Jobs and Votes

Andrew Gelman posts these fascinating graphs showing the trend in Republican voting in several occupational categories compared to the national average.

Clearly, running a business makes you a Republican. What if everyone had to do quarterly estimated taxes? But Republicans have made big gains with both skilled and non-skilled wage-earners too. But nothing compares to the professionals — doctors, lawyers, etc. — rush to the Democrats. What explains that?

What’s interesting is that there has been such a big difference in the trend for different kinds of relatively wealthy people. I suspect it has something to do with differences in which compensation, regulation and taxation are experienced. (Do doctors, lawyers, etc. feel more like they’re collecting rents at levels relatively detached from the application of effort?) Or maybe some kind of personality variable that predicts conservatism vs. liberalism is increasingly predicting occupational choice. Can we learn more about this, please?

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Andrew Gelman 1 year ago 1 point
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Will,

People hate talked about some of these things, for example the idea that many professionals feel more like employees than free agents. For example, if you're a doctor you might be more likely to be annoyed at insurance companies than at the government. But I don't know any systematic research on this. Also, not all the professionals, owners, etc., are wealthy.

Regarding your questions about personality variables predicting liberalism or conservatism, check out the work of John Jost. I'm not sure if they've connected these to occupation.

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Tim Lee 1 year ago 1 point
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As someone who is experiencing the joys of paying quarterly estimated taxes for the first time this year, I'm definitely sympathetic to the idea that it makes people more anti-government.

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http://www.angryblog.org/

KJ 1 year ago 1 point
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Agreed. I just moved from a relatively low tax bracket to a high one. When I started my job on top of my wife's I put together a spreadsheet that, after factoring in taxes, childcare, and other things, showed I'd take home about 40% of my new salary.

Damn you government! A weaker minded liberal might have lost his tax and spend ways.

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Dr X 1 year ago 1 point
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I'm aware of nothing that would suggest that any relationship between personality (e.g. Holland occupational categories or the big five personality factors) and occupational choice has changed significantly in the past twenty years.

Here’s another thought. Maybe I missed it, but I didn't see any indication that gender was controlled in these findings? While women have always outnumbered men in teaching and nursing, more traditionally male-dominated professions have seen a tremendous rise in the percentage of women in the ranks over the past twenty years. I wonder if this might account for some, or all, of the shift toward a preference for Democrats among professionals.

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http://drx.typepad.com

Scott Wood 1 year ago 1 point
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I think that changing gender composition might say something, although you'd have to compare the gender composition of all of the other characteristics.

Two other comments:

To me, "professional" has always seemed the closest thing to "academic" without being actually in the academy, (or semi-academy of think tanks). Has the distribution of academic voting changed over the same period?

Also, I would have thought that an ever increasing percentage of "professionals" are professional in guiding people through the arcane intricacies of regulations. I would expect those folks to favor pro-regulation politicians.

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Scott Wood 1 year ago 1 point
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Oops: I meant "gender composition of all of the other categories."

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Ned 1 year ago 1 point
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For some occupations (college professors, medical doctors), risk aversion comes to mind - if you are so risk averse that it's worth to you to struggle a few years to get a tenure, or you chose medicine because of job security it provides, you are more likely to vote for Democrats (big government, social safety net etc.).

Incidentally, this also explains why median US voter is to the right of median EU voters (US was founded by risk-takers, people who left their old lives behind), and the difference between men and women (men are risk-takers).

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Jim’s Blog » Blog Archive » voting anti capitalist
April 13, 2008 at 5:43 pm

[...] “The Fly Bottle” reports on the relationship between voting patterns and employment. [...]

Jobs and Votes

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