Political Bias on Campus: Experimental Evidence

Abstract

Does political ideology affect how students judge situations? Although students who are liberal or conservative might both show political bias, they differ in their views of how the world works. This experiment conducted with 739 students manipulates ideology in a scenario about a student government regulating a biased student newspaper. Results showed symmetry in some but not all items, suggesting that bias may have different causal mechanisms depending on ideology.

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to the POLS Lab at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte for making possible the survey experiment used in this manuscript.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Data Availability Statement

Datasets and Stata code for replicating the analyses appearing in this paper are available at the Harvard Dataverse https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/HOJKEL.

Notes

¹ The document Professional Competency Areas for Student Affairs Educators, a collaboration between NASPA and ACPA, describes these competencies in detail and can be found on the NASPA website.