Okay yes you will. An analysis published on Thursday of various parts of government and adjacent institutions like think tanks showed that while the use of science in public policy and lawmaking has increased in recent decades across the board, Democrats are consistently more likely to rely on and cite scientific research than Republicans.
In the overall analysis covering all Congressional committee reports since 1995 and hearings since 2001 (49,345 in total), as well as 191,118 policy documents from 121 ideological think tanks since 1999, citations of science increased from 20 percent in 1995 to over 35 percent in 2020. That growth, authors wrote in Science Advances, features “systematic partisan differences.”
“Democratic-controlled committees are nearly 1.8 times more likely to cite science than those from Republican-controlled committees,” wrote the authors, led by Alexander Furnas, of Northwestern University. What’s more, when a committee switches from Republican to Democratic control, it averages almost 200 more scientific citations in the new term than in the old one, an increase of 0.58 standard deviations.
Next, think tanks, which are revealed to have “an even starker partisan difference in the propensity to cite science among ideological think tanks than in the government.” A left-leaning think tank is more than five times as likely as a right-leaning one to cite scientific research.
This gap seems to run the gamut of topics: Democratic-led committees beat out Republican-led ones in 20 of 23 scientific fields and 15 of 17 issue areas they looked at; for think tanks, it was all 23 and all 17. Also importantly, there is very little overlap when science is cited — meaning, essentially, Democrats and Republicans don’t pay attention to the same research. Only five to six percent of all the citations from committees were shared across parties, though this rate is tempered by the fact that the vast bulk of papers are only cited once and so by nature cannot be “bipartisan” sources. The authors ran an analysis that attempted to adjust for this, and found that an expected overlap if citations did not follow partisan patterns would still be in the 12 to 13 percent range, double what was observed. Among only scientific papers that are cited at least twice, the rate of overlap was 31.1 percent in committees and 20.5 percent in think tanks; the expected values would be above 50 percent.
Democrats are also just using better science, by a couple of measures. Dem-led committees are more likely to cite “hit” papers, meaning among the most cited in their fields, and they are also much more likely to use papers that actually went through peer review. The same is true again for think tanks.
“In other words, Democratic and left-of-center organizations tend to cite science that is more in line with the work that scientists themselves consider important,” the authors wrote.
They also conducted a survey of 3,500 “political elites” to attempt to explain the underlying reasons for the gap, including congressional staffers, political journalists, lobbyists, and so on. They found, among other things, a substantially higher level of trust in science and scientists among Democrats than Republicans. This mirrors another study published earlier in April involving 7,800 people, which found higher trust for scientists among liberals; five theoretical interventions to increase trust all failed, suggesting the distrust is built on “relatively stable attitudes.”
None of this is particularly shocking, given where the parties have ended up over the past couple of decades. And now, of course, we are watching the rapidly approaching apotheosis of the trend, as the Trump administration speed-runs a century of scientific enterprise both in government and across the country into the ground. Republicans are the ones with the real power to stop it, and have shown no inclination to do so. “Despite recent instances of bipartisan support for science,” Furnas and his colleagues wrote, “the uncovered partisan differences in the use and trust of science highlight a profound tension at the nexus of science and politics.”
GET SPLINTER RIGHT IN YOUR INBOX
The Truth Hurts
