The most Democratic and Republican industries in America

We’re used to thinking of red and blue states, but it might be even more accurate to think of red and blue jobs. Research by Adam Bonica of Stanford University shows that industries and occupations have clear correlations with political ideology. In some industries, occupation is an even stronger indicator of political belief than where a person lives or their economic status.

The graphic above is from Bonica’s 2012 paper, in which he uses a dataset on tens of millions of campaign contributions to measure donor ideology during the 2004-2010 election cycles. Drawing on datasets made available by the Federal Election Commission, the Center for Responsive Politics, the Sunlight Foundation and others, Bonica measures donor ideology using the political orientation of the candidate that receives that donation as a proxy. Higher bars to the left of the graph indicate a liberal affiliation, while those to the right show a conservative affiliation.

Left-aligned industries are in the top row. Academia, Hollywood, print media and the tech industry (Google and Facebook) all heavily skew right (i.e., have a long tail on the right side) and are actually located to the left of the mean Democratic candidate on the ideological spectrum, according to Bonica. More conservative industries are shown along the bottom — oil, gas, coal, automotive, mining and construction.