The U.S. General Social Survey is fairly substantial data trawl that looks for a variety of demographic and opinion data from US residents. Science literacy and political views–or at least proxies for these–are among the pieces of information sought out. There is a general stereotype that liberals tend to be more scientifically literate and more deferential towards scientific ideologies and institutions than conservatives. Speaking very broadly, this can be corroborated by the survey data. But the liberal/conservative dichotomy takes a one-dimensional view of political ideology. What about when we look at it in 2-D? A few guys decided to look at how the data broke down if you split the conservative group into two: those who are both social and fiscal conservatives, and those who are fiscal conservatives but not social conservatives. The latter group in US political terms would be classified as libertarian. Interestingly, in many categories, the libertarians, when stacked against the liberals, tend to have higher scores both on literacy and “optimism”. The results table provides a fun little perusal–at least I think so.
Again, all of this is based on extremely simplified gauges of beliefs and knowledge, and the differences between groups, while statically significant, obviously does not establish any substantially universal characteristics. But this is a good example about how breaking up complex ideological descriptors of a group like “conservative/liberal” can equal a fairly substantial shift in general traits identifiable for a group.