Recently I posted some graphs showing that liberal Democrats have a similar income profile to the general population, while conservative Republicans are more concentrated in the higher half of the income range.
Some people conjectured that the patterns might depend on whether people are thinking of liberalism/conservative as representing social or economic issues. So Daniel and I redid the calculations, looking separately at three different measures of survey respondents’ ideology as derived from the 2000 Annenberg survey:
– self-positioning on the liberal/conservative scale
– position on a scale of economic ideology (based on combining the responses to several survey questions; details in Red State, Blue State)
– position on a social ideology scale (based on combining several other survey responses).
This gave us three 3×3 grids of graphs, one for each of the three ideology scales. This was too much to display, so Daniel and I reduced the data as follows: For each ideology measure, we created five categories of people:
– Liberal Democrats
– Moderate Democrats or Liberal Independents
– Neutral (these included Conservative Democrats, Moderate Independence, and Liberal Republicans)
– Moderate Republicans or Conservative Independents
– Conservative Republicans
This five-point scale takes you from one extreme of ideological partisanship to the other, and with only five categories instead of nine, it’s easier to display.
Here’s what we found (click on the graph to make it larger):
There are some differences between the different measures of ideology, but the take-home point for me is that the patterns are basically consistent: liberal Democrats by any measure are pretty well distributed across the income scale, and conservative Republicans are more concentrated among the upper incomes.