Which Side Are the Faculty on?: Professors, the 2019–2020 Democratic Presidential Primary, and the Politics of Redistribution in the United States

ABSTRACT Existing scholarship on US professors' political views focuses overwhelmingly on their attitudes toward social and cultural issues rather than economic ones. This study explores American academics' perspectives on redistributive economic policy by analyzing Federal Elections Commission data from the 2019–2020 Democratic Party presidential primary, which include records of campaign contributions from 83,334 faculty and more than 6.5 million non‐faculty. Given the unprecedented diversity of economic ideology among the 2019–2020 Democratic presidential primary candidates and the fact that an overwhelming majority of professors in the US support Democrats, these data are uniquely useful in gauging the extent of academics' support for government efforts to downwardly redistribute income and wealth. Moreover, since contributions measure actual political behavior, they offer a more reliable proxy for policy preferences than self‐reported survey data. The donations reveal that, in general, professors gravitate more readily than the rest of the population toward candidates who aggressively support downward redistribution. This dynamic, however, derives entirely from academics' disproportionate support for technocratically minded candidates like Elizabeth Warren. In fact, professors are significantly less likely than those in other occupations to give to self‐described “socialist” politicians, such as Bernie Sanders, who propose achieving redistributionist objectives by way of popular mass movements.