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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.

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