POLITICAL SCIENCE

Students at the College, the Law School and the Graduate School of Design submitted the most responses to the online poll, which was open to students last week. Of those schools, the Graduate School of Design was the most liberal leaning, with 88 percent in favor of Obama. At the Law School, 79 percent supported Obama, and at the College, where more than 10 percent of the student body took the survey, 73 percent favored the President.

While the Law School and the College answered similarly in some respects, Law School students showed significantly greater support for Elizabeth Warren, a professor at the Law School, in her Senate race against Republican incumbent Scott Brown. At the Law School, 81.5 percent said that they would vote for the professor; in the College, Warren received 74 percent of the votes.

Among the concentrations in the College, economics and philosophy students were the most conservative; those concentrators were nearly evenly split between supporting Obama and Romney.

Government professor Arthur P. Spirling, who teaches questions on political science research methods, questioned whether that phenomenon sprung from selection or treatment. Does studying economics or philosophy make a student conservative or do more conservative students choose to study economics and philosophy?

—Staff writer Julia K. Dean can be reached at juliadean@college.harvard.edu.