ABSTRACT
Libertarians are a minority. According to Pew Research, as of 2014, about 11 percent of Americans both identified as libertarian and knew what the term meant. Doing a cluster analysis on American political views, Pew found that only 5 percent of the sampled population held consistently libertarian views (Kiley 2014). To put that in perspective, libertarians in the United States are a political coalition that is somewhere between the proportion of Asians (4.7 percent) and the proportion of African-Americans (12.2 percent) in the total population. Amongst philosophers, the picture is roughly the same. According to a recent survey of philosophers, 9.9 percent identified themselves as libertarian (Bourget and Chalmers 2014). According to an older survey of members of the American Economics Association, about 8 percent of economists identify as supporters of free market principles (Klein and Stern 2007 ). So both amongst laypeople and people who have some expertise in philosophical or economic reasoning, the libertarian position is nowhere close to the dominant. While one can likely identify faults with the surveys, it’s unlikely that they are all off by an order of magnitude. Libertarians look like they are somewhere around 10 percent of the population, and advanced training in relevant disciplines doesn’t seem to move the needle much. That advanced training might help self-described libertarians become more consistent in their beliefs, but, at least on its face, it doesn’t seem to convert people toward or away from libertarianism.
