Campaign Endorsements for Nobel Peace Prize Laureates?

Factual Questions
1

I’ve seen the posts about the Nobel Prize laureates for economy in threads here and I’ve just found the medical, chemistry, and physics laureates giving their support to Kerry here.

So who are the Nobel Peace Prize laureates backing?

(I don’t want to know the whys, just the whos)

2

Oops, that thread title should be from and not for.

I could get by with a little help from the mods. I could get high with a little help from the mods. :smiley:

3

Perusing a list of Peace Prize laureates I’d expect hardly any of them (with the exception of Jimmy Carter) to be in a position to officially endorse Bush or Kerry, because most of them are

  • dead
  • international organizations or UN agencies; they obviously cannot interfere in a nation’s internal politics
  • NGOs - they wouldn’t want to get into the bad books of of whoever is elected
  • still active as politicians and political activists - for much the same reason
  • government officials and diplomats - protocol of their role pretty much forbids them officially endorsing a candidate in a foreign election.

The laureates of the other Nobel prizes OTOH are mainly academics who are much less constrained in expressing their personal opinion.

4

I doubt many people are going to decide who they vote for based on what some ‘ivory-tower intellectual elitist’ thinks. (This opinion is far from true; the average middle manager is far more elitist than most scientists I’ve met. But it’s a catchphrase people can understand.) There are quite a few names I recognize, though, and a couple names I would have expected to see (scientists who I would think are rather liberal) but probably didn’t endorse anyone.

Is there a corresponding list for Bush? I can’t imagine that many Nobel laureates would endorse him, simply because funding is a constant struggle for scientists and he hasn’t been terribly generous. (Reduced funding is analogous to a substantial tax increase, or even price caps in business.) There is also, in the US, a significant correlation between supporting Bush and being Protestant, and an inverse correlation between religious involvement and working in science.

5

Well, Jimmy Carter is backing Kerry.

George W Bush (along with Tony Blair) were nominated for the 2004 Peace Prize.

Here’s the list of the 6 Nobel laureate economists who support Bush.
Here’s the list of the 10 Nobel laureate economists who support Kerry.