Over the past six decades, approximately 90 percent of academic research in the social sciences has leaned left politically, according to research published in March by a University of Oxford scholar.
In an interview published this week, sociology doctoral candidate James Manzi told The Chronicle of Higher Education that his paper addresses “a gap in the research.” While the skew of professors’ political ideologies is widely evidenced, the effects of those beliefs on their research are less so, he said.
His study, “The ideological orientation of academic social science research 1960–2024,” was published in the journal Theory and Society in March.
Using an AI large language model, Manzi analyzed the political leanings of approximately 180,300 abstracts of academic papers in 11 social science fields, according to the report.
The fields are anthropology, communications, criminology, economics, ethnic studies, gender studies, political science, psychology, public administration, public health, and sociology.
Each paper received a score “based on a fixed political-ideology scale ranging from far right to far left, with the views of contemporary political figures, media outlets, and think tanks as reference points,” the report states:
Using that process, Manzi found that about 90 percent of those abstracts leaned left.
He also determined that “the mean political stance” of the 11 disciplines he examined — anthropology, communications, criminology, economics, ethnic studies, gender studies, political science, psychology, public administration, public health, and sociology — was left of center for every year examined. According to the paper, all disciplines showed leftward movement between the years 1990 and 2024, fields with “greater leftward orientation generally displayed greater ideological homogeneity,” and “sociocultural content was more consistently left-leaning than economic content, and that gap widened over time.”
Unwilling to speculate about why these fields lean so heavily to one side, Manzi simply pointed out that his findings align “exactly, really, with what prior research shows.”
His interview with The Chronicle continues:
[The Chronicle:] There are a couple other findings I wanted to ask about. One being: “Disciplines with greater leftward orientation generally displayed greater ideological homogeneity.” I’m conscious of the fact that you don’t want to get further beyond the research and say more than what it shows. But I write about and think about the ideological health of these disciplines. I’m wondering if there’s any larger conclusions — or even larger questions — that you think people should think about based on that specific finding.
[Manzi:] Definitely a further question that I think people should think about, is, Why does that happen? What causes that pattern to exist? One of the things I really try and emphasize in the discussion section of the paper is: There’s nothing here that describes the causal mechanism. There’s nothing in this paper that is dispositive evidence of bias.
I could imagine all kinds of mechanisms for why gender-studies papers, to take an example, tend to be both further left of center and show lower heterogeneity than, say, economics. Hypothetically, it could be, ‘You have closed-minded people, and they’re not really being extra rigorous.’ That’s possible. It could be true.
But you could as easily imagine that it could be — well, the topic of study is different. One could make the argument that there are so many more findings to be made there that are considered to be more left of center. And economics is, hypothetically, covering a much broader range of topics, and the things to be discovered out in the world have a more heterogeneous set of outcomes.
Read the full interview at The Chronicle.
