If professors made $500k/year, would they be Republicans? (updated and corrected)

University presidents do make $500,000 a year, if not more. What is known about their political tendencies?

The PhD is only the beginning of a professor’s education. Of course, physicians continue to learn on the job, too, and undertake formal training. But an academic’s further education is exponentially more intense. Much of their day to day work is a continuation of the work they did in graduate school. Assuming years of education have a linear effect on voting, we should expect dramatically lower numbers of republicans (perhaps the actual fugures suggests that the effects of further education drop off beyond a threshold).

Not only is the correlation weak (as #1 points out) and largely driven by a few outliers — in particular, the highly paid and highly Republican orthopedic surgeons, and the (relatively) low-paid Democratic psychiatrists — but this is an example of “ecological correlation”: Clustering individual features (political leanings and salary here) by groups tends to exaggerate the apparent correlation. I’m not saying the effect isn’t real, but I think Republican need to push for academic salaries around a million dollars, just to be on the safe side.

Whats the difference between pediatrics and orthopaedics?

One problem with the comparison is that it’s not just level of income that matters, but how it’s received. Academics may be professionals with advanced degrees, but they’re getting a paycheck each month. Most doctors will be in partnerships or other incorporated structures and look very closely at details of the tax system that don’t apply for standard wage and salary income. Republican tax policy spends an enormous amount of time relative to the number of people it affects on Subchapter S corporations — each time the issue arises, we’re told that it’s for that next Steven Jobs who hasn’t had time yet to incorporate his business, but it’s actually the way that a lot of upper class income is shielded from tax, and the relevant professions (doctors, lawyers) know that. Of course if academics shifted to 500K a year salaries, we might also see the emergence of alternative service provision structures to take advantage of the these loopholes, but then the whole academic contract would change.

From my point of view there has not been a lot of practical difference between Republicans and Democrats, especially since the Democratic Party has moved as far right as it has in recent years. So I would think the main qualities apprehended by prospective adherents of either party would be style and traditions of occupation and neighborhood, rather than ideology or policy. The occupation and neighborhood would be related strongly to income and net worth. (Or at least this was the situation before the Republican Party began to fall apart.)

It never hurts to follow the money. Though in the case of pediatrics, majority Democratic makes sense. People who specialize in children’s health would tend to favor policies like
S-CHIP and expanded Medicaid. One would think that Orthopedists would champion Medicare, because of the number of joint replacements they do.
I noticed that they did not include cosmetic surgeons. I would suspect they would trend
Republican even more than Othopedists. Unless they were influenced by the “liberal Hollywood friends”. ;-)

is there any discussion of correlation vs causation? Could be that the med students who are more conservative just go for the higher paid specialties.

“The implicit assumption is that the group of those qualified and willing to take up academic jobs is roughly representative of the US population, and therefore contains roughly equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans. To state that submission is to see immediately what’s wrong with it. As a group, academics are obviously not typical of the US population. ”

It is fun how this analysis gets to be glossed like that ONLY for academics who don’t want to deal with differential treatment analysis. Shall we try that style when discussing programmers and women? In every other area where we see differential outcomes that stark they are considered strong evidence of direct discrimination.

Anarcissie @11;
As the saying says; “Assertion made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”

Or as currently said; “Citation needed.”

@15 I am talking about voting patterns? I assume they vote with their social class status, which ‘professional’ degree holders seem to do. By comparison, ‘academic’ degree holders in humanities subjects become more radical than their social class. I was going to write a much longer post making more of the of the contrast of the Nigel Farages (rich, non-college) and the Ralph Milibands (working class, professor) of this world but I didn’t want to write to derail the thread. John Quiggan’s output on ‘non-college whites’ is available on this blog. https://crookedtimber.org/2012/09/10/the-white-working-class/

The point of course is the above-the-line modest proposal to conservatize academia by raising their pay, sarcastic or not, wouldn’t work. People who derive their social status from being social scientists and derive their status in society by being right aren’t going to change their opinions because they’re paid more.

Neil Gross has already done all the hard work for you in “Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care?” and related articles. His answer; professor is a politically typecast profession.

Eyeballing the chart, I’d guess the (simple) correlation coefficient is about 0.7, so the R-squared of the regression would be about 0.5. I wouldn’t call that weak.

Politics arising from your personality and cognitive style in interaction with other people.

Our personalities and cognitive styles are effectively social strategies actively employed both in motivating and situating ourselves in the (economic) world and in competing and cooperating with others.

A collegial working environment or an independence from direct supervision is going to a very different experience from being a manager or a business executive in a highly structured and hierarchical situation.

With the surgeons, it would be interesting to know if there are different styles of control — some more collegial, some featuring greater domination — and if they correlate differently with political identity and attitudes.

Every job says they are the ones that are different. It would be awfully convenient for academics, especially as they are the ones who study and document discrimination, if ‘academic’ were the only one where that were true.

Bruce Wilder @ 29:

Yes. Business school faculty are more likely to be Republicans:
“Academic field also makes a tremendous difference, with the humanities averaging a 10:1 D:R ratio and business schools averaging 1.3:1, and with departments ranging from sociology (44:1) to management (1.5:1). Across all departments and institutions, the D:R ratio is 5:1, while in the “soft” liberal‐arts fields, the ratio is higher than 8:1. These findings are generally in line with comparable previous studies.”

Faculty partisan affiliations in all disciplines: A voter‐registration study
Christopher F. Cardiff Department of Economics , San Jose State University , San Jose, CA,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08913810508443639

Medicine and the US is rather a special case, because of their peculiar medical system. It therefore tends to make voting patterns strongly influenced by personal pecuniary interest (US medical professionals being the best paid in the world at the expense of other Americans).

= = = placeholder@11:56 PM: Geosciences and Biology on the other. I suggest that this is because America is one of the few industrialised countries where schools are forbidden from teaching the basics of those disciplines in secondary school. = = =

There are a few school districts in the Bible Belt where christianists have been been able to restrict some portions of the biology curriculum, and the trends in the Texas School Textbook Board are disturbing. But the United States is a large place. I have not seen any reports that high schools are “forbidden” from teaching biology or geoscience [only the best-funded would have a separate course in the latter; usually included in 9th grade general science]. Perhaps you could provide some links?

I think there are other factors which make physicians an inappropriate comparison. Firstly, many people go into medicine for the money, few if any academics do. Likewise, academics in fields which are high paying outside of academics (engineering, computer science, etc.) trend somewhat more conservative than other disciplines.

LFC @ 37: “There have been periodic battles over the teaching of evolution and over textbooks in certain states, but that hardly amounts to a widespread prohibition on secondary schools teaching the basics of chemistry, physics, and biology.”

My anecdotal sense is that there is a widespread de facto albeit not de jure prohibition, at least in rural and suburban America. In my high school bilology course in northern NYS evolution was neither studied nor mentioned. Most of my family went to Houghton College in western NYS. The last I knew, students there must sign a pledge not to engage in non-Christian activities such as mixed-gender dancing or playing games with cards which have graven images on them (such as bridge), and the teachers there believe that the Theory of Evolution is false and the universe was created in seven days. The college turns out mostly grade-school and high-school teachers, and is accredited by NYS (I looked it up) as a source of biology and physics teachers.

I know of three similar colleges (places my nephews and nieces considered) within a 100-mile radius of where I live in Western NYS. When I lived in Mount Vernon in southern Ohio, there was (is) one in town (Nazareth College). When I last visited California, it was to attend a niece’s graduation from Biola (Bible Institute of Los Angeles). This is a biased sampling, but my guess is the portion of such colleges to secular colleges in the USA is similar to the portion of evangelicals in the population, and that they supply a somewhat disproportionate amount of secondary school teachers.

@JimV
I’m sure the picture is somewhat mixed, b/c of the elements you mention. More rural than suburban, I wd guess, but right now we wd just be doing anecdote v anecdote.

My sense, apart from this particular question, is that there has been some good research and writing on U.S. secondary education in recent years, esp. the impact of different approaches to inequality, residential patterns etc. One bk that I’ve read parts of but must read all of is Gerald Grant’s Hope and Despair in the American City (2009), contrasting Raleigh NC w/ Syracuse NY.

placeholder @ #35: As a chemist, I’ve observed over the years that engineers tend to be by far the most conservative group in the STEM disciplines, with the order being roughly engineers>chemists>physicists≈mathematicians>biologists.

As I recall, at UC Berkeley during the Free Speech movement in ’64, only the Business, Engineering, and Chemistry faculties continued to hold classes during the strike.

Yeah, doctors are a poor cohort to look at, given their narrow focus. Doctors are notoriously bad financial planners, for example. Many I have spoken with are quite badly informed outside their specialties.

Likewise, academics in fields which are high paying outside of academics (engineering, computer science, etc.) trend somewhat more conservative than other disciplines.

Which raises the possibility that education, or salary, aren’t particularly important in determining political affiliation.

Most, to the point of all, stars in the entertainment industry are lightly educated and fabulously rich. According to the education-salary model, they should be skew conservative; however, exactly the opposite is the case.

Academics in engineering skew far more conservative than those in, say, anthropology, yet both are equally educated.

Perhaps it is down to something else entirely. In engineering, political leanings don’t make the square root of zero difference: the bridge stands or falls because it was designed and built well, or not. When a hiring committee is looking at candidates, their publications won’t give a hint of ideological leanings, so any committee bias, no matter what it might be, would be far more difficult to implement.

(My mother was a tenured rhetoric and English professor at Florida Atlantic University. She told me that over her 20 years there, the hiring bias became grotesque: no one even slightly conservative was going to get hired, ever. Consider how much easier it is for the hiring committee in an English department to determine political bona fides from publication history than for the Civil Engineering department.)

I’d bet that if you were to plot the objectivity of disciplines — Civil Engineering on one end, and Feminist Studies on the other — there would be a far more obvious skewing of ideological preference. And there appears to be some of that effect within medical specialties — the success criteria for surgeons and anesthesiologists are much different than psychiatrists and family practice doctors.

I’ve served on academic hiring committees many times, interviewed dozens of candidates, and have never had a clue what their politics were.

Hey Skipper 10.11.16 at 3:02 pm @ 52 —
I’m going to give you a semi-anecdotal example which doesn’t necessarily prove anything but may prove interesting.

When I got into the computer-programming craft in 1965, about half of my fellow practitioners were women. In those days no one knew how to create an effective computer programmer and many were needed, so businesses simply vacuumed up likely-seeming candidates almost at random and threw them at the task. Some could do it, other couldn’t. A lot of those who could were women. I suppose since typing (at card punch machines) seemed to be involved in the job, a good many of these people came from female-predominant office jobs: secretaries and typists. who happened to be around when managers were looking for someone to send to computer school (a few weeks of minimal training) and, hey, they could type. A lot of them in fact turned out to be very good at the job. And anyone who was halfway competent found she or he was on the right side of a tight labor market, which was nice.

Things went along this way for a while but eventually it became noticed outside the craft that computer programmers were making a mighty lot of money and that computers were becoming pretty important, raising the social and political status of those who could deal with them. Nevertheless, the field was open: almost anyone who could do the job could get a shot at it. This development greatly excited academic institutions and they began to offer courses and degrees in such fictive disciplines as ‘computer science’ and ‘software engineering’. Business managers are suckers for credentials — it’s an effective mode of CYA — so the credentialed, even if they lacked knowledge and competence, were likely to get hired before the merely competent. As the earlier computer programmers burned out, got interested in other things, were promoted to their level of incompetence, died, etc., the newer credentialed people began to take their place.

Well, we all know what a recently graduated engineer looked like in the 1970s: young, White, male, and of a certain mentality which one might call ‘conservative’. The culture of the work also changed and became much more authoritarian. Even the language and the practices changed.

Not long after this development — the general exclusion of women from the craft, or ‘profession’ as it was now called — began to be considered a Problem and organizations like the ACM had conferences about it. (The racial and social-class components of the Problem were also occasionally noticed.) This Problem has hardly gone away in the 40 years which have ensued. First you do it, then you have a Problem about it, then you have a conference which you get paid to attend! Win-win-win, I guess.

I could go into how the culture and the substance of the work changed, as well as the composition of the workforce, but this is already too long. However, to me it’s an interesting case of a distinct series of political transitions in a seemingly apolitical field. Someone should write it up sometime.

[Anarcissie:] When I got into the computer-programming craft in 1965, about half of my fellow practitioners were women.When I got into the computer-programming craft in 1965, about half of my fellow practitioners were women.

(You seem to be about ten years older than I.)

I’m contradicting your personal experience — that’s a fool’s errand — but mine doesn’t mirror it. In the early 1970s, a friend of mine, far smarter than I, had access to the Cal Tech mainframe. The computer areas were exclusively male. My dad was one of the first COBOL programmers; he even wrote a compiler for it. He worked at Burroughs. I don’t recall any women working as programmers there, but I’d have to ask to be sure.

I bought my first computer, an Apple II, in 1981. I’ll bet the demographic for computer purchases then was almost exclusively male. No one I knew who had any apparent interest in learning about the innards of those things was female.

This development greatly excited academic institutions and they began to offer courses and degrees in such fictive disciplines as ‘computer science’ and ‘software engineering’. Business managers are suckers for credentials — it’s an effective mode of CYA — so the credentialed, even if they lacked knowledge and competence, were likely to get hired before the merely competent. This development greatly excited academic institutions and they began to offer courses and degrees in such fictive disciplines as ‘computer science’ and ‘software engineering’. Business managers are suckers for credentials — it’s an effective mode of CYA — so the credentialed, even if they lacked knowledge and competence, were likely to get hired before the merely competent.

In as much as my graduate degree is in computer science, specializing in software engineering, I’ll try not to take that personally.

I think you slam business managers rather too much. Any group will have in it people with neither knowledge nor competence, and it isn’t always easy to discover that ahead of time. Credentials are proxies — among 1000 people with a graduate degree in computer science, is one more, or less, likely to find people competent, knowledgable and trainable in computer areas than a 1,000 people who didn’t graduate high school?

An extreme example, of course, but that highlights the point: credentials matter (after all, not graduating high school is just as much a credential as having an advanced degree.)

Not long after this development — the general exclusion of women from the craft …

Absence is not the same as exclusion. In my profession, women were effectively and legally barred until the late 1970s. Their absence was well and truly down to exclusion.

Forty years later, women comprise about 6%. Exclusion is no longer a very good explanation.

mdc: In what field?

“. I also happen to be a gear head”

This means something quite different to my ears, and explained so much on my first (mis)reading ; )

= = = I’m contradicting your personal experience — that’s a fool’s errand — but mine doesn’t mirror it. In the early 1970s, a friend of mine, far smarter than I, had access to the Cal Tech mainframe. The computer areas were exclusively male = = =

Remember that during WWII the computers (in the original sense of the word) and calculating/decryption machine plugboard operators were almost entirely women, and many of them had math degrees ranging from BA to Ph.D. After the war some of those women went on to academic and business careers as programmers and researchers because there were no qualified men to obstruct them. IBM in particular didn’t discriminate and encouraged women to try programming. The bro-heavy computer culture we think of today didn’t really get started until around 1980.

[Placeholder:] Skipper, how are you using the word objective?

In the sense that the criteria separating success from failure, or good from bad, are clear.

In that regard, Civil Engineering is, compared to Sociology, very objective.

Sociologists are more liberal than engineers because they objectively study human society.

I doubt you can defend the claim that sociologists objectively study human society. Also, you aren’t really addressing the horse-cart problem. Are people sociologists because they are liberal, liberal because they are sociologists, or liberal because academia actively excludes conservatives?

[Anarcissie:] I didn’t know the current participation of women was as low as 6%. That is really striking.

Wow, did I ever confuse the issue. I gave you every reason to expect that 6% refers to the computer field. My bad — my profession, which was for awhile, but is no longer in the computer field, (and is entirely different) is at 6%.

@Ronan: Less dramatic, but similar conclusion: Engineering degrees have a very reduced effect on religious belief and attendance compared to others similar too…huh…look at that… vocational degrees.
http://www.nber.org/papers/w15182.pdf

In the sense that the criteria separating success from failure, or good from bad, are clear. In that regard, Civil Engineering is, compared to Sociology, very objective.

Objectivity refers to the ability to make measurable and easily verifiable claims. Mathematicians and Philosophers can make claims that necessarily true. Natural Scientists and especially Physicists make claims that are easier to measure and verify than Biologists. Human society, being difficult to measure and providing many unreliable witnesses, is the least objective science. They can still make objectively verifiable claims such as ‘among surgeons voting republican is a dependent variable to which personal income is an independent variable’ (see: the article of this comment thread.) This objectively disproves that surgeons are more ‘objectively minded’ because their views correlate with their self interests and group beliefs.

Engineering is a vocational degree. It is a subset of physics and mathematics used for building things. Like Astrophysics but better paid. Like how Accounting versus Mathematics and Law versus political science or Medicine versus Biology. However, Physicists report liberal beliefs at a higher rate than Engineers despite being a more ‘hard science’! In other words, objectivity does not cause conservatism. Indeed Engineering seems have little predicable effect on political preferences.

Indeed because ‘objective’ insight into human affairs is clouded by human social forms, only those who can see through them than objectively view society. Like Philosophy is the only discipline that knows its own thoughts, Sociology is the only discipline that understand itself- therefore it is the QUEEN OF THE SCIENCES.

I would probably put it differently: the university system was the enforcement edge of the social order. Universities have huge incentives to contribute to a situation where merely demonstrating that you can do the work is not enough. This has happened in all sorts of areas, where demonstrating that you can do the work (often better than the person with the university credential) won’t even get you an interview anymore.