This from the New York Times -- a left-wing newspaper (at least on the US's scale).
Liberals push for generous government spending to help the neediest people at home and abroad. Yet when it comes to individual contributions to charitable causes, liberals are cheapskates.
Arthur Brooks, the author of a book on donors to charity, “Who Really Cares,” cites data that households headed by conservatives give 30 percent more to charity than households headed by liberals. A study by Google found an even greater disproportion: average annual contributions reported by conservatives were almost double those of liberals. ((Note from Mike: this is not because they typically have more money -- on average the conservative households have less.))
Other research has reached similar conclusions. The “generosity index” from the Catalogue for Philanthropy typically finds that Republican states are the most likely to give to nonprofits, while Northeastern states are least likely to do so.
The upshot is that Democrats, who speak passionately about the hungry and homeless, personally fork over less money to charity than Republicans.
“When I started doing research on charity,” Mr. Brooks wrote, “I expected to find that political liberals — who, I believed, genuinely cared more about others than conservatives did — would turn out to be the most privately charitable people. So when my early findings led me to the opposite conclusion, I assumed I had made some sort of technical error. I re-ran analyses. I got new data. Nothing worked. In the end, I had no option but to change my views.”
Something similar is true internationally. European countries seem to show more compassion than America in providing safety nets for the poor, and they give far more humanitarian foreign aid per capita than the United States does. But as individuals, Europeans are far less charitable than Americans.Americans give sums to charity equivalent to 1.67 percent of G.N.P. The British are second, with 0.73 percent, while the stingiest people on the list are the French, at 0.14 percent.
The article goes on to point out that charitable giving can't quite be equated to giving to the poor, because the numbers include donations to churches (popular with American conservatives) and donations to educational and cultural institutions (schools, museums, theatres, popular with liberals) so it's difficult to tell. But to me, just the willingness to give money away is an interesting statistic... and ...
Mr. Brooks says that if measuring by the percentage of income given, conservatives are more generous than liberals even to secular causes.
Conservatives also appear to be more generous than liberals in nonfinancial ways. People in conservative states are considerably more likely to volunteer for good causes, and conservatives give blood more often. If liberals and moderates gave blood as often as conservatives, Mr. Brooks said, the American blood supply would increase by 45 percent.
Of course, given the economic pinch these days, charity isn’t on the top of anyone’s agenda. Yet the financial ability to contribute to charity, and the willingness to do so, are strikingly unrelated. Amazingly, the working poor, who have the least resources, somehow manage to be more generous as a percentage of income than the middle class.
