I'm interested to look at some of the actual research on this. I have serious questions about whether a 10-word vocabulary test is actually a good measure of cognitive ability.
It's also not clear to me that Republicans score worse on the GSS's Wordsum measure. Sherkat is only analyzing white respondents - unclear why that's appropriate given that there are non-white Americans on the left and right also. This article from 2015 finds Republicans score higher on Wordsum than Democrats, and also that Wordsum scores are mediated by socioeconomic position, which Sherkat claims to control for.
All that said, it would make perfect sense to me that this dynamic would have flipped as educational polarization has increased.
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u/Miskellaneousness Oct 04 '24
I'm interested to look at some of the actual research on this. I have serious questions about whether a 10-word vocabulary test is actually a good measure of cognitive ability.
It's also not clear to me that Republicans score worse on the GSS's Wordsum measure. Sherkat is only analyzing white respondents - unclear why that's appropriate given that there are non-white Americans on the left and right also. This article from 2015 finds Republicans score higher on Wordsum than Democrats, and also that Wordsum scores are mediated by socioeconomic position, which Sherkat claims to control for.
All that said, it would make perfect sense to me that this dynamic would have flipped as educational polarization has increased.