Sunday, March 21, 2010

Maybe the right is just louder...

I was surprised by this chart of political contributions and occupations.  Farmers seem to be split more evenly than I expected.

Combined with the procedure described the previous post, this allows for interesting comparisons of ideological giving patterns across industries/professions.As a first cut, I recovered ideal point estimates for the 3125 PACs and 131,000 individual contributors that gave to two or more unique candidates during the 2007-2008 election cycle and scaled them using the IMWA procedure. The figure below ranks a subset of occupations from left to right based on the mean ideal point of the members of each occupation. As a point of reference, the occupation ideal points are imposed over the density plots for all Democratic and Republican candidates.
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On the other hand, there aren't too many to the right of us, either.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You seem to be sliding (falling) to the left. Are you celebrating the Health Care vote today? I suspect you are. Just tell all us ugly conservatives how we pay for it.

John Phipps said...

anon:

Thank you for reading. I will respond in detail on a post soon.

Anonymous said...

Political contributions also depends on who is in power or who is believed to come into power after a particular election. Ds run the house, senate and look likely to take over the presidency then contributions will tend left. Rs running things contributions will run right. Need to look at these statistics over many election cycles to see any trend. More could be said about a particular group if they contributed the same way whoever is in power. Lobbyist and business types (or people who want something from the government) tend to give more to the winners or people in power.