1. gnxp
  2. Rich, smart, male & white exhibit political diversity

Rich, smart, male & white exhibit political diversity

By razib on October 21, 2009.

I stumbled onto a fascinating working paper today (via the sagacious Andrew Gelman), All Together Now: Putting Congress, State Legislatures, and Individuals in a Common Ideological Space. It uses the NPAT survey of political opinions to construct an ideological scale (as opposed to self-reports). This is a wide ranging piece of proto-scholarship, with a lot of ideas and results, but one thing that struck me are the probability density distributions on page 13 & 14. The title says it all, but the charts are reproduced below....

i-2fa56f5db6e14edeeba50ce70fe9e313-boris1.png
i-a8591078f94c82eac1503f335b26eaee-boris2.png

Stupid people tend to be politically moderate. Probably also the less educated or politically informed (I'm pretty sure I've found this via the GSS and posted the results, but it looks like the search engine is wonky today). You can guess which direction is more "liberal" or "conservative" by looking at the differences in modes for various classes.

Tags
Culture
Politics

More like this

Socioeconomic status, ideology & party
Andrew Gelman has a post up, Who are the liberal Democrats and the conservative Republicans?, which shows that conservative Republicans tend toward higher incomes, while conservative Democrats tend toward lower incomes. I decided to see if something similar was discernible in the General Social…
Are the elites more polarized? Yes!
One of the argument from Andrew Gelman's Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State which has percolated into the punditocracy is that the Culture Wars are to a large extent a feature of the upper socioeconomic brackets. Gelman presents data which strongly contradicts Thomas Frank's argument…
Intelligence, politics & religion
My posts below on IQ, politics & religion resulted in a fair amount of blogospheric response, and weird comments. A few quick points 1) I think results on standardized tests are informative and correlate reasonably with a host of life outcomes. If you don't think they do, that's fine, I don't…
The Perils of Ideological Continua and Coordinate Systems
This post (from January 14, 2005) is how I see the political/ideological landscape in the USA. ---------------------------------------------------- We use the words Left and Right to describe Liberal and Conservative ideological and political leanings. The phrases stem, if I remember correctly,…