Conservatives are as smart as liberals

One "urban legend" which is in common circulation among my friends is that liberals are smarter than conservatives. From my own personal experience this seems plausible, and I doubt I'm the only one as evidenced by the furious speed at which the "Bush voting states have lower IQs" meme spread around the blogosphere several years ago. But is this true? I've seen enough data to suggest that this really isn't so, and my psychologist friends have told me the biggest predictor of liberalism isn't IQ, but a strong tendency toward "openness" on personal tests.But I just couldn't leave it alone...I decided to look at the General Social Survey and see what it tells us about political ideology and intelligence. The GSS has a variable, POLVIEWS, where people are classified as extremely liberal to extremely conservative where those states are equivalent on a 1 to 7 scale. In other words, if you are 4 you are a moderate, 1 extremely liberal, and 7 extremely conservative. The WORDSUM variable just measures the number of correct answers on a vocabulary test of 10 words. 0 means you're semi-sentient and 10 means you have a good vocabulary.Instead of producing garish bar graphs I thought I would just look at correlations. Though political ideology is categorical here, it is nicely translated into a numerical scale where rank order exists. The "higher" numbers are more conservative, the "lower" ones more liberal. For vocabulary there is a natural numerical scale. The question: do political ideology and vocabulary track each other at all? Yes, but hardly. The raw results are below, but I don't really think that the story ends here, so read on.