“Do Ethicists and Political Philosophers Vote More Often Than Other Professors?”, 2010 (; backlinks; similar):
If philosophical moral reflection improves moral behavior, one might expect ethics professors to behave morally better than socially similar non-ethicists.
Under the assumption that forms of political engagement such as voting have moral worth, we looked at the rate at which a sample of professional ethicists—and political philosophers as a subgroup of ethicists—voted in 8 years’ worth of elections. We compared ethicists’ and political philosophers’ voting rates with the voting rates of 3 other groups: philosophers not specializing in ethics, political scientists, and a comparison group of professors specializing in neither philosophy nor political science.
All groups voted at about the same rate, except for the political scientists, who voted about 10–15% more often. On the face of it, this finding conflicts with the expectation that ethicists will behave more responsibly than non-ethicists. [supplement]