After seeing this post up on how high information levels and education may lead to political polarization, I wanted to revisit the GSS data on political moderation and independence in light of educational attainment and intelligence. For the later I used the proxy of a score on a vocabulary test which has a 0.70 correlation with general intelligence. My question was this: what are the different effects of intelligence and education on ideology and partisanship? To answer this question I looked at two response variables, POLVIEWS and PARTYID, which measure ideology from very liberal to very conservative and partisanship from strong Democrat to strong Republican. I amalgamated "leaners" so that in the middle I had moderates and independents left. For the vocab test I used WORDSUM. The scores have a value from 0 to 10, out of 10. I combined the 0-4 interval because the sample size there was small. ...
Political moderation, education, and intelligence
Explore the effects of intelligence and education on political ideology and partisanship through analysis of vocabulary test scores.
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