Edited by Orlando Patterson and Ethan Fosse, this volume on culture and poverty features a wide range prominent scholars in economics, sociology, education, public policy, and the humanities, including Andrew Clarkwest (Mathematica Policy Research), Thomas DeLeire (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Rajeev Dhejia (NYU), Kathy Edin (Harvard), Amy E. Foran (Northwestern), Ron Ferguson (Harvard), Nathan Fosse (Harvard), David Hureau (Harvard), Simone Ispa-Landa (Northwestern), Alexandra Killewald (Mathematica Policy Research), Heather Koball (The Urban Institute), Joe Krupnick (Harvard), Erzo F.P. Luttmer (Dartmouth), Wayne Marshall (Brandeis University), Jody Miller (Rutgers), Josh Mitchell (The Urban Institute), Andrew Papachristos (UMass Amherst), Jacqueline Rivers (Harvard), James E. Rosenbaum (Northwestern), Janet Rosenbaum (Northwestern), Peter A. Rosenblatt (Johns Hopkins), Rob Sampson (Harvard), Tommie Shelby (Harvard), Pam Schuetz (Northwestern), Jennifer Stephan (Northwestern), Van Tran (University of Pennsylvania), Sudhir Venkatesh (Columbia), Chris Winship (Harvard), Robert G. Wood (Mathematica Policy Research), Queenie Zhu (Harvard), among others.

The political liberalism of professors, an important occupational group and anomaly according to traditional theories of class politics, has long puzzled sociologists. This article sheds new light on the subject by employing a two-step analytic procedure. In the first step, we assess the explanatory power of the main hypotheses proposed over the last half century to account for professors’ liberal views. To do so, we examine hypothesized predictors of the political gap between professors and other Americans using General Social Survey data pooled from 1974 to 2008. Results indicate that professors are more liberal than other Americans because a higher proportion possess advanced educational credentials, exhibit a disparity between their levels of education and income, identify as Jewish, non-religious, or non-theologically conservative Protestant, and express greater tolerance for controversial ideas. In the second step of our article, we develop a new theory of professors’ politics on the basis of these findings (though not directly testable with our data) that we think holds more explanatory promise than existing approaches and that sets an agenda for future research.