Profession by Political Affiliation

[GMDino]

(04-03-2016, 10:41 AM)bfine32 Wrote: I posted this in another thread; however, I didn't want to derail and felt many that may not be overly concerned with that thread (Cruz) might find this of interest:

http://verdantlabs.com/politics_of_professions/

I was surpised to discover that my chosen profession (HR Manager0 is occupied by more Liberals than Conservatives. But in general it pretty much backs up assumptions I have made.

Interesting.  Not too many surprises.

I'd be interested in how they came up with it though.

While searching I found this one:

http://www.businessinsider.com/charts-show-the-political-bias-of-each-profession-2014-11

Which used campaign donations.  And even they admit that the "center" average isn't really bipartisan:

Quote:That basic summary shows the average ideology scores for each profession. However, the "purple" professions that appear in the middle of the spectrum aren't really bipartisan. They're actually extremely polarized: Rather than having a large number of donors with middle of the road politics, they're largely split, with a big liberal group on one side and a similarly sized large conservative group on the other.

It looks like your post came from the same basic methodology:

http://verdantlabs.com/blog/2015/06/02/politics-of-professions/

Quote:Here's the math


This analysis is possible because the Federal Election Commission (FEC) provides data that reveals who made what contribution to which political campaign, when they contributed, how much they contributed, what they call their occupation, and other info. We aggregated that data and applied a simple formula for each occupation:

      Dem % for occupation = # of people who primarily gave to Demstotal Dem + Rep contributors

A caveat with this methodology is that we assume Democrats and Republicans contribute at a similar rate to each other within each profession. In other words, we assume that a 75 / 25 split of contributions by Democratic teachers vs. Republican teachers translates to a 75 / 25 split of Democrat vs. Republican teachers in the general populace. If it's actually the case that, say, Republican teachers are looser with their wallets and have a higher per capita contribution rate, our ratio for that profession will be a bit skewed. Thus, the ratios should be viewed as approximate.

For example if I took a survey where I work there would be 1 democrat and 10 republicans.  But if I looked at campaign donations only I'd see two democrats and two republicans because one boss donates to friends in both parties and most of the guys on the shop do not donate at all.

That doesn't mean the link isn't an accurate approximation...just that I wonder how close it really is vs people who care about their politics donate more than people who may be more in the middle of the spectrum and don't donate at all.