Inside Higher Ed reports this morning on yet another study showing that the academy leans to the left — Narrow-Tent Democrats and Fringe Others: The Policy Views of Social Science Professors, by Daniel B. Klein (Department of Economics, George Mason University) & Charlotta Stern (Institute for Social Research, Stockholm University):

The latest study is based on surveys conducted in 2003 of members of various disciplinary associations. On the question of political affiliation, the survey found the following breakdown of Democrats to Republicans:

• Anthropologists and sociologists — 21.1:1
• Political and legal philosophers — 9.1:1
• Historians — 8.5:1
• Political scientists — 5.6:1
• Economists — 2.9:1

[L]eaders in some of the disciplines studied say that the study overstates and oversimplifies the role of party affiliation in academic life…

Troy Duster, past president of the American Sociological Association, said he was not surprised that Democrats far outnumber Republicans in his discipline. But he said that the suggestion that “some kind of conspiracy” was at work simply was not true….Sociologists and anthropologists, by their training, “look at issues of social stratification and social inequality” and do so from the perspective that inequality is not a good thing. People who spend their professional lives focused on inequalities are probably likely to have “a more progressive orientation,” he said, than people whose professional lives focus on other issues.

Here is the abstract of the paper:

This paper provides copious results from a 2003 survey of academics. We analyze the responses of 1208 academics from six scholarly associations (in anthropology, economics, history, legal and political philosophy, political science, and sociology) with regard to their views on 18 policy issues. The issues include economic regulations, personal-choice restrictions, and military action abroad. We find that the academics overwhelmingly vote Democratic and that the Democratic dominance has increased significantly since 1970. A multivariate analysis shows strongly that Republican scholars are more likely to land outside of academia. On the 18 policy questions, the Democratic-voter responses have much less variation than do the Republicans. The left has a narrow tent. The Democratic and Republican policy views of academics are somewhat in line with the ideal types, except that across the board both groups are simply more statist than the ideal types might suggest. Regarding disciplinary consensus, we find that the discipline with least consensus is economics. We do a cluster analysis, and the mathematical technique sorts the respondents into groups that nicely correspond to familiar ideological categories: establishment left, progressive, conservative, and libertarian. The conservative group and the libertarian group are equal in size (35 individuals, each), suggesting that academics who depart from the leftist ranks are as likely to be libertarian as conservative. We also find that conservatives are closer to the establishment left than they are to the libertarians.