Political Ideological Distance between Sociology Students and their Instructors: The Effects of Students’ Perceptions

Abstract

College instructors, as a group, are more liberal than the general US population. The causes and consequences of this incongruence have been the focus of a considerable amount of discourse. However, little scholarly attention has been devoted to understanding if and how political ideologies shape students’ classroom experiences. We advance this area of inquiry by assessing empirically how sociology students’ perceived ideological distance from graduate student instructors affects multiple outcomes, ranging from classroom behaviors to course evaluations. Our findings suggest that students’ perceptions of political ideological distance from their instructors, regardless of the direction of that distance, negatively affect seven out of the eight outcomes we evaluate. We submit that shared concerns about student learning should prompt increased scholarly attention to the role of political ideologies in the college classroom.

Keywords

• political ideology
• sociology instructors
• student-faculty differences