the following as the 10 most common surnames in Ireland in the 1990s:
1. Murphy 2. (O)Kelly 3. Walsh(e) 4. (O)Connor 5. (O)Sullivan 6. (O)Byrne 7. (O)Brien 8. Ryan 9. Smith/Smyth 10. (O)Neill
We'll exclude Smith/Smyth for obvious reasons. The remaining 9 most common names, all of Gaelic origin, cover 7.85% of the 1990s Irish population. (With the 1890 data, the number would be 7.67%; but that's leaving out some of the variants included in the 1990s survey.) Northern Ireland's inclusion in the survey might end up inflating our surname-based Irish Catholic population estimates by something like 10%, but I'm not worried about this level of error right now.
The number of US whites bearing one of the nine most common Irish surnames in 2000, from Census data: 1188571
The extrapolated equivalent total number of Irish individuals among the US white population in 2000: 15141032
Which comes out to 7.78% of the ancestry of the US non-Hispanic white population in 2000.
15 million (or maybe 13.5 million) descendants is certainly a more plausible biological outcome of 4.5 million Irish immigrants than the "40 million Irish Americans" we see from census self-identifications.
But it appears there's considerably less disconnect between levels of Irish ancestry and Irish self-identification in Massachusetts (vs. the US as a whole).
In the 1940 Census (the 2000 Census surname data is not available broken down by state), 87028 Massachusetts whites had one of the nine most common Irish names. Based on that, we can estimate the number of Irish in MA was 1108637 -- or 25.9% of the total 1940 MA white population of 4280019.
The 2005-2009 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates put the Irish proportion of the Massachusetts population, based on self-identification, at 23.7% (vs. 11.9% for English). Or, considering only the non-Hispanic white population, something like 29% identify as Irish.
This better agreement likely reflects relatively lower levels of intermarriage in MA, as might be expected from the state's greater Irish concentration.
The future of genealogy
An ASHG 2013 abstract from AncestryDNA:
Reconstruction of Ancestral Human Genomes from Genome-Wide DNA Matches.
Individuals who lived long ago may still have much or all of their genome present in modern populations. The genomes of these individuals exist in small segments broken down by recombination and inherited in part by his or her descendants. If such an individual had many children, leading to a large number of descendants today, much of the ancestral genome will be present in modern populations. For the pairs of descendants with the “target” ancestor as their most recent common ancestor (MRCA), any region of their genomes shared identical-by-descent (IBD) most likely represents the corresponding region of the ancestor’s genome. Given a set of pairs of individuals linked to the same MRCA, we develop a novel computational approach to reconstruct the haplotypes of the MRCA from the IBD segments and haplotypes of the descendants. With simulated data we assess the performance of our method, affected by factors such as quality of genealogical trees used to infer the MRCA, reliability of inferred IBD, coverage of IBD segments, number of descendants of the MRCA, and number of sampled descendants. To demonstrate the utility of our method, we examine over 125,000 individuals in the AncestryDNA database with phased genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphism data and detailed genealogical information. After first identifying regions of the genome shared IBD between all individuals, we selected one group of several hundred individuals with an 18th century couple as a known MRCA. Using our method to tile together these individuals’ IBD segments, we are able to reliably construct the ancestral couple’s four haplotypes in large genomic regions with high coverage of IBD segments. In regions of the genome with lower IBD coverage, we are unable to identify and construct all haplotypes with certainty. Our study demonstrates the possibility of reconstructing the genomes of human ancestors, with large family sizes and a large number of living descendants, who lived one to even 12 generations ago. The ability to reconstruct the genomes of human ancestors using genetic and genealogical data has exciting implications in the fields of population genetics, medical genetics, and genealogy research.
Blaine Bettinger has a longer post, The Science Fiction Future of Genetic Genealogy, inspired by the abstract.
While the potential for this sort of thing has been apparent for years, it's good to see concrete steps being taken in this direction. A related (perhaps slightly over-optimistic) 2010 post by Tamura Jones:
Evidence both purifying selection and positive selection act on MC1R in S. Europe
Mol Biol Evol (2013) doi: 10.1093/molbev/mst158 First published online: September 17, 2013
MartÃnez-Cadenas et al.
In humans, the geographical apportionment of the coding diversity of the pigmentary locus MC1R is, unusually, higher in Eurasians than in Africans. This atypical observation has been interpreted as the result of purifying selection due to functional constraint on MC1R in high UVB radiation environments. By analyzing 3,142 human MC1R alleles from different regions of Spain in the context of additional haplotypic information from the 1000 Genomes (1000G) Project data, we show that purifying selection is also strong in Southern Europe, but not so in Northern Europe. Furthermore, we show that purifying and positive selection act simultaneously on MC1R. Thus, at least in Spain, regions at opposite ends of the incident UV-B radiation distribution show significantly different frequencies for the melanoma-risk allele V60L (a mutation also associated to red hair and fair skin and even blonde hair), with higher frequency of V60L at those regions of lower incident UV-B radiation. Besides, using the 1000G South-European data, we show that the V60L haplogroup is also characterized by an EHH pattern indicative of positive selection. We, thus, provide evidence for an adaptive value of human skin depigmentation in Europe and illustrate how an adaptive process can simultaneously help maintain a disease-risk allele. In addition, our data support the hypothesis proposed by Jablonski and Chaplin (2010), which posits that habitation of middle latitudes involved the evolution of partially depigmented phenotypes that are still capable of suitable tanning.
"Alienated" ethno-religious minorities preferring "inclusive" anti-majority narratives
Even more importantly, says Ryn, Catholics recognize in Straussians figures who share their own “alienation” about living in a predominantly Protestant country. [. . .] Straussians provide a narrative about the American founding that make ethnic Catholics feel secure about their Americanness.
Paul Gottfried on Leo Strauss, Allan Bloom, and their Catholic dupes:
Arthur Meier Schlesinger channeling Madison Grant (1921)
The swarming of foreigners into the great industries occurred at considerable cost to the native workingmen, for the latter struggled in vain for higher wages or better conditions as long as the employers could command the services of an inexhaustible supply of foreign laborers. Thus, the new immigration has made it easier for the few to amass enormous fortunes at the expense of the many and has helped to create in this country for the first time yawning inequalities of wealth.
Most sociologists believe that the addition of hordes of foreigners to the population of the United States has caused a decline in the birth-rate of the old American stock, for the native laborer has been forced to avoid large families in order to be in a position to meet the growing severity of the economic competition forced upon him by the immigrant. This condition, joined to the tendency of immigrant laborers to crowd the native Americans farther and farther from the industrial centers of the country, has caused the great communities and commonwealths of the Atlantic seaboard, about whose names cluster the heroic traditions of revolutionary times, to change completely their original characters. Puritan New England is today the home of a population of whom two-thirds were born in foreign lands or else had parents who were. Boston is as cosmopolitan a city as Chicago; and Faneuil Hall is an anachronism, a curiosity of bygone days left stranded on the shores of the Italian quarter. In fifteen of the largest cities of the United States the foreign immigrants and their children outnumber the native whites; and by the same token alien racial elements are in the majority in thirteen of the states of the Union. When President Wilson was at the Peace Conference, he reminded the Italian delegates that there were more of their countrymen in New York than in any Italian city; and it is not beside the point to add here that New York is also the greatest Irish city in the world and the largest Jewish city.
Whatever of history may be made in the future in these parts of the country will not be the result primarily of an "Anglo-Saxon" heritage but will be the product of the interaction of these more recent racial elements upon each other and their joint reaction to the American scene. Unless the unanticipated should intervene, the stewardship of American ideals and culture is destined to pass to a new composite American type now in the process of making. [. . .]
To the immigrant must also be assigned the responsibility for the accelerated growth of political and industrial radicalism in this country. While most of the newcomers quietly accepted their humble place in American society, a minority of the immigrants consisted of political refugees and other extremists, embittered by their experiences in European countries and suspicious of constituted authority under whatever guise.
From an essay in which the half-Jewish child of immigrants helpfully explains "The Significance of Immigration in American History" (the inevitable conclusion, naturally, being that America is "a nation of immigrants" -- or something like that). More:
Social changes in New England in the past fifty years (1900)
If some supernatural observer could have taken a bird's-eye view of New England in 1850 and again in 1900, he would read the story of change in plain characters. Approaching New England, as would become a Superior Intelligence, by way of Boston, he would find the region for some fifteen miles around the gilded dome on Beacon Hill so "filled in " as to form a continuous city with a million people, nearly half of them — figuring back for three generations — being Irish, about one-sixth "Old Americans," and the rest Germans, British, Scandinavians, Italians, Frenchmen, Chinamen, and citizens generally. [. . .] In Fall River, with 85 per cent, of foreign population, he might inquire his way half a dozen times before meeting a person who spoke English.
Having left a New England of full-blooded Yankees, which supplied its own wants and sent little abroad, he finds a population half foreign, dependent on others for its corn and grain and beef and mutton, but supplying half the nation with boots and shoes, making three-fourth's of its cottons and using half its wool.
Social changes in New England in the past fifty years
By Edwin Webster Sanborn
Fifty years ago the new order of things had made little change in the outward appearance of New England. It was still a compact community, peopled for the most part by direct descendants of the old Puritan stock. It was a land of farmers, and the type of New England life was the country village. Commerce and fisheries were important sources of wealth; but merchants and seafaring men, as well as the minister, lawyer, doctor, and mechanic, generally owned a little land, and helped to make agriculture the prevailing occupation. Factories had been slowly taking the place of household' industry, yet manners and way of living belonged to the homespun age.
Genetic and neuroanatomical influences on political affiliation and ingroup favoritism
Work from our own group
demonstrated that in-group favouritism
also contains a substantial heritable
component (Lewis & Bates, 2010). In this
study, we examined the claim that race
favouritism (i.e. preferences for members
of one’s own racial group) is simply one
manifestation of a more general ‘us vs.
them’ coalitional mechanism. This claim
is based on reasoning that limited
exposure to other racial groups over evolutionary time necessarily must have
limited any ability of natural selection to
shape the human mind towards specific
race preferences (Kurzban et al., 2001).
Our study found support for a common,
and strongly heritable, favouritism
‘system’ – reflecting in-group bias in the
realm of religion, ethnicity and race.
Interestingly, however, we also found
evidence for specific sets of genetic
factors for each of these forms of
favouritism: in other words, even when
one accounts for the common favouritism
system, additional genetic factors appear
to influence race favouritism. [. . .]
Neuroanatomical work provides partial support for functional imaging findings linking political conservatism to the ACC and amygdala. For instance, Kanai et al. (2011) recently reported that increased grey matter volume in the ACC and decreased volume of the right amygdala predicts political liberalism in young adults. This association between liberalism and the ACC supports the work noted above forging links between politics and conflict monitoring/response. And the finding that liberals have less grey matter in the amygdala – a region with links to disgust processing and fear conditioning – also converges with behavioural work showing that conservatives tend to be more disgust sensitive and responsive to threat (Oxley et al., 2008).
Lewis, G. J. and Bates, T. C. (2013). The long reach of the gene: Prejudice, politics, and religiosity. The Psychologist, 26. 194-199. (pdf)
The liberal progress narrative and moral foundations
As we
elaborate in this article, we view the “five foundations”
of morality as Level 2 psychological constructs
that people use in the construction of Level 3 narratives,
including their individual life stories, and the
collective narratives that animate competing political
ideologies. [. . .]
Consistent with the first graph in Figure 1, the liberal progress narrative makes extensive use of the Harm foundation (“suffering,” “misery,” “oppression”) and the Fairness foundation (“unjust,” “inequality”). There is no mention of ingroup or nation, and no mention of purity or sanctity. Authority and tradition are mentioned only as the sources of harm and injustice.
Above and Below Left–Right: Ideological Narratives and Moral Foundations (pdf)
In Defense of Israel: How Social Context Affects Jewish-Americans’ Moral Reasoning
The American Jewish community is liberal, yet some contend that American Jews become more conservative when thinking about the defense of Israel. Recent research suggests that conservatives base their moral judgments on the foundations of fairness, minimizing harm, in-group favoritism, respect for authority, and purity. By contrast, liberals largely base moral judgments on just two foundations: fairness and harm-minimization (Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009). This thesis expands this research by thinking about how a topic that is important to someone alters their moral reasoning. If Israel is important to someone who is Jewish and if thinking about Israel, specifically in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, makes American Jews more conservative, they should alter their moral judgments in ways consistent with conservatives. To test this hypothesis, two studies primed Jews and non-Jews to think about Israel or a different location, and measured the accessibility and relevance of moral foundation categories. Results suggest that priming for Israel does not influence the moral reasoning of Jewish-Americans. However, when asked to think about explicit moral violations committed by military guards, Jewish-Americans expressed less concern for the interrogated victim, less anger at the interrogating soldier, and more support for the soldier’s actions when the military guards were Israeli, compared to a different location. Irrespective of ingroup identification, when individuals were presented with a moral violation committed by soldiers from a nation that they glorify, individuals also showed a preference for conservative-consistent moral foundations. The results from this study also suggest that previous research may have conflated the effects of ingroup identification and those of group-specific glorification.
Pasek, Michael, "In Defense of Israel: How Social Context Affects Jewish-Americans’ Moral Reasoning" (2012). Honors Theses. Paper 40. http://scarab.bates.edu/honorstheses/40
Author's Preface to The Puritan Dilemma (1958)
The Puritans of New England are not in good repute today. Authors and critics who aspire to any degree of sophistication take care to repudiate them. Liberals and conservatives alike find it advantageous to label the measures they oppose as Puritan. Whatever is wrong with the American mind is attributed to its Puritan ancestry, and anything that escapes these assaults is smothered under a homespun mantle of quaintness by lovers of the antique. Seventeenth-century Massachusetts has thus become in retrospect a preposterous land of witches and witch hunters, of killjoys in tall-crowned hats, whose main occupation was to prevent each other from having any fun and whose sole virtue lay in their furniture.
While we're at it . . .
The first anti-slavery novel wasn't written by a "Yankee". It was written by Tory Englishwoman.
"Yankees" and women's suffrage
Steve Sailer, citing Wikipedia:
So it was not surprising that WASPy America was favorable ground for feminism in the early 20th century, as shown by the Yankee domination of the women’s vote movement. In contrast, the newer immigrants of the era, such as Sicilians and Jews, came from more patriarchal cultures.The Wikipedia edit actually claims:
The woman suffrage movement was led by old stock women, especially Yankees and Quakers of English or German ancestry, whose families had been in North America for generations.And, if this were completely accurate, it would hardly have been surprising that colonial stock Americans (still the majority of the US population in the mid-to-late 19th century and the overwhelming majority among the more educated) were the leaders of a particular intellectual movement in America (while noting that the comparable movements in Europe were led by Italian women in Italy, German and Jewish women in Germany, etc.). But if we scroll up in the same Wikipedia entry:
Agitation for equal suffrage was carried on by only a few individuals. The first of these was Frances Wright, a Scottish woman who came to the country in 1826 and advocated women's suffrage in an extensive series of lectures. In 1836 Ernestine Rose, a Polish woman, came to the country and carried on a different campaign so effectively that she obtained a personal hearing before the New York Legislature, though her petition bore only five signatures.Polish woman?
Ernestine Louise Rose (January 13, 1810 – August 4, 1892) was an atheist feminist, individualist feminist, and abolitionist. She was one of the major intellectual forces behind the women's rights movement in nineteenth-century America. [. . .]She was born on January 13, 1810, in Piotrków Trybunalski, Russia-Poland, as Ernestine Louise Polowsky. Her father was a wealthy rabbi and her mother the daughter of a wealthy businessman.
Haidt on moral foundations 2/2
"As you can see, the lines for Care and Fairness (the two top lines) are moderately high across the board. Everyone—left, right, and center—says that concerns about compassion, cruelty, fairness, and injustice are relevant to their judgments about right and wrong. Yet still, the lines slope downward. Liberals say that these issues are a bit more relevant to morality than do conservatives.
But when we look at the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations, the story is quite different. Liberals largely reject these considerations. They show such a large gap between these foundations versus the Care and Fairness foundations that we might say, as shorthand, that liberals have a two-foundation morality.4 As we move to the right, however, the lines slope upward. By the time we reach people who are “very conservative,” all five lines have converged. We can say, as shorthand, that conservatives have a five-foundation morality. [. . .]
Figure 8.2 shows our data on the MFQ as it stood in 2011, with more than 130,000 subjects. We’ve made many improvements since Jesse’s first simple survey, but we always find the same basic pattern that he found in 2006. The lines for Care and Fairness slant downward; the lines for Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity slant upward. Liberals value Care and Fairness far more than the other three foundations; conservatives endorse all five foundations more or less equally.8 [. . .] We’ve found this basic difference no matter how we ask the questions."
Particular rules and virtues vary across cultures, so you’ll get fooled if you look for universality in the finished books. You won’t find a single paragraph that exists in identical form in every human culture. But if you look for links between evolutionary theory and anthropological observations, you can take some educated guesses about what was in the universal first draft of human nature. I tried to make (and justify) five such guesses:• The Care/harm foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of caring for vulnerable children. It makes us sensitive to signs of suffering and need; it makes us despise cruelty and want to care for those who are suffering.
• The Fairness/cheating foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of reaping the rewards of cooperation without getting exploited. It makes us sensitive to indications that another person is likely to be a good (or bad) partner for collaboration and reciprocal altruism. It makes us want to shun or punish cheaters.
• The Loyalty/betrayal foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of forming and maintaining coalitions. It makes us sensitive to signs that another person is (or is not) a team player. It makes us trust and reward such people, and it makes us want to hurt, ostracize, or even kill those who betray us or our group.
• The Authority/subversion foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of forging relationships that will benefit us within social hierarchies. It makes us sensitive to signs of rank or status, and to signs that other people are (or are not) behaving properly, given their position.
• The Sanctity/degradation foundation evolved initially in response to the adaptive challenge of the omnivore’s dilemma, and then to the broader challenge of living in a world of pathogens and parasites. It includes the behavioral immune system, which can make us wary of a diverse array of symbolic objects and threats. It makes it possible for people to invest objects with irrational and extreme values—both positive and negative—which are important for binding groups together.
Estimating the proportion of Puritan genes in America's white population
Ellsworth Huntington estimated about 5500 people bearing the surname Huntington were alive in America circa 1930.
Census Bureau estimates put the number of whites bearing the surname Huntington in 2000 at 6325.
So the absolute frequency of New England genes might have increased something like 6325/5500 = 1.15 times in a 65 year period in which the American "non-Hispanic white" population overall increased 188 128 296 / 110 286 740 = 1.7 times. While there is uncertainty in these numbers, there's little doubt the relative representation of New England genes amongst American "whites" has fallen over the past century.
As for what the actual proportion of Puritan genes might be, we can make a crude estimate as follows.
There were 992 421 whites in New England in 1790, perhaps 7/8 of whom were of Puritan stock.
There were 687 Huntingtons in the US in 1790, about 85% of them in New England.
6325 / 687 = 9.2
9.2 * 992 421 = 9 130 273
Adding say 20% to account for people of New England stock outside of New England in 1790 brings us to 10 956 328.
10 956 328 / 188 128 296 = 5.8% (of overall US white ancestry)
As of 1930, just over 1/4 of Huntingtons in Ellsworth Huntington's tabulations were located on the "East Coast", so the fraction in New England proper will have been well under 1/4 even at that date. But if, to find an upper limit, we assume 1/4 of New England genes remain in New England today, we're left with the equivalent of 10 956 328 / 4 = 2 739 082 individuals. That's against a total New England "non-Hispanic white" population of 11 686 617 in 2000.
2 739 082 / 11 686 617 = 23.4% (upper limit for New England) [the correct estimate is about half this number; see update below]
And, again, that's an overestimate of the proportion of New England genes in New England's white population today. [see update for more accurate estimate], but it's pretty clear "Yankees" are not the dominant force in voting in slates of Irish Catholic Democrats.
Update: Corrected math error and checked a couple more names.
Coolidge - 2663.892 / 225 = 11
Conant - 4671.9 / 551 = 8.48
Huntington + Coolidge + Conant - 13661 / 1463 = 9.34
More names can be added, but these seem similar enough.
Update 2: It appears something like 613 / 4,571 = 13.4% of Huntingtons were living in New England at the time of the 1940 Census.
So with better numbers the estimate for the average degree of New England ancestry of today's white New England residents becomes 12.6%.
Religion, ethnicity, and political alignment
Exploring the Bases of Partisanship in the American Electorate: Social Identity vs. Ideology. Political Research Quarterly June 2006 vol. 59 no. 2 175-187.
Group Components of U.S. Presidential Voting Across the States. Political Behavior. June 1999, Volume 21, Issue 2, pp 123-151
[. . .] We estimate multivariate, group-based logit models of presidential vote choice using 1988 CBS/ New York Times and 1992 Voter Research and Surveys exit poll data from each of the largest states.
[. . .] The estimates indicate that elements of the New Deal Democratic coalition remain intact across the largest states in recent presidential elections. For example, controlling for other factors, the voting poor in each state remain more inclined to support the Democratic standard bearer. [. . .]
The marginal Jewish effect approaches, and occasionally surpasses, that for race across the states. Relative to mainline Protestants, Jews remain much more Democratic in their presidential voting (see also Manza and Brooks, 1997b). This marginal effect is powerful across the states in both 1988 and 1992, showing that Jewish identification manifests itself in terms of distinctive political behavior both in states with sizable Jewish populations (e.g., New York) and in states with much smaller Jewish populations (e.g., Illinois).
The effect of Catholic identification on Democratic voting was uniformly positive in 1988, but much less potent than the influence of being Jewish. A noteworthy Catholic effect was evident in states as dissimilar as Massachusetts and Texas. Relative to the support for Dukakis in 1988, the Catholic support for Clinton in 1992 was much spottier." Only results for the voters of Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania revealed a powerful, positive Catholic influence across both 1988 and 1992. With the possible exception of these three states, it appears that Democratic presidential candidates can no longer depend on a reservoir of support among large-state Catholics (see also Petrocik, 1987; Green and Guth, 1991; Kellstedt and Green, 1993). Some accounts suggested that the strong appeal of Reagan shook many Catholics loose from their Democratic moorings. But the results from 1992 suggest that this shift is more than a Reagan phenomenon.
Group Components of the Presidential Vote, 1952–1984. The Journal of Politics. Volume 51, Issue 02, May 1989, pp 337-346.
Except for bivariate analyses, previous research on the group basis of partisan strength in the United States has focused on party identification as the dependent variable. This essay examines the group basis of the presidential vote, 1952–1984, using a multivariate logit approach. Our multivariate analysis shows the persistence of group-based divisions between Republican and Democratic voters. Among other patterns, class-based divisions have noticeably increased.
[. . .] Over the full 32-year span of this study, the major group effects are race, religion, and class. This of course is not surprise. However, it may be a surprise to see the effect of being Jewish (vs. Protestant) is almost as great as the effect of being black (vs. nonblack), and that membership in the "no religion" category generally makes one more Democratic than does being Catholic. It may also be a surprise to see the more important "class" measure to be union membership rather than poverty.
[. . .] The bottom row of table 1 traces the voting behavior of non-group members, 1952-184. These nonmembers are northern white male Protestants who are not college educated but not poor, over thirty and living outside the largest SMSAs. These "vanilla" voters show a steady Republicanism that sometimes reaches margins of more than four to one.
Religion, Ethnicity, and Party Affiliation in the U.S.: Evidence from Pooled Electoral Surveys, 1968–72. Social Forces (1977) 56 (2): 637-653.
By analyzing a white Christian subsample of pooled national survey data collected in 1968, 1970, and 1972 (subsample's n = 4,142), we try to determine whether ethnicity has a direct effect on party identification net of parental party identification. In so doing, we raise a number of subsidiary issues: (1) how best to measure ethnicity, (2) the need to distinguish between ethnically identified and ethnically assimilated respondents, and (3) possible regional variation in the impact of ethnicity. We find that religion alone (Protestant versus Catholic) is an adequate measure of ethnicity for this analysis, there being little intrareligious variation in party identification by national origin. Second, religion's effect is largely limited to the ethnically identified. Third, its effect holds up when controlling for parental party identification and SES. Fourth, regional variation in the impact of religion is understood as largely flowing from regional variations in the distribution of Catholics. [. . .]
We had suggested that ethnicity's impact should be greatest in the Northeast and negligible in the South. Indeed, the explained variance estimates (R2s) of the ethnic (or religious) effect reported in Table 2 seem to bear out those hypotheses. [. . .] On the other hand, inspection of the unstandardized coefficients for those equations---a more appropriate way of comparing impact across populations with different distributions of dependent and independent variables---reveals only negligible differences between the Northeast and the other nonsouthern regions. In the Midwest and West the difference is virtually identical (Catholics are about one half a standard deviation unit more Democratic than Protestants) while in the North it is only slightly larger (about seven-tenths of a standard deviation unit). In the South, as expected, there is virtually no difference in the political identification scores of Catholics and Protestants.
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