Awesome

Academic bias

I sometimes find people claiming there is no political bias in academia, or that it isn’t a big deal. So I made these graphs to help visualize the scale of the issue.

The density plot below shows the population-weighted distribution of US counties by Democratic vote share in 2020. The coloured lines show the proportion of registered Democrats, out of registered Republicans and Democrats, in five academic disciplines. I’ve added a zoom inset, in case you strain your eyes trying to spot the number of Republicans among history faculty.

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Another set of data comes from Langbert and Stevens (2020):

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To get more disciplines, we can use Langbert (2018), who looks at professors in liberal arts colleges. I haven’t added the proportion of the population in more Democratic counties, since it’s essentially zero for most of this data. But well done to engineering: a full 26% of the US population lives in counties which are more Democratic than engineering faculty.

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FAQ

• How did you make those cool plots?

  After writing the first version of this, I was inspired to create a little R package for making insets in ggplot plots. Don’t say the culture war never gave you anything!

• Is this satire?

  A little bit, yes. But the data is real.

• This isn’t fair, you’re comparing registered Democrats in faculty to Democrat voters in the US.

  Short answer: dude, suppose I’m out by a factor of ten.

  Long answer: in the 2016 data, we can correct for this by assuming that unregistered faculty split their vote equally between Democrat and Republican. On this ridiculously generous assumption, our data looks like this:

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Sources

Langbert, M., Quain, A.J. and Klein, D.B., 2016. Faculty voter registration in economics, history, journalism, law, and psychology. Econ Journal Watch, 13(3), pp.422-451.

Langbert, M., 2018. Homogenous: The political affiliations of elite liberal arts college faculty. Academic Questions, 31(2), pp.186-197.

Langbert, M. and Stevens, S., 2020. Partisan registration and contributions of faculty in flagship colleges. National Association of Scholars, 17.