Ratio Working Papers
No 53:
How Politically Diverse Are the Social Sciences and Humanities? Survey Evidence from Six Fields
Daniel B. Klein ()
and Charlotta Stern ()
Abstract: 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 estimates. 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.
Keywords: academia; diversity; Democratic; Republican; voting; political parties; (follow links to similar papers)
JEL-Codes: A13; A14; (follow links to similar papers)
20 pages, November 18, 2004
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Klein, Daniel B. and Charlotta Stern, 'How Politically Diverse Are the Social Sciences and Humanities? Survey Evidence from Six Fields', Academic Questions.
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