Cats and Dogs

The Idealistic Pragmatist has a POST on the correlation between pet ownership and politics. The graph is taken from the people at neuropolitics.org, who, obviously, research the connection between neuroscience and politics.

Percentage Owning Cats and Dogs (Blue=Dogs, Green=Cats) (VL=Very Liberal, L=Liberal, C=Conservative, VC=Very Conservative) (M=Male, F=Female)

The Conservative females were slightly more likely to select dogs over cats, and the Very Conservative females were equal in their preferences, although they reported the lowest rate of pet ownership.

The Liberal males were about equal in their preferences, and the Very Liberal males had a significant preference for cats. The regular Liberal females had a noted preference for cats, and the Very Liberal females had a strong preference for cats.

So what is driving the Conservative preference for dogs over cats? Is it the dog’s pack-oriented nature and prominent submissive behaviors? Could this be an indicator of the Conservative’s stronger propensity to organize into pack-like social structures?

Conversely, what is driving the Liberal’s preference for cats? Does the Liberal have a stronger aversion to pack-like hierarchical organizations and an attraction to feline-like territorial-based social organization?

I’d suspect income to be a hidden correlate here.

If you look at the blue bars (dogs) for women and compare it to the green bars for men (cats) and drew a line of best fit through those points, it would be virtually horizontal, especially if you knew the standard errors, which would be quite large as the sample size is likely not large enough.

So, (men, women) of all political stripes have statistically identical preferences for (cats, dogs).

A line of best fit for women & cats shows an inverse relationship as one is more conservative.

A line of best fit for men and dogs shows a positive relationship as one is more conservative.

It’s not best to generalize, but usually conservative politics are the domain of mid-to-upper income folks whereas liberal ideals tend to gravitate towards the lower end of the income spectrum. While there are exceptions to the rule, these are merely tendencies.

So, since it costs more to own a dog, a dog is a symbol of status. You better have money, and maybe even a nice house with a large yard, if you want to have a puppy. Also, most people would probably prefer to take their dog out in public rather than their cat.

Or, if you want to invoke issues of power and blame the patriarchy, you could assume that in more conservative households the “man of the house” makes all the big decisions, and so his spouse is reflecting his preference. But you’d need some data on the marital status of the survey participants to answer this point further.

Hey, there’s a reason why they say uniting the left is a lot like herding cats.

But then again, conservatives make the same claim.