Tag Archives: Republicans

Science and policymakers

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While the study announced here is US-centriic, it’s almost certain that lessons can be drawn from those of us in other jurisdictions. From an April 22, 2025 Northwestern University news release by Shanice Harris (also received via email), Note: Links have been removed,

Societal challenges, from climate change to public health crises to advancements in artificial intelligence, have been intrinsically linked with scientific progress for generations. But as politics become more polarized, the role of science in law making has become increasingly contested. 

A new Northwestern study analyzing congressional committee reports, committee hearings and policy documents from think tanks around the country, found that even though policy citations of science have increased steadily over the last 25 years, Democrats have a propensity to cite impactful science more often than their Republican counterparts in policymaking.

The research team, led by the Kellogg School of Management’s Dashun Wang and Alexander Furnas, observed systematic differences in the amount, content and character of science data cited in policy by partisan factions in the U.S.

Wang is the Kellogg Chair of Technology and a professor of management and organizations at Kellogg and of industrial engineering and management sciences at McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, director of Kellogg’s Center for Science of Science and Innovation (CSSI), Northwestern Innovation Institute and co-director of Kellogg’s Ryan Institute on Complexity. Furnas is a research assistant professor at Kellogg CSSI.

“Despite recent instances of bipartisan support for science, our study uncovered partisan differences in the use of science that highlight a profound tension at the nexus of science and politics,” Wang said.

Regardless of political party, the use of science in policymaking has increased over the past 25 years. “In society today, many of the societal challenges are intrinsically linked with the latest scientific developments we’ve seen,” Wang said. “It’s welcoming to see that policy makers and the policy documents they generate increasingly rely on scientific evidence.”

Who cites science, when and how?

Science may be more embraced in the public sphere now versus then, but when researchers analyzed policy documents created by left-leaning politicians versus their Republican counterparts, there was a clear disparity. They observed systematic differences in the amount, content and character of science they used.

“We found that policy documents from Democratic-controlled committees are nearly 1.8 times more likely to cite science than those from Republican-controlled committees,” Wang said. “When it comes to think tanks, left-leaning ones are five times as likely to cite science than those produced by right-leaning ones.”

Researchers noticed that under Democratic-control the House Energy and Commerce committee cited science on abortion, drunk driving, youth and e-cigarettes, energy production and infrastructure, gun violence and mental health. When Republicans controlled the committee they were more likely to cite science about health care insurance costs, air pollution, opioids or high-school athletic injuries. But even when they are focusing on the same policy or issue, they don’t cite the same science.

“All the papers that are cited are by construction partisan, but we found that only 5 to 6% of scientific citations are shared by Republicans and Democrats,” Wang said. “Meaning there is much less bipartisan engagement with the scientific literature than expected. They don’t seem to cite the same papers.”

Trust is often understood as the reason that science may or may not be cited in policy making. Researchers found that the marked decline in conservatives’ trust in science in recent decades, a result of the rising political polarization in the U.S., may be threatening confidence in science.

“Science is supposed to be seen as a politically neutral, trusted source of information,” Wang said. “But as our study suggests, different political parties cite different scientific sources to back their claims. That raises the question of whether science is being used selectively to support preexisting beliefs or agendas.”

Breaking down the numbers

The researchers analyzed all congressional committee reports since 1995, committee hearings since 2001 and 191,118 policy documents published by 121 U.S.-based ideological think tanks after 1999. They also looked at a large-scale publication and citation database that captures 122 million scientific publications across disciplines. Linking the two gave them an opportunity to examine the partisan differences in the use of science in policy.

Think tanks — groups of experts that provide advice or ideas on economic and political issues — were an important dataset for the researchers to look at when analyzing where and what type of science was cited.

“Think tanks are an understudied area that have an extremely profound influence in the U.S., unlike other democracies,” Furnas said. “The policy production, idea generation and building of evidence happens in these private institutions. It was important to bring them into the conversation along with formal government institutions.”

Researchers also surveyed 3,500 U.S. political elites and public servants, asking how much they trust or distrust science, regardless of political party. They found 96% of Democratic elites either completely or partially trust scientists to disseminate unbiased knowledge, compared to 63.7% of Republican elites.

Real-world implications today

The researchers are continuing to explore how political dynamics shape the relationship between science and policymaking — including how evidence is produced, interpreted, and used across different institutional settings.

There are also real-world implications when scientific evidence is questioned. Furnas said the current tariff and economic strife is a blatant example.

“There’s economic science about what the impacts of tariffs are. There is a general economist consensus view on U.S. trade policy that is evidence based,” Furnas said. “But because different partisan actors have different commitments, that’s when we might see people cherry picking scientific fact. That’s how you get policy uncertainty.”

In addition to Wang and Furnas, co-authors of the study include Timothy M. LaPira of James Madison University [Virginia, US].

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Partisan disparities in the use of science in policy; Documents from Congress and think tanks reflect differences in how science is cited by Alexander C. Furnas, Timothy M. LaPira, and Dashun Wang. Science 24 Apr 2025 Vol 388, Issue 6745 pp. 362-367 DOI: 10.1126/science.adt9895

This paper is behind a paywall.

Curiosity may not kill the cat but, in science, it might be an antidote to partisanship

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I haven’t stumbled across anything from the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School in years so before moving onto their latest news, here’s more about the project,

The Cultural Cognition Project is a group of scholars interested in studying how cultural values shape public risk perceptions and related policy beliefs. Cultural cognition refers to the tendency of individuals to conform their beliefs about disputed matters of fact (e.g., whether global warming is a serious threat; whether the death penalty deters murder; whether gun control makes society more safe or less) to values that define their cultural identities.Project members are using the methods of various disciplines — including social psychology, anthropology, communications, and political science — to chart the impact of this phenomenon and to identify the mechanisms through which it operates. The Project also has an explicit normative objective: to identify processes of democratic decisionmaking by which society can resolve culturally grounded differences in belief in a manner that is both congenial to persons of diverse cultural outlooks and consistent with sound public policymaking.

It’s nice to catch up with some of the project’s latest work, from a Jan. 26, 2017 Yale University news release (also on EurekAlert),

Disputes over science-related policy issues such as climate change or fracking often seem as intractable as other politically charged debates. But in science, at least, simple curiosity might help bridge that partisan divide, according to new research.

In a study slated for publication in the journal Advances in Political Psychology, a Yale-led research team found that people who are curious about science are less polarized in their views on contentious issues than less-curious peers.

In an experiment, they found out why: Science-curious individuals are more willing to engage with surprising information that runs counter to their political predispositions.

“It’s a well-established finding that most people prefer to read or otherwise be exposed to information that fits rather than challenges their political preconceptions,” said research team leader Dan Kahan, Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law and professor of psychology at Yale Law School. “This is called the echo-chamber effect.”

But science-curious individuals are more likely to venture out of that chamber, he said.

“When they are offered the choice to read news articles that support their views or challenge them on the basis of new evidence, science-curious individuals opt for the challenging information,” Kahan said. “For them, surprising pieces of evidence are bright shiny objects — they can’t help but grab at them.”

Kahan and other social scientists previously have shown that information based on scientific evidence can actually intensify — rather than moderate — political polarization on contentious topics such as gun control, climate change, fracking, or the safety of certain vaccines. The new study, which assessed science knowledge among subjects, reiterates the gaping divide separating how conservatives and liberals view science.

Republicans and Democrats with limited knowledge of science were equally likely to agree or disagree with the statement that “there is solid evidence that global warming is caused by human activity. However, the most science-literate conservatives were much more likely to disagree with the statement than less-knowledgeable peers. The most knowledgeable liberals almost universally agreed with the statement.

“Whatever measure of critical reasoning we used, we always observed this depressing pattern: The members of the public most able to make sense of scientific evidence are in fact the most polarized,” Kahan said.

But knowledge of science, and curiosity about science, are not the same thing, the study shows.

The team became interested in curiosity because of its ongoing collaborative research project to improve public engagement with science documentaries involving the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School, the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, and Tangled Bank Studios at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

They noticed that the curious — those who sought out science stories for personal pleasure — not only were more interested in viewing science films on a variety of topics but also did not display political polarization associated with contentious science issues.

The new study found, for instance, that a much higher percentage of curious liberals and conservatives chose to read stories that ran counter to their political beliefs than did their non-curious peers.

“As their science curiosity goes up, the polarizing effects of higher science comprehension dissipate, and people move the same direction on contentious policies like climate change and fracking,” Kahan said.

It is unclear whether curiosity applied to other controversial issues can minimize the partisan rancor that infects other areas of society. But Kahan believes that the curious from both sides of the political and cultural divide should make good ambassadors to the more doctrinaire members of their own groups.

“Politically curious people are a resource who can promote enlightened self-government by sharing scientific information they are naturally inclined to learn and share,” he said.

Here’s my standard link to and citation for the paper,

Science Curiosity and Political Information Processing by Dan M. Kahan, Asheley R Landrum, Katie Carpenter, Laura Helft, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson. Political Psychology Volume 38, Issue Supplement S1 February 2017 Pages 179–199 DOI: 10.1111/pops.12396View First published: 26 January 2017

This paper is open and it can also be accessed here.

I last mentioned Kahan and The Cultural Cognition Project in an April 10, 2014 posting (scroll down about 45% of the way) about responsible science.

Wars (such as they are) on science

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I hinted in a Jan. 27, 2017 posting (scroll down abotu 15% of the way) that advice from Canadians with regard to an ‘American war on science’ might not be such a good idea. It seems that John Dupuis (mentioned in the Jan. 27, 2017 posting) has yet more advice for our neighbours to the south in his Feb. 5, 2017 posting (on the Confessions of a Science Librarian blog; Note: A link has been removed),

My advice? Don’t bring a test tube to a Bunsen burner fight. Mobilize, protest, form partnerships, wrote op-eds and blog posts and books and articles, speak about science at every public event you get a chance, run for office, help out someone who’s a science supporter run for office.

Don’t want your science to be seen as political or for your “objectivity” to be compromised? Too late, the other side made it political while you weren’t looking. And you’re the only one that thinks you’re objective. What difference will it make?

Don’t worry about changing the other side’s mind. Worry about mobilizing and energizing your side so they’ll turn out to protest and vote and send letters and all those other good things.

Worried that you will ruin your reputation and that when the good guys come back into power your “objectivity” will be forever compromised? Worry first about getting the good guys back in power. They will understand what you went through and why you had to mobilize. And they never thought your were “objective” to begin with.

Proof? The Canadian experience. After all, even the Guardian wants to talk about How science helped to swing the Canadian election? Two or four years from now, you want them to be writing articles about how science swung the US mid-term or presidential elections.

Dupuis goes on to offer a good set of links to articles about the Canadian experience written for media outlets from across the world.

The thing is, Stephen Harper is not Donald Trump. So, all this Canadian experience may not be as helpful as we or our neighbours to the south might like.

This Feb . 6, 2017 article by Daniel Engber for Slate.com gives a perspective that I think has been missed in this ‘Canadian’ discussion about the latest US ‘war on science’ (Note: Link have been removed),

An army of advocates for science will march on Washington, D.C. on April 22, according to a press release out last Thursday. The show of force aims to “draw attention to dangerous trends in the politicization of science,” the organizers say, citing “threats to the scientific community” and the need to “safeguard” researchers from a menacing regime. If Donald Trump plans to escalate his apparent assault on scientific values, then let him be on notice: Science will fight back.

We’ve been through this before. Casting opposition to a sitting president as resistance to a “war on science” likely helped progressives 10 or 15 years ago, when George W. Bush alienated voters with his apparent disrespect for climate science and embryonic stem-cell research (among other fields of study). The Bush administration’s meddling in research and disregard for expertise turned out to be a weakness, as the historian Daniel Sarewitz described in an insightful essay from 2009. Who could really argue with the free pursuit of knowledge? Democratic challengers made a weapon of their support for scientific progress: “Americans deserve a president who believes in science,” said John Kerry during the 2004 campaign. “We will end the Bush administration’s war on science, restore scientific integrity and return to evidence-based decision-making,” the Democratic Party platform stated four years later.

…

But what had been a sharp-edged political strategy may now have lost its edge. I don’t mean to say that the broad appeal of science has been on the wane; overall, Americans are about as sanguine on the value of our scientific institutions as they were before. Rather, the electorate has reorganized itself, or has been reorganized by Trump, in such a way that fighting on behalf of science no longer cuts across party lines, and it doesn’t influence as many votes beyond the Democratic base.

The War on Science works for Trump because it’s always had more to do with social class than politics. A glance at data from the National Science Foundation shows how support for science tracks reliably with socioeconomic status. As of 2014, 50 percent of Americans in the highest income quartile and more than 55 percent of those with college degrees reported having great confidence in the nation’s scientific leaders. Among those in the lowest income bracket or with very little education, that support drops to 33 percent or less. Meanwhile, about five-sixths of rich or college-educated people—compared to less than half of poor people or those who never finished high school—say they believe that the benefits of science outweigh the potential harms. To put this in crude, horse-race terms, the institution of scientific research consistently polls about 30 points higher among the elites than it does among the uneducated working class.

Ten years ago, that distinction didn’t matter quite so much for politics. …

…

… with the battle lines redrawn, the same approach to activism now seems as though it could have the opposite effect. In the same way that fighting the War on Journalism delegitimizes the press by making it seem partisan and petty, so might the present fight against the War on Science sap scientific credibility. By confronting it directly, science activists may end up helping to consolidate Trump’s support among his most ardent, science-skeptical constituency. If they’re not careful where and how they step, the science march could turn into an ambush.

I think Engber is making an important point and the strategies and tactics being employed need to be carefully reviewed.

As for the Canadian situation, things are indeed better now but my experience is that while we rarely duplicate the situation in the US, we often find ourselves echoing their cries, albeit years later and more faintly. The current leadership race for the Conservative party has at least one Trump admirer (Kelly Leitch see the section titled: Controversy) fashioning her campaign in light of his perceived successes. Our next so called ‘war on science’ could echo in some ways the current situation in the US and we’d best keep that in mind.