Not long ago, one of my teachers (in my logic design class) said that better educated people tend to be democrats. He claimed that most of the academia are liberals for that reason. The same went for college graduates.
I did notice that all of the professors I’ve had who mentionned politics at all declared themselves , if not democrats, then liberals and certainly anti-Bush.
So, is my logic design teacher correct? Why or why not?
This CNN page might help a little.
VOTE BY EDUCATION BUSH KERRY NADER
No High School (4%) 49% +10 50% 0%
H.S. Graduate (22%) 52% +3 47% 0%
Some College (32%) 54% +3 46% 0%
College Graduate (26%) 52% +1 46% 1%
Postgrad Study (16%) 44% +0 55% 1%
VOTE BY EDUCATION BUSH KERRY NADER
No College Degree (58%) 53% n/a 47% 0%
College Graduate (42%) 49% n/a 49% 1%
This is only one election however
Jim
Educated DOES NOT EQUAL members of academia. Members of academia are educated in the traditional sense but most people educated in the traditional sense are not in academia. They are a self-selected group and they are not consistent across fields. Most educated people work outside of academia. There are also large differences across disciplines. A women’s study professor will be much more likely to be a Democrat than a business or engineering professor.
This is also a by-product of our two-party system. On one hand, you have Democrats that are more recently known to be more tolerant on social issues while Republicans pick up a hodge-podge of Christian fundamentalists and rural people that may be more socially conservative. OTOH, Republicans are supposed to be the party of sound fiscal policy (not of late) and Democrats the party of a hodge-podge of special interest groups that only care about social policy in their own interest at the expense of all else.
I am a moderate libertarian which means that I lean towards Republican philosophy because of economic issues and agree with Democrat social ideas in theory but without their government induced approach. I was once a member of academia and there were others like me.
In my experience, most liberals key off of certain social issues more than economic theory. They largely ignore they most fundamental parts of government in favor of quick fixes for their pet “injustices”. Other educated people like me don’t see things the same way.
The average Republican is better educated than the average Democrat. It is the large urban, poorly educated underclass, overwhelmingly Democratic, that brings the Democratic average down.
People with advanced degrees do tend to be Democrats more often than Republicans.
That is true and a good point. It is a huge and diverse country. People adopt the same ideas for very different reasons. A Nobel prize winning economist probably votes Republican for different reasons than the high school dropout in Mississippi but they can be grouped together.
Also, just because people have different philosophies doesn’t mean that one is right and one is wrong. I am from rural Louisiana but live in the Boston area now which may as well be two different countries. My experience and needs growing up there were very different than someone growing up in Cambridge, MA. I held my own experiences to heart and they to theirs. A Manhattanite isn’t going to experience the same things as a farmer in Nebraska. It doesn’t mean the farmer is stupid. How much does a Manhattanite know about the important grain market and why should the farmer care about the latest play about high gay culture when there is none around?
That is what makes democracy great. People send signals about what they are experiencing to everyone.
Cite?
It’s not like there’s no poorly educated white people in rural America as well, especially in the Southeast. And they are rumored to vote overwhelmingly Republican. So there’s vague generalizations on both sides of this argument, not that either yours or mine proves anything.
I would also bring up the variables of geographic location and type of college. I don’t think many Bob Jones graduates are lining up to vote Democrat.
I think some ABD poli-sci type could find a dissertation in this topic.
Robin
Prof. James Lindgren is the director of the Demography of Diversity Project at Northwestern Law. He is quoted here:
Which is pretty much what I said above, but I’m not a professor and didn’t have the stats at hand.
Much better. That wasn’t so hard, now was it? 
Not at all.
I think this data points to some interesting trends in both parties, many of which are not positive ones.
Based on the information I provided, Gozu, it seems your teacher certainly is not correct. He likely is making the mistake of figuring the subset of smart people around him represent the opinions of all smart people.
There’s got to be some careful way to phrase this so that it is really “people who are graduating from college”. Which I’m sure would skew left.
It has been my experience that when bumpkin white boys enroll into a liberal arts college, they tend to have their whole world open up to them. Some may even spend time around black and asian folks for the first time. Quite a few go from a super conservative to middle of the road or liberal.
Maybe that is what your professor was getting at, I dunno, YMMV.
I think that’s likely, but what the professor state is not necessarily incorrect.
“A better educated person is more likely to be a Democrat” does not contradict “Republicans on average are better educated.”
I often heard from my parents when I was growing up that there were more Democrats than Republicans, but the Republicans generally had a higher turnout on election day. If true (and I don’t claim that it is), and ignoring the fact that “better educated” is ill defined, then it’s possible that there are more “better educated” people in the Democratic party than the Republican, making the prof’s statement true, but that there are even more less educated people in the Democratic party than in the Republican, bringing the average down and making Mr. Moto’s statement true.
I’m coming up blank on finding registration numbers for the various parties. Anyone with better Google-fu want to step up?
Take a look at this recent GD thread: Higher education leans left: why?
There actually were more Democrats than Republicans for most of the 20th century and there still are today.
Prior to the Civil Rights movement the Republican party was basically a pro-upper class, pro-business, somewhat isolationist party that mostly advocated lower taxes and less involvement in foreign affairs (Eisenhower kind of changed that a lot, although some argue he wasn’t a Republican in the traditional mold of the time.)
Since most people aren’t upper-class, business owners, et cetera the GOP was smaller. The Democrats had most of the poor, the entire South, etc. The black vote would be solidly GOP however in most places blacks just couldn’t vote so they weren’t a major political force.
I don’t have figures handy but I seem to remember at one time affiliation almost broke down to 60-40 in favor of the Dems, the GOP hasn’t gained much at all since then but the dems have lost and there are more and more independents every year.
Another question to ask: Are there more college INSTRUCTORS registered as Democrats than Republicans? And, in fact, are more teachers (of all grade levels) registered as Democrats than Republicans?
If so, that could help explain the perceived liberal-academic bias. (i.e., even though more college graduates are Republicans, fewer of them generally decide to make a career in college education than do Democrats).
The thread that Thudlow pointed you to talked about this issue, at least a little.
I forget where I heard this so apologies for no cite but it seems relevant.
“If you are 20 and a conservative you have no heart. If you are 40 and a liberal you have no brain.”
The issue is more complicated than Mr. Moto would have you believe.
One of the longstanding stereotypes about American politics is that the more education you have, the more liberal you become, and that the more money you have, the more conservative you become. Whether or not this is true, you cannot just dismiss this as one person’s overgeneralization–anyone who has studied political science has heard this truism.
And to some extent it is true. According to Professor Bryan Caplan at George Mason University
Link
Controlling for wealth, education makes one more liberal.
But, the correlation is slim. The most accurate answer is that there is very little correlation between education and ideology.