Study: Conservatives and liberals are equally charitable, but they give to different charities

Study: Conservatives and liberals are equally charitable, but they give to different charities: Leaving aside the fraught question of whether charitable donations and taxes serve the same question, is this really true? Do conservatives give more away? According to a new study by two MIT political scientists, not really.

Michele Margolis and Michael Sances note that Brooks’ conclusion comes from a dataset that doesn’t really ask how conservative people are politically so much as how conservative they are socially. Using a dataset which uses more traditional questions to test political beliefs – the General Social Survey – they found no statistically significant relationship between peoples’ political beliefs, or their partisan affiliation, and their charitable giving level. And this held at the state level too. There was no significant relationship between a state’s level of giving and the vote share that Bush received in that state in 2004.