The US congress is also an intelligence meritocracy

Higher IQ -> higher representation in congress

S. Lant had a good idea over on Twitter:

Fellow poaster Jerome Sneed Democrat had a second good idea:

There was that IQ study that showed that Episcopalians were the one religious group with higher IQ than Jews.

Indeed there was! It was Helmuth Nyborg's 2009 study.

I compiled the congress data from Pew from 117th, 118th, and 119th congress to stabilize the numbers slightly (didn't help much because people rarely change). I also threw in a replication based on another Pew research survey that measured intelligence in the form of science knowledge. Grouping the 1000+ Christian variaties into the Pew religious categories in the congress table was done by regex best of my (quick) ability. Then we get this table:

• IQ data from NLSY 1997, only for the Whites, whereas congress can be non-white. It's a mismatch but I don't want to download NLSY and redo this.

• Sci knowledge from my study of Pew research's 2015 survey. They had questions about own religion and family religion in childhood.

The correlations:

Beware the sample sizes were often bad (e.g. 11 Hindus with science scores) and the overlap in religious categories was not optimal either, and some groups are aggregates ("Christian"). Anyway, if we use the older larger sample size for Whites:

And with the partial replication:

p = 0.055, because of Buddhists (finally, something to blame them for: not being worldly enough to enter politics in sufficient numbers), p = 0.009 without them.

I'm pretty sure that if one compiled some more data to reduce the sampling error (e.g. NLSY79, GSS, ANES, other Pew studies, older congress compositions), one could improve upon these results. Looks like the US congress is also roughly speaking a meritocracy. Recall that in our study of the ABCD study, we also found this result using polygenic scores and measured IQ, though the groups don't match up so well with the congress groups.