摘要 :
The political liberalism of professors—an important occupational group and anomaly according to traditional theories of class politics—has long puzzled sociologists. This article sheds new light on the subject by employing a two...
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The political liberalism of professors—an important occupational group and anomaly according to traditional theories of class politics—has long puzzled sociologists. This article sheds new light on the subject by employing a two-step analytic procedure. In the first step, we assess the explanatory power of the main hypotheses proposed over the last half century to account for professors’ liberal views. To do so, we examine hypothesized predictors of the political gap between professors and other Americans using General Social Survey data pooled from 1974–2008. Results indicate that professors are more liberal than other Americans because a higher proportion possess advanced educational credentials, exhibit a disparity between their levels of education and income, identify as Jewish, non-religious, or non-theologically conservative Protestant, and express greater tolerance for controversial ideas. In the second step of our article, we develop a new theory of professors’ politics on the basis of these findings (though not directly testable with our data) that we think holds more explanatory promise than existing approaches and that sets an agenda for future research.
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摘要 :
Sociologists and demographers often use Lexis diagrams to visualize temporal data. However, the traditional Lexis plot arranges the data in a matrix of right triangles, with age on the vertical axis and period on the horizontal ax...
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Sociologists and demographers often use Lexis diagrams to visualize temporal data. However, the traditional Lexis plot arranges the data in a matrix of right triangles, with age on the vertical axis and period on the horizontal axis. This representation of the data subordinates cohort to an off-diagonal of unequal length. Not only does this violate the proportionality principle of effective statistical graphics, but it implicitly treats cohort as a residual or epiphenomenal dimension and makes it difficult to compare variation within and across cohorts. As an alternative, the author introduces the Ryder plot, a novel graphical tool that displays cohort, age, and period data as a grid of equilateral triangles, thereby providing an unbiased representation of all three dimensions and facilitating the analysis of intra- and intercohort variability. The author uses Ryder plots to chart the rise and fall of verbal ability in the United States, revealing two epochs of social change across three centuries of cohorts.
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