How Politically Diverse Are the Social Sciences and Humanities?
by Daniel B. Klein and Charlotta Stern
ABSTRACT: Survey Evidence from Six Fieldsby Daniel B. Klein and Charlotta Stern — Available HERE as Working Paper in PDFAbstract: In Spring 2003, a large-scale survey of American academics was conducted using academic association membership lists from six fields: Anthropology, Economics, History, Philosophy (political and legal), Political Science, and Sociology. This paper focuses on one question: To which political party have the candidates you’ve voted for in the past ten years mostly belonged? The question was answered by 96.4 percent of academic respondents. The results show that the faculty is heavily skewed towards voting Democratic. The most lopsided fields surveyed are Anthropology with a D to R ratio of 30.2 to 1, and Sociology with 28.0 to 1. The least lopsided is Economics with 3.0 to 1. After Economics, the least lopsided is Political Science with 6.7 to 1. The average of the six ratios by field is about 15 to 1. Our analysis and related research suggest that for the the social sciences and humanities overall, a “one-big-pool” ratio of 7 to 1 is a safe lower-bound estimate, and 8 to 1 or 9 to 1 are reasonable point estimate. Thus, the social sciences and humanities are dominated by Democrats. There is little ideological diversity. We discuss Stephen Balch’s “property rights” proposal to help remedy the situation.
Download the entire survery (PDF file)
How Many Democrats per Republican at UC-Berkeley and Stanford?
By Daniel B. Klein and Andrew Western
ABSTRACT: Voter Registration Data across 23 Academic DepartmentsBy Daniel B. Klein and Andrew Western — Available HERE as Working Paper in PDF
Abstract: Using the records of the seven San Francisco Bay Area counties that surround University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University, we conducted a systematic and thorough study of the party registration of the Berkeley and Stanford faculty in 23 academic departments. The departments span the social sciences, humanities, hard sciences, math, law, journalism, engineering, medicine, and the business school. Of the total of 1497 individual names on the cumulative list, we obtained readings on 1005, or 67 percent. The findings support the “one-party campus” conjecture. For Stanford, we found an overall Democrat to Republican ratio of 7.6 to 1. For UC-Berkeley, we found an overall D to R ratio of 9.9 to 1. Moreover, the breakdown by faculty rank shows that Republicans are an “endangered species” on the two campuses.
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