Narrow-Tent Democrats and Fringe Others: The Policy Views of Social Science Professors

Daniel B. Klein () and Charlotta Stern ()
Additional contact information
Charlotta Stern: Swedish Institute for Social Research, Stockholm University, Postal: SE-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden

No 8/2005, Working Paper Series from Swedish Institute for Social Research

Abstract: This paper provides copious results from a 2003 survey of academics. We analyze the responses of 1208 academics from six scholarly associations (in anthropology, economics, history, legal and political philosophy, political science, and sociology) with regard to their views on 18 policy issues. The issues include economic regulations, personal-choice restrictions, and military action abroad. We find that the academics overwhelmingly vote Democratic and that the Democratic dominance has increased significantly since 1970. A multivariate analysis shows strongly that Republican scholars are more likely to land outside of academia. On the 18 policy questions, the Democratic-voter responses have much less variation than do the Republicans. The left has a narrow tent. The Democratic and Republican policy views of academics are somewhat in line with the ideal types, except that across the board both groups are simply more statist than the ideal types might suggest. Regarding disciplinary consensus, we find that the discipline with least consensus is economics. We do a cluster analysis, and the mathematical technique sorts the respondents into groups that nicely correspond to familiar ideological categories: establishment left, progressive, conservative, and libertarian. The conservative group and the libertarian group are equal in size (35 individuals, each), suggesting that academics who depart from the leftist ranks are as likely to be libertarian as conservative. We also find that conservatives are closer to the establishment left than they are to the libertarians.

Keywords: - (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pol
Date: 2005-10-21
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Published in Critical Review, 2005, pages 257-303.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.criticalreview.com/2004/pdfs/klein_stern.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:sofiwp:2005_008

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Swedish Institute for Social Research
Address: SOFI, Stockholm University, SE-10691 Stockholm, Sweden
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Jean Parr ().