Partisan registration of faculty in flagship colleges

ABSTRACT

This is a study of 12,372 professors in 116 colleges that are the four top US News-ranked colleges in each of 30 states that collect political registration data. We devised the sample to highlight variation in registration arising from individual, college-level, and state-level characteristics. We find an overall Democratic-to-Republican registration ratio of 8.5:1, but age, gender, field, region, and religious affiliation modify the ratios of Democrats to Republicans. This is the first application of logistical modeling to archival faculty registration data. The logistical models mostly confirm the univariate findings but reveal that state- and college-level dummy variables retain their significance when individual, field, and college rank are controlled. Organizational cultures of academic institutions and state political cultures along with better-understood influences of personal and institutional characteristics may influence the propensity of colleges to engage in or deviate from preponderately Democratic hiring.

KEYWORDS:

• Voter registration
• academia
• higher education
• ideology
• political parties
• professors
• politics

JEL:

• CODES: D73
• H75
• I21

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The 20 states that do not disclose registration data are Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin, and Virginia. See Aristotle Inc. (2020).