I've had several posts about the connection between tastes in reading and political views. The basic conclusion is that people with more "sophisticated" tastes tend to be more liberal. I recently ran across another relevant survey (from 1999) which asked people if they could name the authors of the following books: The Cat in the Hat, Huckleberry Finn, The Shining, The Old Man and the Sea, The Firm, A Tale of Two Cities, A Farewell to Arms, The Great Gatsby, Moby Dick, and Crossings (I list them in order of the percent who gave the correct answer). The mean was about three correct answers (it was open-ended, not multiple choice).
The few political questions in the survey were not of much general interest, so I'll just look at ideological self-rating (very liberal to very conservative). Among people who got 0-2 right (about 30% of the sample), 45% said they were conservative, 37% moderate, and 17% liberal; among people who got 6-10 right (about 20%), it was 27%, 48%, 25%. If you regress ideology on age, sex, race, Hispanic status, education, and "knowledge" (number of correct answers), the estimate for knowledge was positive and statistically significant (.054 with a standard error of .014). The estimate for education (1=no HS diploma... 4=college graduate) was .01 and not significantly different from zero.
Why would knowledge of the names of authors be associated with ideological self-rating? One possibility is that some people understood the terms in a non-political sense, e. g., "liberal" as meaning something like broad-minded. Incorrect (or unconventional) understandings are more common among less educated people, so this would suggest that the relation between knowledge and ideology would be stronger among the less educated, but if anything it was stronger among more educated people. So I think that there really is a connection between knowledge and political views (people who knew more authors were also more likely to say they were Democrats, although the connection was weaker). This doesn't mean that this knowledge affects political views; rather the general curiosity that makes people learn and remember the names could also make them more critical of tradition.
PS: This is the 15th anniversary of my first post. I didn't really plan to keep the blog running this long, but coming up with new material has been easier than I expected.
[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]
