ideology

I usually say to my students that accuse academia of having a liberal bias, “ok, I’ll give you that one, but the military, religious institutions, talk radio and corporate America have a conservative bias.” I might have to rethink the last one after this graph from Adam Bonica.

It shows a wide spread of ideology by members of corporate boards based on their giving patterns. While this doesn’t necessarily prove that corporate America is ideologically neutral, it does suggest that members of corporate boards aren’t agents of the right. This might say something about the lack of serious distinction between our two political parties when it comes to issues of corprorate governance — but that for another blog post.

What do you think this says about corporate America’s ideological views?

HT: The Monkey Cage

From Chris Orr at TNR’s The Plank

Scientific proof that it is no longer possible to satirize the GOP:

This study investigated biased message processing of political satire in The Colbert Report and the influence of political ideology on perceptions of Stephen Colbert. Results indicate that political ideology influences biased processing of ambiguous political messages and source in late-night comedy. Using data from an experiment (N = 332), we found that individual-level political ideology significantly predicted perceptions of Colbert’s political ideology. Additionally, there was no significant difference between the groups in thinking Colbert was funny, but conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements.

So when I’m pretending to be Pat Buchanan or Noam Chomsky in class to get a response from students, the ideological ones think I’m serious?