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Democrats Republicans Science

How Democrats and Republicans Cite Science (nature.com) 211

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
An anonymous reader shares a Nature story: The United States is known for the deep polarization between its two major political parties -- the right-wing Republicans and left-wing Democrats. Now an analysis of hundreds of thousands of policy documents reveals striking differences in partisan policymakers' use of the scientific literature, with Democratic-led congressional committees and left-wing think tanks more likely to cite research papers than their right-wing counterparts. The analysis also shows that Democrats and left-leaning think tanks are more likely to cite high-impact research, and that the two political sides rarely cite the same studies or even the same topics.

"There are striking differences in amount, content and character of the science cited by partisan policymakers," says Alexander Furnas, a political scientist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and a co-author of the analysis, published in Science on 24 April. The researchers used the government-policy database Overton to assemble around 50,000 policy documents produced by US congressional committees in 1995-2021 and around 200,000 reports from 121 ideologically driven US think tanks over a similar period. These documents contained 424,000 scientific references.

A statistical analysis revealed that congressional reports are now more likely to cite science papers than before. But, in each two-year congressional cycle, documents from committees under Democratic control had a higher probability of citing research papers, and the gap between the two parties has increased. Overall, documents from Democratic-controlled committees were nearly 1.8 times more likely to cite science than were reports from Republican-led ones. The differences were starkest for reports produced by partisan think tanks, which the researchers say are "key resources for partisan policymakers." Left-leaning think tanks were 5 times more likely to cite science than right-leaning ones. And there was little overlap between the science referenced by the two sides: just 5-6% of studies were cited by both groups.
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How Democrats and Republicans Cite Science More

How Democrats and Republicans Cite Science

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  • US democrats are "left-wing" (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 25, 2025 @03:21PM (#65331023)
    Citation needed

  • Reality has a well-known liberal bias (Score:4, Insightful)

    by abulafia ( 7826 ) on Friday April 25, 2025 @03:23PM (#65331029)
    And Republicans are increasingly interested in enforcing their vision of what social hierarchies should be rather than making peoples' lives better.

    When you're focused on dictating behavior, the only authority you're citing is violence.

    • Trump 2028 for Ayatollah.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      That nicely sums it up. And that is what will not make America great, but an unimportant backwater in the longer run: People that think they can force reality to work how they want it to work and that think facts change if you just believe strongly enough. Faiures.

  • The U.S. Doesn't Have a Left-Wing Party... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Jerrry ( 43027 ) on Friday April 25, 2025 @03:31PM (#65331051)

    ...only a conservative party (the Democrats) and an ultra-conservative party (the Republicans).

    • America has a two-party system because we have winner take off first past the post voting. It's not correct to say we don't have a left-wing party. Because for all intents and purposes the Democrat party isn't one party. It's a network of sub parties that operate under a single brand name because of how our electoral system works.

      It would be more convenient for people who don't pay a lot of attention to politics if we could have a voting system that allowed people to be more obvious about it. So the peo

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      Republicans are radical, the opposite of conservative. Democrats are non-functioning, once a tent becomes too large it ceases to be a tent at all. There is neither a left wing party nor a right wing party.

      • Do you know where the term right and left wings come from? The sides of the room they sit on. So as long as there are right and lefts sides of a room, there can always be a right wing party or left wing party.

    • Yes, there is a left-wing party: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      (Members: 15000. Members in elected offices: 0)

  • Sounds to me like either conservatives can't understand these studies or they are afraid they will find out something they don't like about the world in them. Either way it's a difficult thing to defend, making up your own truth about something that was studied and found to be different.

    • Sounds to me like either conservatives can't understand these studies or they are afraid they will find out something they don't like about the world in them. Either way it's a difficult thing to defend, making up your own truth about something that was studied and found to be different.

      Or maybe it does not matter. Even if there is science on a particular subject, that in no way means you agree with any particular policy in response. Not every scientific paper means "we have to do something", though busybodies and zealots are always looking for any excuse and government has a lot of those types. It's even not at all unusual with governments for a response to a problem being worse than the original problem. All the science in the world unfortunately can't fix that part.

      • Sure but in many of these cases we are not talking about policy disagreements, if only it were that, that's what it's supposed to be; Republicans have one policy on climate change, Democrats another but we can't even have that discussion because we are still arguing with "is it happening at all", like you said, all the science in the world hasn't moved us past that.

        Same with covid; there is a very valid and very important argument to be had about appropriate measures in the wake of it. When and how should

        • Republicans have one policy on climate change, Democrats another but we can't even have that discussion because we are still arguing with "is it happening at all", like you said, all the science in the world hasn't moved us past that.

          I'm not sure that is actually true. Few people argue climate never changes. Rate and causation are not really relevant if you don't consider it a government problem in any case, so no need to cite anything, and that is what this article is about, the citations.

          Same with covid; there is a very valid and very important argument to be had about appropriate measures in the wake of it.

          Agreed. It's hard to come back and discuss how something can be done better with all the enemies you made the first time though. That too is a common problem.

          • So all the scientists yelling "based on all that science our conclusion is we need to do something", that part of the science doesn't matter? I suppose that's a way we can handle things but again, we're not arguing "climate changes", that's silly to say, it's that the change is unnatural and we are the cause. Do we agree on that?

            I would again put much of that blame that it caused enemies at all down to the ideological rejection of facts. How do you talk about proper vaccine response with people who think

            • So all the scientists yelling "based on all that science our conclusion is we need to do something", that part of the science doesn't matter?

              It's not science per se, no. And activist scientists are bad for science IMHO but that is another discussion. Policy should be left to policymakers. Scientists are free to run for office. Some of them even do. Voters can decide directly if they want to buy the solutions they are selling, it does not get much better than that. And if people vote for policymakers who say we don't care, that is a fair choice too.

              I would again put much of that blame that it caused enemies at all down to the ideological rejection of facts. How do you talk about proper vaccine response with people who think it's secret poison with no evidence?

              I think you equate an entire large middle ground with a vocal fringe. They do the same of co

    • The Left and Right absolutely understand science behind closed doors. Both will publicly embrace science when it COINCIDENTALLY aligns with their politics.

      Politics always corrupts science, logic, etc. If you do science, engineering, etc ... always keep politics away from your work. Politics will just f' things up in the long run.

    • Sounds to me like either conservatives can't understand these studies or they are afraid they will find out something they don't like about the world in them. Either way it's a difficult thing to defend, making up your own truth about something that was studied and found to be different.

      From what I've seen of the "general populace" online, liberals largely think that science is a method of learning more about the world and ways to improve our lives; conservative largely think scientists are in the pocket of whomever is funding them and will create any sort of result their financial masters desire. So it makes no sense for conservatives to cite scientific studies when they believe all science is bogus.

    • Sounds to me like either conservatives can't understand these studies or they are afraid they will find out something they don't like about the world in them.

      It sounds to be like neither of them are using science properly. The paper shows that each party cited papers on the topics that it was most concerned about, suggesting that they are both cherry picking papers to match their decided conclusions and not using papers to come to a conclusion. Indeed the suggestion that somehow more citations is better is an appeal to authority which is a logical fallacy. What matters is whether what they are saying is factually correct or wrong and the amount of citations is

      • Re:Science and how not to Use It (Score:5, Informative)

        by SoftwareArtist ( 1472499 ) on Saturday April 26, 2025 @12:51AM (#65332057)

        The paper goes into lots of detail about this.

        We find that papers cited by only Democratic committees are more likely than those cited by only Republican committees to be hit papers in science, defined as the top 5% of the most cited papers in their field and year (uD = 0.48 versus uR = 0.44, t = 7.50, df = 27468, P < 0.0001; see fig. S25A). Democratic committees' documents are also more likely to cite science that has passed peer review (measured as percent preprint; uD = 0.0138 versus uR = 0.0184, t = -3.60, df = 28109, P < 0.001; see fig. S25C), and tend to cite slightly older science than Republican committees (uD = 8.22 versus uR = 7.93, t = 3.16, df = 36945, P < 0.01; see fig. S25D).

        Democrats are more likely to cite highly regarded papers that are influential in their fields. Republicans are less likely to cite papers at all, and when they do cite papers they tend to be less influential ones, and are more likely to not even have been peer reviewed.

        See the paper for many more details.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed. But trying to defend something that is in conflict with well extablished facts is also a sign of a severe mental disability that basically prevents rational decision making. This is acceptable in younger children, but anybody older with that defect becomes a problem.

  • False in the very first sentence. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dfghjk ( 711126 ) on Friday April 25, 2025 @03:53PM (#65331105)

    "The United States is known for the deep polarization between its two major political parties -- the right-wing Republicans and left-wing Democrats. "

    The US no longer has two major political parties differentiated by right wing and left wing. This is a fundamental falsehood designed to suggest that what we have is business as usual. The US does not have functioning political parties at all and Republicans are only right wing by coincidence, the party displays the opposite of conservatism.

    Of course Democrats are more likely to cite actual research, but so what? Truth doesn't matter, social wedges do.

    • Everywhere is polarized, it is not just the US. The problem IMHO is that there is no longer a concept of "live and let live", nowadays everyone wants to run everyone else's life, and not only that they want to be as douchey as possible about it. When they are in power the cons want to own the libs, but when power changes the libs absolutely want to own the cons every bit as badly. The agendas are different, but they are all exactly the same kind of people underneath - and none of them are decent human be

      • Everywhere is polarized, it is not just the US.

        It's particularly the case with the US, because its system supports exactly 2 parties (Effective number of parties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ). Two options naturally create a "divergence of political attitudes away from the center, towards ideological extremes." (Political polarization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ), because that's the only way the two options have to differentiate. If the US system supported more options, the third one would tend to be an in-between, a political center, where

        • That might work if you had lots of parties and few dominant ones. The parties outside the big two here in Canada really are not any different apart from being a bit more fringy. The politicians themselves are still all the same, and we are doing just fine on the societal division as well. Trump is actually muting some of that division temporarily, but it will be back soon enough.
  • You must answer the question, "Who should I trust?"
    Commonly, people tend to trust those with the same ideological background.

    The article uses the phrase "left-wing" Democrats, whereas the spectra of both parties overlap. The closer to the centre a person is, the more likely they are to trust peer-reviewed science.

    If you've decided to trust a paper based solely on ideology, you need backup.

  • Boy... (Score:5, Funny)

    by ZombieCatInABox ( 5665338 ) on Friday April 25, 2025 @05:07PM (#65331285)

    Boy, there are a lot of pissed, angry conservatives in this thread.

  • In no way are the Democrats left-wing. They are overwhelmingly of the centre. It is center/right Democrats vs far-right Republicans. Calling the Democrats left-wing is just nonsense.
  • From what I've seen 99% of those involved have the best of intentions. Yet, the skewing of thought has prevailed in the same direction for decades.

    Science is frequently seen as the least-skewed type of writing. It is still pretty far from foolproof. And when things that are not foolproof are cited by further work, there's not an obvious way to address all of them at once.

    I applaud this work. Let's stay tuned!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      There is no skewing. There are people (like you) that are in denial regarding reality, hence things look skewed to you. In actual reality, at least STEM scientists are pretty much allo ver the place politically. But here is the thing people like you do not understand: Research comes with a burden of proof. You cannot poof things that are wrong. Hence there is a very strong bias towards factual reality in STEM research.

  • Looks like abandoning science wasn’t just a MAGA sideshow — it’s been structurally baked into GOP policymaking for decades.

    Northwestern just dropped a brutal empirical study — Partisan Disparities in the Use of Science in Policy (Furnas et al., 2024) — showing that Republican policymakers systematically cite less science, cite worse science, and trust scientists about as much as they trust independent election auditors.

    The findings are brutal: Democratic committees are nearly twice as likely to cite science as Republican ones, and left-leaning think tanks are five times more likely to ground their arguments in scientific research. Republicans, when they cite science at all, lean heavily on outdated, low-impact, or pre-peer-review work — the intellectual equivalent of presenting a stack of hotel bar napkins as expert testimony. Republicans aren’t cherry-picking from the same tree — they’re harvesting from a rotting orchard, and they’ve been doing it for a quarter-century.

    Why?

    Because the modern GOP — hijacked first by the Dixiecrats looking for safe harbor during the Civil Rights movement, and then two generations later by MAGA's mob of white Christian Nationalists and authoritarian nutbars — is a coalition built on resentment, reaction, and rejection of any authority outside its own tribal mythos. Of course they distrust scientists. Scientists have an inconvenient habit of insisting that gravity works, vaccines save lives, and the Earth is older than 6,000 years. But the GOP's vision of conservatism, especially the MAGA-infested version it is currently suffering under, demands more.

    Frank Wilhoit's ruthless summary of conservatism nails it:

    Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:
    There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

    The MAGA conservatives running the current GOP want to advance and protect their privilege, not any conservative principle. Every scientific fact that challenges their privileged position in the power structure becomes the enemy. Science, like justice, demands impartiality. Conservatism, corrupted by MAGA into tribalism, demands exceptions.

    You don't need a PhD in political science to draw a straight line from the southern "Dixiecrat" realignment during the Civil Rights movement to today's Project 2025 fever dreams. It's the same anti-intellectualism, the same theocratic longings, just duct-taped onto an internet-age grift machine.

    And the kicker?

    This paper robustly shows that even when both parties write policy documents about the same issue — say, minimum wage — they still cite completely different scientific studies. They're not building on a common foundation; they're arguing from different planets.

    Which brings us to now. The GOP’s Project 2025 outlines plans to dismantle the administrative state — a media-friendly sound bite and polite euphemism for purging government scientists, researchers, and regulators who dare to apply empirical evidence to public policy. MAGA and their fellow travelers don't want science interfering with their agenda, period. Remember Dick Cheney’s infamous comment about “creating their own reality”? He wasn’t posturing. For once in his life, he was telling the truth.

    So here's the question for my reasonable conservative friends, who also claim to be principled Republicans:

    If you keep voting for a party that systematically rejects science, and has been doing so for decade after decade, what exactly did you expect would happen?

    When you strap yourself to a cult of grievance and gaslighting, don’t look shocked when the tracks end, the ground falls away, and the laws of physics finish the argument. You bought the ticket. Enjoy the ride.

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