Injustice by the Numbers

[Valin]

Library of Law and Liberty:

Ken Masugi

August 13, 2014

 

Tim Groseclose has confirmed that he is one of America’s leading conservative commentators with the publication of Cheating: An Insider’s Report on the Use of Race in Admissions at UCLA. It may seem an odd role for Groseclose, for six years the Marvin Hoffenberg Chair of American Politics at UCLA and a quantitative social scientist whose innovations are widely recognized (see the list of publications on his website). He has achieved academic plaudits while openly declaring his Rush Limbaugh-listening and other rightwing proclivities.

 

To fully appreciate Cheating, we should start by discussing Left Turn, Groseclose’s earlier popular work about liberal media bias. Such critiques (as well as exposées of race preference in academia) are legion, but he devises formal models to measure the extent of bias or discrimination that enables all sorts of instructive comparisons. He establishes PQ measurements (political bias) of counties, cities, politicians, and media outlets. His website even contains instructions on how to calculate your own PQ.

 

Among his provocative comparisons, Groseclose argues that one of the most conservative areas in America, a gun-toting Mormon locale (which, coincidentally, Edward Banfield studied in his now 60-year-old classic, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society), is by his analysis less conservative than the Beltway is liberal. Using Groseclose’s framework, we can see that a leftist politician could perceive herself as less leftist than she actually is, especially after we have compared her with a Tea Party Republican who is less conservative than she thinks. Given their environments, the media, and colleagues, extreme liberals can come to regard themselves as centrists.

 

(Snip)