Liberals don't Care More

Science vs. Hanania

Richard Hanania claims, in his post “Everything is Liberal”, which I have recently debunked, that liberals dominate institutions (wrong) because they “care more” about politics.

A lot could be said about how vague this is and how “care amount” is an unsuitable exogenous variable for a model.

But essentially, Hanania defines liberal-style political action as “caring” while ignoring conservative-style action. Liberals protest more, but conservatives are more involved in local politics and do more on other measures. When everything balances out, as I showed in my last article on Hanania, liberals and conservatives seem to care just about as much.

But what if you just ask liberals and conservatives how much they care directly?

Liberals don’t care more about politics.

I measured wokeness using an original Gaussian wokeness metric. It looks like this so far:

Here are how it correlates with everything:

The general factor is based off of the sum of the questions about gays, feminism, and race.

I asked people how much they care about politics, ranging from far below average to far above average. As you can see, wokeness does not predict caring more about politics. While the woke protest more, this is consistent with our analysis from part 1, showing that when you average “caring” across political behavior, liberals don’t care more.