These are the occupations on the opposite extremes of the liberal-conservative spectrum based on their campaign contributions according to research by Adam Bonica. As Andy put it: the conventional wisdom isn’t always wrong, even after using sophisticated statistical methods and hard data. See here for more on what campaign contributions can tell us about the ideology of PACs and candidates.
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Nice idea but terrible, terrrible graph. A simple dotplot (with occupations listed in order of their average “conservatism” of contributions, however this is measured) would be much better–at least for conveying the information. Better still might be a scatterplot of avg $ contributed vs. avg ideology.
See here for some better graphs on ideologically aligned and divided industries.
Erik: Nice. But he seems to be mixing categories. “Professors” is a job category. The others are industries. Perhaps “Professors” should be replaced by “Higher education.” And then the category would not just be professors but all people who work in this industry. Similarly, “Civil Servants and Public Officials” should be “Government,” no? And does this include public school teachers, prison guards, etc?
But of course then this raises the question of where are primary and secondary education in this picture. Not to mention other industries such as transportation, food and beverages, health, …
All of this is not so simple. As we say to the funding organizations, further research is needed!
Andrew: agreed. Further complicating things is that for research questions related to lobbying influence you would want to know about industries but if you want to make more sociological statements about ideology, then profession may well be the more appropriate category.
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