Friday, August 24, 2007

Progressives Read More

Our friends over at ThinkProgress brought this up earlier in the week, but it turns out that we're smarter than conservatives -- or at least we read more. A full 34 percent of conservatives haven't picked up a book in the last year, while that number for liberals was only about 22 percent. The average number of books per year was kind of a wash, eight for conservatives versus nine for liberals (although I wonder what the distribution of Dan Brown books is).

This reminds me of what I learned in my wonderful voting behavior class in college. The people at either end of the reading scale tend to not change their minds very much about which party or candidate they support. This is because if you read a lot, you tend to either read things you agree with or immediately discount the things you don't agree with. Those that don't read a lot or are generally uninformed about public affairs tend to have a sort of blind loyalty to one party. The people that change their mind lie somewhere in the middle.

Cross-posted at campusprogress.org/blog.

1 comment:

trevor said...

"Those that don't read a lot or are generally uninformed about public affairs tend to have a sort of blind loyalty to one party. The people that change their mind lie somewhere in the middle."

College?

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