New research finds a persistent and growing leftward tilt in the social sciences
A new study published in Theory and Society suggests that published research in the social sciences has leaned consistently to the political left for more than six decades. The findings indicate that this leftward tilt has grown stronger over time, particularly regarding social and cultural issues. This provides evidence that the academic publishing environment has grown increasingly uniform in its political orientation. Past surveys have consistently shown that college and university faculty in the United States tend to identify with left-leaning political views. James Manzi, a researcher at the University of Oxford, wanted to know if this political preference actually appears in the published academic work itself. Prior to recent technological advances, analyzing the political content of hundreds of thousands of scientific texts was too expensive and time-consuming for human readers to accomplish. Manzi decided to use artificial intelligence to read and code these massive amounts of text to see how academic outputs have shifted over a 65-year period. Looking at published output provides a stable way to see what disciplines consider important and how …
