Wednesday, October 19, 2016

Political persuasions of US academia

From a Nature News article about scientists who support Trump (how on Earth did they manage to track down that handful of people?), there's a graphic showing how the political leanings of academics breaks down:


I guess most of this is pretty much what I would have guessed, except I would not have been surprised if engineers had a greater number of conservatives, and I don't really know why mathematicians lean more heavily conservative, too.  (Also, astronomers don't do conservative politics, for some reason.)

4 comments:

Jason Soon said...

Math isn't really empirical (though I suppose you could say the same about econs and sociology haha) so it's possible to be a top mathematician and very religious and religious people are more likely to be Republican, hence ...

of course you might argue why doesn't the effect work for engineers but I think there we're picking up on different kind of Republican, those who have been in business for themselves

Steve said...

Yes, I suppose so. Although, if asked to guess, I would have thought that the great majority of mathematicians are atheists these days...

I think the almost total exclusion of conservatives or "middle of the road" amongst astronomers and astrophysicists is perhaps the most unusual finding, though. Maybe it was a small sample size?

Mayan said...

Astrophysics tends to be exploratory, without much practical application (yet), and requires a high level of curiosity and open-mindedness on account of the weird and often speculative subject matter, which correlates with the personality types that tend toward liberalism.

John said...

Mathematicians are kooky. That's why. :)Mathematicians lean toward a platonic view of mathematics, which is kinda religious in a way. Perhaps they all secretly believe in the Mathematician.