The authors seem to make the mistake of conflating the two national parties with the political ideologies they purport to represent. They claim the vast majority of "neuropundits" are liberal, and back this up by detailing the differences in party affiliation, more are Democrats. But this is disingenuous. The fact of the matter is both party platforms contain a mix of liberal and conservative policies, and it makes sense that scientists would gravitate toward the Democratic mix.

With some exceptions, the Democrats tend toward conservative (almost libertarian) political ideology with respect to certain social issues like privacy and freedom of speech. The government should stay out of your bedroom and it can't tell you not to burn the flag. Obviously in terms of many programs, however, the Dems are liberal and favor gov't spending and intervention (say, education). The Republican party has come to represent the opposite. The government can tell you who you can't sleep with but private enterprise should take care of everything that involves paying people to do things.

I'm a scientist, and I tend to be okay with the idea of gov't spending, so I'd probably lean Dem no matter what. I know many scientists who agree with me about spending, and I also know many who are very wary of large gov't. But almost all scientists I know value objective thought and free discourse above all else. This isn't so much a political issue as that this is what lies at the core of modern science. And so while they may or may not agree with the Dems on how many programs the gov't should oversee, I would say they overwhelmingly agree that the gov't shouldn't tell you what is and isn't moral. And I suspect this, more than anything else explains the skew in the the party affiliation of scientists.

It also doesn't help that the Republican Party has decided that having an education, particularly from a well-known university, is something that should be mocked unless you barely passed your coursework.

It may be the case that having such a political skew amongst scientist, and university staff in general, is not a good thing. But it's not fair to dismiss this as some kind of liberal university conspiracy without at least examining the possibility of confounding variables.