Discover more from Overcoming Bias
In the US at least, academics are more liberal and Democratic than ordinary people. While among ordinary people the ratio of Democrats to Republicans is about 1:1, academia as a whole has a ratio of 5:1, and the humanities and social sciences have a ratio of 8:1. These ratios have roughly doubled over the last forty years. See this 2005 Critical Review paper by my colleague Dan Klein, but also this 2006 Public Opinion Quarterly reply, and this further response.
Does this difference between academia and the public produce or reflect a bias in the beliefs expressed in academic articles?
To judge this, we need to better understand the cause of this difference. It might be due to academics being more intelligent and informed, or it might be due to social pressure and conformity. This 2005 BE Press Forum paper suggests that discrimination against conservatives, women, and religious folks is at least part of the explanation, though see this reply and this response.
This issue is of particular interest to me, since economists have a 3:1 ratio, making us "right wing" relative to the rest of academia. My department has about a 1:1 ratio, making us "right-wing nuts," even though we roughly mirror the public.
It is interesting to note that when you look at higher dimensional opinion spaces what you see is a tight liberal clump in one corner, and a broad spread of opinions across the rest of the opinion space; there is no conservative clump to speak of. Of course this is consistent with both the information and the conformity theories mentioned above.
What we need are clever ideas for data that might better distinguish between these theories.
Why Are Academics Liberal?
Noah Smith's attempt to apply a little "social pressure and conformity" to Robin, by smearing him, reminded me of this useful (and topically relevant) list of 'purgings' compiled by Handle:
https://handleshaus.wordpre...
I tend to agree with Hopefully, that the problem is the binary idea of political affiliation, when it's much more fruitful to think in two dimensions. Socially, conservatives tend to be retrograde; they also tend to be much more inimical to science. Humanities today are much more socially progressive and inclusive (at least in theory), and might not know much about economics, so they tend to side with the liberals, and even prefer liberal economic policy because it all comes in one big package. I imagine it would be similar with the scientists. Meanwhile, economists would care much more about the economic aspect, and either ignore or adopt the social policy. I'd even go so far as to speculate that there are probably more good economic paths than one, some more liberal, some more conservative, which would explain a more even distribution.