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There has been debate this week about how many libertarians there are. The answer is: it depends on how you measure it and how you define libertarian. The overwhelming body of literature, however, using a variety of different methods and different definitions, suggests that libertarians comprise about 10-20% of the population, but may range from 7-22%.

Furthermore, if one imposes the same level of ideological consistency on liberals, conservatives, and communitarians/populists that many do on libertarians, these groups too comprise similar shares of the population.

In this post I provide a brief overview of different methods academics have used to identify libertarians and what they found. Most methods start from the premise that libertarians are economically conservative and socially liberal. Despite this, different studies find fairly different results. What accounts for the difference?

1) First, people use different definitions of libertarians

2) Second, they use different questions in their analysis to identify libertarians

3) Third, they use very different statistical methods.

Lets start with a few questions: How do you define a libertarian? Is there one concrete libertarian position on every policy issue?

What is the libertarian position on abortion? Is there one? What is the libertarian position on Social Security? Must a libertarian support abolishing the program, or might a libertarian support private accounts, or means testing, or sending it to the states instead? A researcher will find fewer libertarians in the electorate if they demand that libertarians support abolishing Social Security rather than means testing or privatizing it.

Further, why are libertarians expected to conform to an ideological litmus test but conservatives and liberals are not? For instance, what is the conservative position on Social Security? Is there one? When researchers use rigid ideological definitions of liberals and conservatives, they too make up similar shares of the population as libertarians. Thus, as political scientist Jason Weeden has noted, researchers have to make fairly arbitrary decisions about where the cut-off points should be for the libertarian, liberal, or conservative position. This pre-judgement strongly determines how many libertarians researchers will find.

Next, did researchers simply ask people if they identify as libertarian, or did they ask them public policy questions (a better method)? If the latter, how many issue questions did they ask? Then, what questions did they ask?

For instance, what questions are used to determine if someone is liberal on social issues? Did the researcher ask survey takers about legalizing marijuana or did the researcher ask about affirmative action for women in the workplace instead? Libertarians will answer these questions very differently and that will impact the number of libertarians researchers find.

While there is no perfect method, the fact that academics using a variety of different questions, definitions, and statistical techniques still find that the number is somewhere between 7-22% gives us some idea that the number of libertarians is considerably larger than 0.

Next, I give a brief overview of the scholarly research on the estimated share of libertarians, conservatives, liberals, and communitarians in the American electorate. I organize their findings by methods used starting with most empirically rigorous:

Ask people to answer a series of questions on a variety of policy topics and input their responses into a statistical algorithm

In theses studies, researchers ask survey respondents a variety of issue questions on economic and social/cultural issues. Then, they input peoples answers into a statistical clustering technique and allow an algorithm to find the number of libertarians. This is arguably the strongest method to identify libertarians.

Ask people to answer a series of questions on a variety of policy topics and plot their average responses on a 2-dimensional plot

In these studies, researchers 1) average responses to multiple questions on economics and then 2) average responses to multiple questions on social/cultural/identity/lifestyle issues. They then take the two averaged scores to plot respondents on a 2-dimensional graph (Economic Issues by Social Issues).

Ask people to answer a question about economic policy and a question about social policy

While not as rigorous as asking people multiple questions, this is another quick way to observe the diversity of ideological opinion in surveys.

Ask people if they identify as libertarian and know what the word means

The Pew Research Center found that 11% of Americans agree that the word libertarian describes me well and know libertarians emphasize individual freedom by limiting the role of government.

Ask people if they identify as socially liberal and fiscally conservative, an oft-used definition of libertarianism

A 2011 Reason-Rupe poll found that 8% of Americans said they were conservative on economic issues and also liberal on social issues. But the same method found 9% identified as liberal on both social and economic issues, 2% identified as liberal on economic issues and conservative on social issues, and 31% identified as conservative on both social and economic issues. They remaining respondents were somewhere in the middle. These results are consistent with polls from Rasmussen, and Gallup which finds a public preference for the word conservative over liberal. This means many people who endorse liberal policy are inclined to self-identify as moderate or conservative.

Conclusions

In sum, the overwhelming body of empirical evidence suggests that libertarians share of the electorate is likely somewhere between 10-20% and the conservative and liberal shares arent that much greater. Libertarians exist, quite a lot, but you have to know what youre looking for.

Excerpt from:
How Many Libertarians Are There? The Answer Depends on the Method You Use - Cato Institute (blog)