Long time readers know that it’s trivially easy to extract information from the GSS that political moderates and independents are not as intelligent as partisans and ideologues. New readers are not always familiar. A comment:
#8 Do you have something to back up the idea that independents are less intelligent? If anything, I would’ve expected the opposite- that independents are capable of thinking for themselves instead of following the party line.
First, a quick review of the data. I used two GSS variables, PARTYID and POLVIEWS, and limited the sample to non-Hispanic whites after the year 2000. I removed those of “Other party” as well. Finally, I crossed that against vocab score results, which correlates with intelligence with a value of 0.70. It is rather obvious that middle-of-the-roaders are not as bright:
WORDSUM SCORE
0-2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Strong Dem
15
8
13
9
10
12
14
15
20
Dem
17
24
14
15
15
13
14
15
15
Lean Dem
11
9
8
11
11
11
10
18
14
Independent
26
23
23
21
18
16
14
11
11
Lean Repub
10
8
12
10
8
12
13
10
12
Repub
15
21
18
21
21
20
18
16
13
Strong Repub
6
8
11
13
18
16
16
16
15
Extreme Liberal
5
3
2
2
1
4
3
4
7
Liberal
5
11
6
6
8
12
10
16
20
Lean Liberal
6
10
13
7
10
11
12
17
14
Moderate
44
45
44
43
39
33
30
28
24
Lean Conservative
21
12
13
18
16
18
18
14
16
Conservative
14
16
16
20
22
17
22
19
15
Extreme Conservative
5
4
5
3
4
6
3
2
3
As you can see the proportion in the middle decreases as you go up in intelligence. Why? A straightforward explanation is that independents and moderates are “low information” political actors. And therefore they are likely to be less intelligent in the first place. But there is I think another …