Are physically strong and/or muscular men more likely to support right wing over left-wing politics?

Hard working people think that physical work is more important that office or abstract work (Idea men) . In the old days hardware was more important than software in computing worth. Now after Bill Gates we know better. $50 billion reasons why ideas and physical labour are both important.

Not where I live or see on TV. Right wing supporters tend to be bigger but not in shape, they are more often overweight and if muscular they are muscle bound. I see a lot of men that are in shape with good flexibility and agility that are supportive of civil liberties and civil equality.

And, the source is the Daily Mail, the paper of people who think they run the country. Notice the continued use of the term welfare state to describe left wing politics.

Maybe those who rely on physical strength are less fully evolved than those who rely on their wits.

Let’s see. Those liberal dens of iniquity, our nation’s Universities, are full of PhDs who are weak of mind and unable to do any work. Lucky duckies somehow just coasted through grad school and post doctoral work by sheer laziness. Yeah, sounds like the sort of nonsense that the PhDs hired by right-wing think tanks to demonize PhDs would be spreading.

I wonder if there were any considerations made for race in the study? Was it a mixed group or strong white males?

@Judi If they were predominantly Republicans, it’s strong (or weak) white males.

There are so many big blow-hards on each side of the political spectrum that I would be surprised if your hypothesis is correct. But even if you are correct then so what? It means nothing.

FYI: I’m a man who is 5’ 11” tall and weighs in at 142 pounds. I’m very introverted and physically weak. I’m also a conservative Republican.

Sure. All those muscles draw the blood away from their brain.

I go to the gym about five times a week. Today, I think I’ll go over to the area where all of that grunting and power-lifting go on and ask who has read Ayn Rand’s ‘Atlas Shrugged’, and see what happens.

Wish me luck….

Most of those kind of males are democrats in my area , farmers and manual laborers.

I’m a physically strong female and I’m liberal Republican if that helps your study.

I never would have guessed this might be true. There are a whole bunch of very muscular gay men on South Beach in Miami that I doubt are voting for the Republicans. Also, a whole bunch of unionized labor workers with muscles who tend to vote for the Democrats. The stereotype for Republicans are they are the big business guys, CEO’s, upper management, etc. Those men usually are not all pumped up with muscles working out 3 hours a day in the gym. Not that I think all Republicans are big business, certainly there are very wealthy Democrats. I am just talking about stereotypes out there.

I don’t think we can generalize about muscles and politicals.

Maybe there’s a difference between a big vs a muscular guy here, I’m not sure. The muscular guy had to work hard to build his form, unlike just a plain old ‘bigger’ guy who’s big by default/genetics.

Most bodybuilders that I knew wern’t liberals, though I knew plenty of ordinary ‘bigger’ guys who were.

After reading the article and taking a look at the original research paper, here’s something that I take to be a major design flaw in the study: it equates physical strength with upper body strength, and upper body strength with bicep size. What of the forearm, triceps, chest, shoulders, and upper back? These are all important components of upper body strength. And what of the legs, lower back, and abdomen? These are all important components of overall physical strength.

I lift weights four times a week, and I see plenty of people who never do anything other than bicep and chest exercises. Nor is this limited to my gym, as I know from comparing my experiences with other fitness enthusiasts from around the world. People with these sorts of habits are not strong, but rather acutely focused on particular parts of their body. If we’re just going by the size of someone’s biceps, then we’re going to get a lot of these partial-body exercisers and miss out on a lot of people who can break concrete with their feet.

Just to be clear, I am not judging people who are only interested in partial-body workouts. Everyone is free to train for whatever sort of body they want. My criticism is of the study and how it operationalizes strength. We cannot accurately assess whether there is a correlation between strength and political ideology, let alone what that relationship might be, so long as we are employing dubious definitions of “strength.” This is particularly true given the evolutionary hypothesis that Petersen and his fellow researchers believe their study supports.

This depends on what part of the country you live in. As far as a real relationship between the two there isn’t really any causality even though there may be some correlation.

@ETpro , grad school is not that hard and most of those PHD guys actually do have it made. Furthermore many have spent the bulk of their thinking lives thinking about their course of study and not other things like politics. They are no more wiser in politics than anyone else.

@zenvelo , So you are saying that people who are right wing don’t support civil liberties and civil equality!!?? I’m average not weak but not a jarhead and I’m a centerist. Most right wingers I know are more supportive of civil liberties than the left wingers I’m friends with.

@ARE_you_kidding_me If you look at the article, you’ll see that they studied people in three different countries and from different areas of those countries to prevent local trends from skewing their data. Of course the results would have been different if they had focused only on San Francisco or Jefferson City. That’s why they didn’t. So while there are plenty of problems with the study, I don’t think regional bias is one of them.

As for graduate school being easy, I can assure you it is not. And the vast majority of PhDs do not “have it made.” Don’t just focus on the lucky few who get prime spots at top universities. They are a fraction of the total number of PhD holders in the world, and cannot be taken as representative of the group as a whole. If one thing unites us, however, it is that we all work very hard to achieve our degrees.

In fact, the stress of it is why there is a roughly 50% dropout rate among graduate students overall. This number varies by program, of course, but my understanding is that 30% attrition is as low as it goes. I do agree with you that many graduate students are no better informed about politics than anyone else—though again, depending on course of study—but as far as I can tell, @ETpro never said otherwise.

Finally, I would suggest that all statists—left, right, and center—tend to be antagonistic to civil liberties. The only real difference is which civil liberties they disregard. And as the shared legacy of Bush and Obama demonstrates, executives have an overwhelming tendency to take power and never give it back, no matter what they said on the campaign trail.

@gondwanalon There you go. I’m 5 10½ and weigh 170. I work out every day, alternating between free-weight lifting on even days and a brutal Heavyhands routine using 15 pound dumbbells for 30 minutes on odd numbered days. I am very muscular and wiry, and I’m an extremely progressive Democrat. The so called “study” certainly did not predict either of us correctly.

@ETpro To be fair, though, it’s a correlation study. It does not posit strict causation. Petersen’s data set includes plenty of “strong” leftists and “weak” rightists—just not enough to undermine the trend. That said, I don’t doubt that the sample is unrepresentative (or even misrepresentative given the sorting criteria used). So your underlying point remains.

@ETpro I’m pretty sure that you could kick my butt in any physical activity right now. Good for you. You are living my dream. As you likely know health issues starting from this last January which resulted in heart surgery last month have turn my dream into a nightmare. I’m now clawing my way back to good heath and physical fitness. Many more years of good health and fitness to you!

@gondwanalon Yeah, I know, and that truly sucks. However far apart we may be on the political spectrum, my heart goes out to you and I sincerely hope you get healthy and strong enough to royally kick my ass soon. You live long and prosper, yourself.

@ETpro Thank you for your kind words. I admit that you have opened my mind a bit from reading your thoughtful political discussions. Thank you for that. You are very good at presenting opposite political views from me. Also I’m sure that you are aware that all of your physical strengths can quickly be taken away (by injury/illness). Last December my fitness was such that I was planning on running a qualifying time fro the Boston marathon at the P.F. Chang’s Rock n Roll marathon in Phoenix last January. My dream and years of hard work were all literally taken away from me in a heart beat as my heart sunk into constant atrial fibrillation. Oh well, c’est la vie!

@gondwanlon Hello, and congratulations for coming so close to qualifying for Boston. Runners like that are the Real Deal. Starting ten years ago, I ran three marathons and never came CLOSE to posting a time which would qualify for Boston, so I’ll always admire people who realistically can.

I just want to mention that you were very wise, after learning about your heart condition, to bow out of distance running, rather than just thinking, “aww, hell….I’ll go for it anyway”.

Back in 2006, I was trained and ready to run my fourth Disney World Marathon in Orlando, but came down with bronchitis (and as you said….“c’est la vie”). We had a hotel room reserved, so went down there anyway to cheer-on some friends who were running the half-marathon that weekend.

At the finish line, a 40-year-old guy (from Phoenix, as I recall), crossed the Finish Line and fell over dead. In the paper the following day, it said that he had a heart condition similar to (or maybe the same as) yours and knew it, so took up distance running to (he thought) strengthen his heart and be around for many years for the sake of his young children.

My point here is, sometimes it is better to be smart than to be bold…..

Good job.

@OneBadApple With 58 official full marathons finishes (Including 6 Boston’s) under my belt, I know very well how important it is to prepare properly. At the age of 50 (in 2001) I finished the Boston marathon in 3:23:24. I didn’t know it at the time but my heart was in constant A-fib the whole way. If my heart was beating normally I would have easily broke 3 hours. Anyway qualifying for Boston use to be too easy for me. It is moire of a challenge now due to a few recent running injuries. I’m now retired from marathons. They can really tear you up and are just not good for you. When I was in my 30’s I won 2 marathons overall and came in 2nd place overall 3 times running in sub-6 minutes per mile pace. I was ego driven and blindly defiant back then. Now have nothing to prove and am interested in maintaining general good health, fitness and enjoying life.

By the way, when I was in my strongest physical condition back in the 1970’s & 1980’s I was a liberal Democrat and voted for Jimmy Carter twice! HA!

@gondwanalon Holy crap, look who I’m giving running advice to !!

With all that you have accomplished, I’m guessing that it can’t be terribly difficult to hang up your running shoes at this point.

Anyway, I bow in your general direction….

@gondwanalon I can deeply sympathize with that, as I have mild but continual atrial fibrillation due to a minor, congenital defect in a heart valve. I take meds to keep it manages. Just before christmas last year, I has a sudden sharp pain in the right groin that would not go away. I didn’t know what it was till I noticed a bulge down there where there should be none. Pushing on that bulge, I could hear and feel my insides retreating back inside the torn muscles of my pubic cradle. I had an an inguinal hernia. It took months of agony to schedule surgery and months more to fully heal and get back to working out. So I am painfully aware of how quickly physical fitness, desirable as it is, can vanish in a puff of bad health.

It depends. Working in a coal mine in the 19th century, I’d say left wing.