I was reading Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler’s “Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics”: for a forum elsewhere on the internets and came across this interesting finding. Using ANES data from 2004, Hetherington and Weiler find that 95% of those who scored the minimum on their scale for authoritarianism (e.g. attachment to strong and traditional notions of public morality etc) thought that gay people ought to be allowed join the armed forces, as against 79% of those with middling levels of authoritarianism and 67% of those who maxed out the scale. Hetherington and Weiler are interested in what this tells us about the differences between authoritarians and non-authoritarians. But it also begs an interesting political question. Assuming that these values have not shifted dramatically in the intervening five years (and if they have, I would guess that they have shifted so as to make authoritarians more rather than less likely to support gays in the military), why has the Obama administration has not pressed for public changes, despite repeated promises, visible anger from supporting constituencies etc? If Hetherington and Weiler are right, the answer is not to be found in public opinion. More than _two thirds_ of the population segment where you would expect to find most opposition is, in fact, in favor of allowing gay people to join the military. Other potential explanations?
