The ideological orientation of academic social science research 1960–2024
9 hours ago
- #ideological orientation
- #large language models
- #social science research
- Study analyzes 600,000 English-language social science abstracts from 1960 to 2024 using large language models (LLMs) to estimate ideological orientation.
- 90% of politically relevant social science articles leaned left from 1960 to 2024, with every discipline left-of-center annually.
- All disciplines showed leftward movement between 1990 and 2024, with policy-proximal disciplines moderating rightward between 1970 and 1990.
- Disciplines with greater leftward orientation exhibited greater ideological homogeneity.
- Sociocultural content was more consistently left-leaning than economic content, with the gap widening over time.
- Robustness checks confirmed findings were not artifacts of idiosyncratic assumptions.
- LLM-based text classification proved reliable for large-scale ideological measurement over time.
- The study provides the first systematic evidence of the long-run political orientation of anglophone social science scholarship.
- Findings reveal persistence and intensification of leftward tendencies, especially in sociocultural domains.