A matter of degree

 Matthew Yglesias has a piece pointing out that overwhelming majorities of students at "elite" universities favor the left.  Is this due to something specific to elite universities, or are they just one end of a continuum running from elite colleges through colleges at different levels of prestige until we get to people who don't go to college?  David French seems to favor the first hypothesis--he points to class and geographic differences in who applies to elite universities:  "we’re left with two Americas living two very different educational realities. At Harvard, Joe Biden wins almost 90 percent, and Donald Trump finishes third. At the University of Tennessee? Two weeks ago I sat in the student section with my son as the students led an entire stadium in a sing-song chant, 'F**k Joe Biden.'"  Yglesias seems to favors the second:  "it does seem to be true that the people who are best at school are on the left politically."  But neither one presents any systematic data. 

Most surveys don't ask people where they went to college, or how well they did in college, so you have to take a less direct approach.  One way is to look at the maps of precinct-level voting compiled by the New York Times.  You find a lot of college towns in Republican states are islands of blue--places like Morgantown WV, Vermillion SD, Manhattan KS.  They aren't as heavily Democratic as places like Princeton or Ithaca, but are definitely different from the surrounding areas.  But many of the votes in those towns may be from faculty or staff, or just people who like living in college towns, so they don't necessarily tell use about college students or college-educated people more generally.  A few surveys ask about cultural tastes, but most of those don't ask about politics.  In a post based on a Gallup poll from 1990, I noted that people who had read more "serious" authors were more likely to be Democrats and liberals.  Now I'll discuss a Pew survey from 2003 that asked about a wider variety of political issues.  This survey also asked people how they felt about a numbers of musicians, entertainers, and leisure activities.  A factor analysis suggested that four of them--"scientific shows and magazines," "Thai or Vietnamese food," "reading books," and "Mozart" formed a group.  I made an index adding together ratings (on a four-point scale from dislike very much to like very much) of those four.  The mean is 11 with a standard deviation of 2.7.  

 If you regress vote in 2000 on that index, the estimated chance of supporting a candidate on the left (Gore or Nader) increases by 1.5%, with a t-ratio of 2.9.  If you add race, gender, city size, age, income, and education as controls, the estimate is 1.7% with a t-ratio of 3.3.  The magnitude of the estimated effect was comparable to the estimated effect of education itself (the gap between college graduates and others was about 6.5%, controlling for the same variables).  That is, people with what you could call more intellectual tastes were more likely to vote for a candidate of the left, even controlling for education.  So the evidence seems to favor the second interpretation--the politics of elite universities are an extreme case of a more general tendency.  Why?  In my next post, I'll look at the association of "intellectual" tastes with opinions on some issues.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]