Most liberal country - I would say either Iceland or Sweden.
Most liberal city - I would say either Vancouver, Reykjavik or San Francisco.
Most liberal location (has to be reasonably large to qualify) - the campus of UC-Berkeley…?
What would your nominees be?
Oberlin.
And by the way, you’ll have to define “liberal.”
Location: various Speakers’ Corners?
I’d nominate the Santa Fe, New Mexico campus of St. John’s College. I’m not an alumnus, but I had a friend who is, and I’d visit him there a lot when he was a student.
In fact, Santa Fe is in the running for Most Liberal City, if Taos doesn’t knock it out.
Ironically, “Liberal, KS” is not even close.
Berkeley isn’t the most liberal college in the U.S. It’s perhaps the most liberal large state university. Large state universities have to be diverse places. The most liberal colleges tend to be small ones where there are more unified social/political/philosophical views. Here’s some lists of liberal colleges (several of which include my undergraduate school, New College in Sarasota, Florida):
There are some cities in France, notably a few suburbs of Paris, that have elected Communist Party mayors for decades.
In the USA, it would probably be The People’s Republic of Boulder, in Colorado. Key West FL would be the most liberal in the south.
“Liberal” is a pretty vague word. There are towns or localities in the western USA that are very strongly Libertarian, and one can argue whether that meets your definition of Liberal, or not.
Here’s one list of the most liberal and conservative cities in the U.S.:
Those are all towns with a high enough level of wealth that political contributions are generous, and then it lists them according to liberal or conservative candidates, who may or may not be local politicians of particular venom or capacity to elicit donations.
In other words, a very suspect metric that counts only one contributing factor.
That’s true. There are various ways to measure this. Here are some more lists:
http://www.livability.com/top-10/political-cities/best-cities-for-liberals/2014
If I was pressed, my vote would be here.
Yes, but what is most liberal in America is not most liberal in the world.
Eugene Oregon is probably more liberal than San Francisco. What am I basing that on? Nothing. But I would assume due to demographics that Eugene (with its hippies and college students) is more liberal than SF which has a lot of wealthy people and minorities.
I have no idea about internationally.
Wait - is it liberal as in “left-wing”, or liberal as in “everything goes”?
Left-wing. A lot of liberalism isn’t “liberal.”
By my reckoning, odds are your best bet is likely somewhere in Scandinavia - or more particularly, somewhere in Sweden.
Most of these lists only include the big cities, but I’m pretty sure that I’ve seen figures somewhere pointing to my town of Lakewood, OH being among the most liberal municipalities in the nation. I’m sure it doesn’t really rate worldwide, though.
Velocity writes:
> Yes, but what is most liberal in America is not most liberal in the world.
That’s true, but I have no idea how to compare the political positions of Americans with those of people from the rest of the world.
Wesley Clark writes:
> But I would assume due to demographics that Eugene (with its hippies and college
> students) is more liberal than SF which has a lot of wealthy people and minorities.
Wealthy people tend to be more conservative than average. Minorities tend to be more liberal than average, so I don’t know what your point is. Minorities tend to be more liberal than college students on average. (Yes, obviously those two groups overlap.)
What’s your definition of ‘liberal’?
Conservativism and liberalism in America, largely because we only have two parties, refer to hodgepodges of political policy positions which don’t necessarily have much logical connexion to each other.
The most economically egalitarian country in the world, last I checked, was the Czech Republic, and they’re also the least religious. However, they’re also quite ‘conservative’ on matters like Muslim immigration.