The Voting Behavior of American Political Scientists: the 1980 Presidential Election

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A SMALL FRACTION of the voting studies conducted during the past three decades focused on the electoral behavior of American political scientists. In 1959, Henry Turner, Charles McClintock, and Charles Spaulding used survey methods to explore the partisan orientations of a random sample of members of the American Political Science Association (APSA). Their findings (Turner, McClintock, and Spaulding, 1963: 650-65) sustained the conventional wisdom that their subjects were (74 percent) Democrats and led them to discount the influence of family and other customary explanatory variables of partisan choice. Instead, they concluded that the partisan preference of political scientists was largely and upon their evaluations of the policies and leadership of the party and on the information and attitudes gained in the political science profession (ibid., 665). A decade later (1970), Turner and Carl Hetrick replicated and extended the 1959 study. As before, the Association proved to be largely a 'one-party' organization (ibid., 374). Seventy-three percent of their respondents were Democrats (virtually the same percentage as before). These were also more politically active than Republican colleagues who, in turn, were more involved than independents. Turner and Hetrick presented additional evidence that adult socialization was more important than childhood socialization in the formation of partisan loyalties and political attitudes. In particular, they pointed to the influence of professional knowledge and the influence of colleagues. They concluded that political scientists perceived marked differences in the policies of the two parties and exercised conscious value judgments in making partisan choices (ibid., 374). In short, the political behavior of political scientists appeared more rational to them than did that of the general electorate. Articles by Everett Carll Ladd and Seymour Martin Lipset added depth to these findings. Two were based upon the 1969 Carnegie Commission Survey of students, faculty, and administrators. Responding to charges of conservatism within the discipline, they demonstrated that American political scientists were pervasively liberal in comparison with the general electorate and other academic groups (Ladd and Lipset, 1971: 135-44). In a subsequent essay, they argued that the belief systems of