Political ideology predicts involvement in crime

- Self-reported political ideology is hypothesized to be related to criminal conduct.
- Data from a large, longitudinal dataset containing self-reported measures of ideology and criminal conduct were analyzed.
- Liberal political ideology was significantly associated with crime cross-sectionally and longitudinally.
- Subgroup analyses confirmed the association for whites and for females.

Political ideology represents an imperfect yet important indicator of a host of personality traits and cognitive preferences. These preferences, in turn, seemingly propel liberals and conservatives towards divergent life-course experiences. Criminal behavior represents one particular domain of conduct where differences rooted in political ideology may exist. Using a national dataset, we test whether and to what extent political ideology is predictive of self-reported criminal behavior. Our results show that self-identified political ideology is monotonically related to criminal conduct cross-sectionally and prospectively and that liberals self-report more criminal conduct than do conservatives. We discuss potential causal mechanisms relating political ideology to individual conduct.