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mgin comments on 2013 Survey Results - Less Wrong
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I find it odd that 66.2% of LWers are "liberal" or "socialist" but only 13.8% of LWers consider themselves affiliated with the Democrat party. Can anybody explain this?
I was wondering about this word "liberal" -- when Will Wilkinson says he's a liberal, that means something entirely different from what you're describing. So, is it possible we have many right liberals here?
As somebody who most definitely identified as liberal, but did not affiliate with the Democrats:
Your question reveals a hidden assumption:
There is no "Democrat party" in (almost) every other country in the world apart from yours* ;)
*(I am assuming you come from the USA based on this underlying assumption)
This is easily tested by comparing against the country of origin question. As it turns out, a bit over half of LW comes from the US. Wikipedia claims that about 33% of Americans identify as Democrats (vs. 28% Republican and 38% other or independent), so we'd expect about 17.5% of LW to identify as Democratic if the base rate applied, up to 35% if every American LWer identifying as liberal or socialist also identified as Democratic.
Bearing this in mind, it seems that party members identified as such really are underrepresented here.
Cool stuff. Thanks for going and checking against the numbers :)
I'd interpret “affiliated” as ‘card-carrying’. If anything, it surprises me as high, but ISTR that in the US you need to be a registered member of a party to vote for their primaries, which would explain that.
It's probably meant to be interpreted as "registered". In the US, registering for a political party has significance beyond signaling affiliation, so it's fairly common: it allows you, in most states, to vote in your party's primary election (which determines the candidates sent by that party to the general election, which everyone can vote in). A few states choose their candidates with party caucuses, though, and California at one point allowed open primaries, though there were some questions about the constitutionality of that move and I don't remember how they were resolved.
Roughly two-thirds of Americans are registered with one of the two major parties.
Do you have a source for that, or is this the same statistic you quoted from wikipedia about "identification"?
I think only half of eligible voters are even registered to vote, but I'd expect almost all registered voters to register in a party. Young people, like LW users, are less likely to be registered.
I honestly don't remember, but I was probably trying to point toward the Wikipedia stats, in which case I shouldn't have used "registered". A quick search for registration percentages turns up this, which cites slightly under 60% registration in the most recent election (it's been going slowly down over time; was apparently just over 70% in the late Sixties). I haven't been able to turn up party-specific registration figures; I suspect but cannot prove that you're underestimating the number of Americans registered as independent.
The democrat party is only socialist in the republican party's eyes.
First reason: by European standards, I imagine the Democrat party is still quite conservative. Median voter theorem and all that. Second reason: "affiliated" probably implies more endorsement than "it's not quite as bad as the other party". It could also be both of these together.