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The Social Desirability of Rallying ’Round the Flag

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Abstract

Identifying the sincerity of shifts in public opinion is difficult: survey settings involve social pressure to provide seemingly popular answers. Names for newborn children in the United States provide an alternative, behavioral measure that can indicate the presence of social-desirability bias. First names typically exceed middle names in visibility and hence sensitivity to social-desirability effects. First names should therefore be more likely to change when name-givers wish to conform to widespread sentiments they do not share. This hypothesis is explored during foreign-policy crises (rallies): French-derived first, but not middle, names declined as anti-French sentiment rose around the 2003 Iraq War, yet no analogous divergence emerged after the 11 September 2001 attacks. Treating all rallies as equally meaningful may then produce misleading analyses of public opinion; seeming waves in political views may reflect conformist dissimulation rather than actual attitudes.

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Notes

  1. An alternative hypothesis would be that those who supported France, incensed by the backlash, became more likely to give their children French-derived first names. Tests of Hypothesis 1 effectively test for this possibility as well.

  2. The Vermont birth-certificate data also includes a small number of international adoptions. Excluding these does not substantially affect reported results. Some births to out-of-state mothers, conversely, may not appear in the birth certificates here.

  3. No observations receive names from other listed languages indigenous to France (Breton, Occitan).

  4. However, it is perhaps notable that one of the only three children in the dataset whose first name is “Osama” was born on 12 September 2001.

  5. Interpreting Islamic-sounding names as signals is complicated by the massive rise in naming children the Arabic-derived name “Aaliyah” or variant spellings thereof after the death of a prominent entertainer of that name in an 25 August 2001 plane crash, almost coincident with the surge in terrorism salience. (“Aaliyah” is, indeed, the most frequent Arabic-derived first name in the sample, with “Aliyah” being the fourth commonest.) Excluding variations of “Aaliyah” from the analysis further reduces the estimated effect of terrorism salience on Islamic-sounding first or middle names.

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Acknowledgements

I thank David Andersen, Olga Chyzh, Tessa Ditonto, and Mark Nieman, along with Political Behavior’s anonymous reviewers and editorial staff, for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this project, and Jonathan Hassid for comments on its first half.

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  1. Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA

    R. Urbatsch

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Urbatsch, R. The Social Desirability of Rallying ’Round the Flag. Polit Behav 42, 1223–1243 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-019-09540-1

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