Parsing the 11:1 Democratic-to-Republican Ratio in Elite Colleges

The Democratic-to-Republican ratio in elite social science departments is 11:1. Some thoughts about the lopsidedness:

(1) Partisan lopsidedness drives ideological lopsidedness, not the other way around. Professors tend to be left because they are virtually all Democrats; that has been increasingly true since the New Deal. In the 1920s elite professors were beginning to become Democratic in response to funding mandates of John D. Rockefeller's General Education Board and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The New Deal cemented that trend. With the radicalization of the Democratic Party after the Vietnam War, universities increasingly moved to the left.

(2) There is an association between left ideology and Democratic affiliation. Conservatives are no longer an important force in the Democratic Party, but they have become an increasingly important force in the Republican Party. Professors, especially elite ones in the Northeast, became more radical and more intolerant as Democrats in the Democratic Party became more radical and more intolerant.

(3) The Democratic Party moved further to the left in tandem with professors' moving to the left, and the causal direction has to be hypothesized that DP-->professors, not the other way around; professors are only one of many interest groups that influence the Democrats.

(4) The faculty Democratic affiliation rate is highest in states with the greatest degree of state Democratic control.  A grater share of SUNY than Ohio State professors are Democratic.  That may be because professors who would otherwise live in a state become professors in that state (Ohio has more Republicans than New York), or it might be because the professors respond to incentives from the state capitals, or both.

If there is in-state hiring, that raises the question as to  why domestic hiring is local, but a large share of elite universities' faculties, as much as 25%, is foreign born. In other words, universities hire internationally before they hire Republicans. The ratio of foreign born professors to Republicans is probably also about 10:1.

(5) The D:R gap in party affiliation among the educated is about 1.6:1, roughly the same as for engineering professors in liberal arts colleges. The gap in party affiliation among history professors among elite research institutions is 35:1. The ratio among studies (gender studies, women's studies, Black studies, LGBTQ studies, and so on) professors in elite liberal arts colleges is 100:0. Few differences in the social sciences are of this magnitude, 35:1.6 or 22 times,or 35:0. These are apartheid rates.