Your career may be a telltale sign of your political tendencies, according to a surprising new study on the link between different occupations and Democratic/Republican leanings. The findings are compiled in the chart below:
To create this graphic, the company Verdant Labs compiled data from the Federal Election Commission and then collected the job titles of different political donors. Founder Mark Edmond noted his surprise that no one had ever performed such an analysis before.
“It took some work to process and present it, but the raw data is sitting right there, available from the U.S. government via the Federal Election Commission’s website,” he said.
The researchers were also surprised by how polarized some professions are, and also puzzled at why, for example, an air traffic controller is more likely to be a Democrat than a pilot. Why is nearly the entire entertainment industry Democratic, while the majority of surgeons are Republican?
The study is filled with many other interesting findings: Truck drivers are 11 times more likely to be Republicans than taxi drivers, prosecutors are 17 times more likely to be Republicans than public defenders, and economics professors are 7 times more likely to be Republicans than English professors.
Yet Edmond also noted how “unsurprising” some of the other results were. “Most of us probably already have the notion that, say, coal miners lean to the right and environmentalists to the left, and it’s amusing to see how much that’s confirmed by the numbers,” he remarked.
How does your career line up with your political tendencies?