Academia - How to continue with the “political attitudes of academics” question?
I think the question is a good fit for this site in its current state as it does not solicit mere opinions and tries not to incite political debates.
However, given the inevitable attraction of political debate, the question shall be equipped with a notice that all answers not providing a reference will be deleted without warning (and are fair game for not-an-answer flags) and the same applies to political discussion in the comments. As a rule of thumb, it should not be possible to deduce the political opinion of the author from a post.
This means that some existing answers, including upvoted ones, need to be deleted, but they are not valid answers to any question that is suited for our site (and thus “had it coming”). Regarding Maarten Buis’ highly upvoted answer in particular, it mainly builds upon the clarification of liberalism, which may be interesting, but not the point of our site.
The question, as it is currently phrased, just wants to know about the existence of "serious" research into the (alleged) phenomenon. Such a question is easily resolved with a google search, as there is an entire wiki page dedicated to the topic. This page is heavily sourced with thirty references. This includes several analyses of why the phenomenon occurs. This is more than sufficient for anyone to resolve the question immediately at hand.
I don't think questions which boil down to "provide me a list of things readily obtained by googling or even just wikipedia" is a suitable question anywhere on the Stack Exchange. It definitely demonstrates a lack of research effort, which is one of the default reasons for down-voting a question.
The attention the question has received is not because it asks a good question which admits a quality answer, but because it asks a trivially answered question on a contentious topic.
Another possibility is the following:
- Revert the question to the original state and keep it closed with the initial answers.
- Invite the OP to ask a new question according to the latest edited version.
- If the OP is not interested in asking the edited question, someone who edited it can go on asking.