1 Evaluating Claims of Bias In Academia : A

In a recent paper, Klein and Western (2004) provide evidence on the political affiliations of faculty at UC Berkeley and Stanford, finding that Democrats far outnumber Republicans. This is an important contribution to debates about political beliefs in academia due to the effort to systematically these authors make to quantify these beliefs via party registration. In this comment, we make two arguments. First, we argue that the evidence presented by Klein and Western is less suggestive of ideological lopsidedness than they claim. This is so both because party affiliation is not informative about the intensity or degree of moderation or extremism of beliefs and because the incompleteness of the party identification strategy they employ is compatible with many faculty being independent or apathetic. Further, we argue that there are good a priori reasons to regard whatever degree of lopsidedness is present as due to self-selection, not hostility towards conservatives. Ethan B. Cohen-Cole Department of Economics University of Wisconsin 1180 Observatory Drive Madison, WI 53706-1393 [email protected] Steven N. Durlauf Department of Economics University of Wisconsin 1180 Observatory Drive Madison, WI 53706-1393 [email protected]