Long time reader Ian comments:
A comparison with “the American public” isn’t really appropriate – to even be in the pool where you’re thinking about an academic career, you need to have a college degree. And that population if memory serves, is far more liberal than the population at large. More realistic would be a comparison with the population of people who have graduate degree….
Roughly about ~20% of Americans self-identify as “liberal,” and ~40% as conservative. The General Social Survey has a variable POLVIEWS, which asks individuals to assign themselves to a position on a political spectrum, from “extremely liberal” to “extremely conservative,” like so:
1 = Extremely liberal
2 = Liberal
3 = Slightly liberal
4 = Moderate
5 = Slightly conservative
6 = Conservative
7 = Extremely conservative
So in other words, the higher the integer, the more conservative the individual. The GSS has a variable, EDUCATION, which records the highest level attained. It falls into three classes, high school, bachelor’s, and graduate degrees (I assume those who did not complete high school are omitted because they didn’t attain an education?). Additionally, it has a 10 word vocabulary test, WORDSUM, which has a 0.71 correlation with general …