We know that Americans are increasingly sorting themselves by political affiliation into friendships, even into neighborhoods. Something similar seems to be happening with doctors and their various specialties.
New data show that, in certain medical fields, large majorities of physicians tend to share the political leanings of their colleagues, and a study suggests ideology could affect some treatment recommendations. In surgery, anesthesiology and urology, for example, around two-thirds of doctors who have registered a political affiliation are Republicans. In infectious disease medicine, psychiatry and pediatrics, more than two-thirds are Democrats.
The conclusions are drawn from data compiled by researchers at Yale. They joined two large public data sets, one listing every doctor in the United States and another containing the party registration of every voter in 29 states.
Eitan Hersh, an assistant professor of political science, and Dr. Matthew Goldenberg, an assistant professor of psychiatry (guess his party!), shared their data with The Upshot. Using their numbers, we found that more than half of all doctors with party registration identify as Democrats. But the partisanship of physicians is not evenly distributed throughout the fields of medical practice.
The new research is the first to directly measure the political leanings of a large sample of all doctors. Earlier research — using surveys of physicians and medical students, and looking at doctors’ campaign contributions — has reached somewhat similar conclusions. What we found is that though doctors, over all, are roughly split between the parties, some specialties have developed distinct political preferences.
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No False Enthusiasm October 8, 2016
Follow the money…NFE
Rick Lyles October 8, 2016
The lead graphic (bar chart) is terrible…makes it look like all surgeons are R (almost completely red) when, in fact, it’s about…
Robert Haar October 8, 2016
Growing up democratic and becoming a surgeon certainly changed the way I look at the world and the political landscape. Most doctors that I…
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It’s possible that the experience of being, say, an infectious disease physician, who treats a lot of drug addicts with hepatitis C, might make a young physician more likely to align herself with Democratic candidates who support a social safety net. But it’s also possible that the differences resulted from some initial sorting by medical students as they were choosing their fields.
Dr. Ron Ackermann, the director of the institute for public health and medicine at Northwestern University, says he remembers his experience rotating through the specialties when he was in medical school. “You’ll be on a team that’s psychiatry, and a month later you’re on general surgery, and the culture is extraordinarily different,” he said. “It’s just sort of a feeling of whether you’re comfortable or not. At the end, most students have a strong feeling of where they want to gravitate.”
Dr. Ackermann, who trained as an internist, helped conduct a survey of physicians on the idea of a single-payer health care system, a liberal policy goal, in 2008. His work found similar trends of support and opposition clustering in certain specialties. (A co-author of that study is Aaron Carroll, an Indiana University medical school professor and an Upshot contributor.)
There is no way to know exactly why certain medical specialties attract Democrats or Republicans. But researchers who have studied the politics of physicians offered a few theories.
One explanation could be money. Doctors tend to earn very high salaries compared with average Americans, but the highest-paid doctors earn many times as much as those in the lower-paying specialties. The fields with higher average salaries tended to contain more doctors who were Republican, while the comparatively lower-paying fields were more popular among Democrats. That matches with national data, which show that, for people with a given level of education, richer ones are more likely to lean Republican (possibly because of a concern over the liberal policy goal of taxing the wealthiest at a higher rate).