# How do education and income affect political orientation? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [September 4, 2008, 11:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-education-and-income-affect-political-orientation/461970 "2008-09-04T11:38:07Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![pseudotriton\_ruber\_ruber](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/a9a28c/32.png) [@pseudotriton\_ruber\_ruber](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pseudotriton_ruber_ruber)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2008, 11:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-education-and-income-affect-political-orientation/461970/1 "2008-09-04T11:38:07Z")
I’ve been operating under some assumptions, that are utterly without foundation but seem pretty logical, and I would like to know what are the most reliable studies that have been done of these pretty basic assumptions: 1. Generally, the more education someone has, the more likely he or she is to vote liberal. 2. Generally, the more income someone has, the more likely he or she is to vote conservative. 3)Generally, the more formal education someone has, the more likely he or she is to have a high income. 1. Generally, the more income someone has, the more likely he or she is to have a high degree of formal education. These seem to me to be generally true, as propositions go. (Let me know, of course, if I’m mistaken about any of these “truths.”) If I meet someone who barely got through grade school, I’m aware that the person may well be a self-made billionaire, but I will assume, until shown otherwise, that he or she works at some undemanding, low-paying job. And so on with my other propositions. But these propositions also contain some contradictions that may prevent any general statements being drawn from them. Obviously if education skews left, and income skews right, but education correlates with income, it’s hard to determine how one’s political orientation is affected if one has both a lot of income and a lot of education, or a little of both. Has anyone studied this and found that income affects political orientation more than education does, or less, and where the distinction lies? I’d mainly be interested in seeing non-partisan quantitative studies. ---
**Author:** ![Bill\_Door](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/50afbb/32.png) [@Bill\_Door](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bill_Door)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2008, 12:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-education-and-income-affect-political-orientation/461970/2 "2008-09-04T12:13:02Z")
I’d have to disagree with the correlation between education and high income after a certain level of education and income. Education can put you firmly into the middle class, but it’s never going to make you rich. You’ll don’t get rich by knowing stuff, you get rich by owning stuff. ---
**Author:** ![Renob](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8c91f0/32.png) [@Renob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Renob)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2008, 12:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-education-and-income-affect-political-orientation/461970/3 "2008-09-04T12:18:21Z")
The Heritage Foundation has some info [here](http://http://www.heritage.org/Press/Commentary/ed110607a.cfm) that higher income areas of the nation tend to vote Democratic. Heritage is, of course, conservative but it seems they have their facts together. Here in Maryland it’s certainly true that the rich DC suburbs are Democratic and the parts of the state that are more rural and poor are Republican. In Washington, D.C., both the poor blacks of Anacostia and the rich whites of Georgetown vote Democratic. In reality, I think trying to say that one’s income determines one’s political ideology is too simplistic. ---
**Author:** ![pseudotriton\_ruber\_ruber](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/a9a28c/32.png) [@pseudotriton\_ruber\_ruber](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pseudotriton_ruber_ruber)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2008, 12:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-education-and-income-affect-political-orientation/461970/4 "2008-09-04T12:21:26Z")
> [@Bill\_Door](#): > > I’d have to disagree with the correlation between education and high income after a certain level of education and income. Education can put you firmly into the middle class, but it’s never going to make you rich. You’ll don’t get rich by knowing stuff, you get rich by owning stuff. Maybe, but that’s what I’m looking to find out --generally. If the upper half of all Americans in terms of education is much richer than the lower half, but the top 2% of most formally educated Americans earn less money than the next 48%, that wouldn’t invalidate the general statement about the top 50% as a whole. ---
**Author:** ![pseudotriton\_ruber\_ruber](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/a9a28c/32.png) [@pseudotriton\_ruber\_ruber](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pseudotriton_ruber_ruber)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2008, 12:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-education-and-income-affect-political-orientation/461970/5 "2008-09-04T12:32:47Z")
> [@Renob](#): > > The Heritage Foundation has some info that higher income areas of the nation tend to vote Democratic. Heritage is, of course, conservative but it seems they have their facts together. > > Here in Maryland it’s certainly true that the rich DC suburbs are Democratic and the parts of the state that are more rural and poor are Republican. In Washington, D.C., both the poor blacks of Anacostia and the rich whites of Georgetown vote Democratic. > > In reality, I think trying to say that one’s income determines one’s political ideology is too simplistic. Your link didn’t work for me. Maybe there’s one too many "http"s in there. I’ll try eliminating one. [here](http://www.heritage.org/Press/Commentary/ed110607a.cfm) Yes, that seems to work fine. Is anyone trying to claim “that one’s income determines one’s political ideology”? I just suggested that my assumptions, which I’m glad to have refuted by an authoritative source, are posited on a strong correlation between income levels and political orientation. Maybe income is a weak factor, while education is a strong factor. I don’t know. I’d just as soon not go into how I feel about these correlations, but simply try to find out if they are, in fact, sound assumptions. ---
**Author:** ![Quartz](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quartz/32/267_2.png) [@Quartz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quartz)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2008, 12:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-education-and-income-affect-political-orientation/461970/6 "2008-09-04T12:55:44Z")
How do the rural well-off and rich tend to vote in America? IOW are voting habits influenced by population density? ---
**Author:** ![Bad\_Astronaut](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/e19adc/32.png) [@Bad\_Astronaut](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bad_Astronaut)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2008, 7:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-education-and-income-affect-political-orientation/461970/7 "2008-09-04T19:41:30Z")
> [@pseudotriton\_ruber\_ruber](#): > > 1. Generally, the more education someone has, the more likely he or she is to vote liberal. > > 2. Generally, the more income someone has, the more likely he or she is to vote conservative. > > 3)Generally, the more formal education someone has, the more likely he or she is to have a high income. > > 1. Generally, the more income someone has, the more likely he or she is to have a high degree of formal education. There is no logical contradiction preventing all four statements from being true. In each case, it is implied that other factors are held constant. So for a group of people with a given income level (for example), the more educated people within that group would tend to be more liberal. I’m not saying they are true necessarily though, that would need to be confirmed with some sort of survey data. ---
**Author:** ![puddleglum](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puddleglum/32/137_2.png) [@puddleglum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puddleglum)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2008, 8:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-education-and-income-affect-political-orientation/461970/8 "2008-09-04T20:52:07Z")
The answer is that the first precept is only true for those educated past a bachelor’s degree (in the US). Liberals do better with those with no high school education and those with a post-graduate degree. However since only 16% of voters in 2004 had a post graduate degree, those numbers aren’t enough to skew the upper income brackets liberal. Voting and income data by race: > **[Gelman's Graphical Treat - Econlib](https://www.econlib.org/archives/2008/08/gelmans_graphic.html)** > > Andrew Gelman, King of Charts and Graphs, and author of Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State, has prepared an exclusive set of statistical pictures just for Econlog readers. Gelman’s graph shows CNN’s exit poll data, broken down by income... Voting and income data by education [http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/US/P/00/epolls.0.html](http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/US/P/00/epolls.0.html)