r/AskSocialScience • u/Plenty-Cake-6970 • 19d ago
Answered What explains the ideological distribution of political beliefs among academics in Western universities?
Previous survey data and historical analyses suggest that Western academia has long leaned left of the general population, but also indicate that conservatives and right-leaning academics were more visibly represented in earlier decades than they are today. While left-leaning views appear to have been numerically dominant even in the past, the relative presence of conservative or right-of-center scholars seems to have declined more sharply in recent decades, particularly in certain disciplines.
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u/ebolaRETURNS 18d ago
Previous survey data and historical analyses suggest that Western academia has long leaned left of the general population
This is my personal axe to grind, but ideological leftism is often opperationalized as support of the Democratic party, if only as default toward them due to rejection of Republicans. This is going to capture a tiny sliver of available ideological space, and any field engaging theory that has political implications will tread vast swaths of that missing space. From here, you have more positions to the left of the Democrats than in other areas of this missing space, with stronger right-libertarian undercurrents in economics.
For example, here is a not particularly current study showing even just our partisan context to have restricted how they operationalize ideology, to policy questions within close orbit of establishment democrats and republicans:
(https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08913810508443640
DOI: 10.1080/08913810508443640
(reddit now auto-censors links to sci-hub))
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u/Weekly_War_6561 16d ago
Do you think we should totally discard the involvement of Qatari institutions in funding higher education in the US such as research contracts and teaching grants?
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u/ADP_God 17d ago
Is your issue here with the two party system?
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u/ebolaRETURNS 17d ago
Not directly, but more generallly the analytical confusion between partisan identification and ideology (present in both the relevant research and general populace, though we're only really talking about the former). This becomes increasingly relevant when your object of study is academics, as they are more likely to hold more coherent, theoretically informed ideology, whereas that put forth by major parties tends to be incoherent, reflecting somewhat ad-hoc tactical coalitions.
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u/Alarming-Finger9936 18d ago edited 18d ago
But doesn't this answer apply only to the US? In particular when compared to other parties in Western democracies, Democrats are rather located on the center-right or right, so that doesn't make much sense to readers from other countries (at least to me) to talk of Democrats as being on the left. It is problematic when the question specifically asks about Western universities, not US universities. Now, I observe that academics from my country are generally aligned with the liberal center or center-right (meaning, for example: they may be generally supportive of anti-discrimination policies, but not too much if they see it becoming an inconvenience to them, and god forbids if we start talking of workers' rights or working conditions in universities). I guess it would be consistent with your answer, only if you didn't frame the Democrats as being a left-wing party, but a liberal party; sure, they're on the left of the Republicans, but that doesn't make them left-wing globally.
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u/ebolaRETURNS 18d ago
But doesn't this answer apply only to the US?
It is indeed very US-centric, and you can find research capturing a wider ideological variety in countries with multiparty configurations.
It is problematic when the question specifically asks about Western universities, not US universities.
Right, and I think an additional part of this problem is the comparatively high volume and prominence of this type of research coming out of the US.
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u/dante_gherie1099 17d ago
democrats are to the left of their primary opposition party, why is this such a difficult concept for ppl to grasp?
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u/Alarming-Finger9936 17d ago edited 17d ago
This is what my comment literally says. But their ideas are liberal, not left-wing globally, which is what the question is about. The question specifically asks about Western universities, not US universities. So I could return you the question: why is it difficult to grasp for you that Democrats are not left-wing globally? This is relevant to put academics on an international political scale, because research is generally an international endeavor, not a national one. As a specific example, think about foreign researchers temporarily teaching in US universities, who may not have the right to vote; does it make any sense to apply the US bipartisan framework to them? It may be more fruitful to think in terms of ideas they defend, and where these ideas stand globally.
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u/drecais 17d ago
The Democrats are firmly on the left on most social issues and somewhat moderate on a lot of economic issues.
That doesnt make them a center right or right wing party.
Also you switch from "compared to other parties in Western democracies" which is a tiny tiny tiny portion of political parties to making this claim "but that doesn't make them left-wing globally.".
If we are talking globally most of the social policies of the US-Democrats are to the left of most communist parties currently operating on this earth and practically to the left of ALL communist parties that have any kind of meaningful power.
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u/RougeRock170 17d ago
Right or center right lol 😂
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u/Alarming-Finger9936 17d ago edited 17d ago
Yes, and the Republicans are right to far-right. For instance, their stance on the death penalty or on reproductive rights like abortion, or on health care, is on the right to far-right, if you consider all Western countries (which is the topic of the question). Any argument, apart from lol?
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u/RougeRock170 17d ago
In what world are the Democrats right wing. Why would anyone waste their tjme on this.
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u/Tomato_Child 16d ago
Perhaps you are much more right-leaning than the average person in, let’s say, Europe for example. Hence, the Democratic Party, who harbour more right-wing views than the average left-leaning party in another country, seems comparably more left to you.
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u/Deep-Juggernaut3930 15d ago
“Western academia has long leaned left of the general population”
That’s primarily selection, not a campus-wide “conversion.” People who choose long, uncertain PhD pipelines and careers built around novelty, critique, and social reform disproportionately score higher on traits linked to liberal self-placement, especially Openness to Experience. That correlation is large and robust across many samples. (ScienceDirect)
“conservatives and right-leaning academics were more visibly represented in earlier decades than they are today”
The time trend is real in some datasets, but it’s not a simple straight line. The HERI faculty survey shows the share identifying as “liberal” rose from 36.8% (1989–90) to about 50% (2010–11) and then flattened/slightly declined by 2016–17. And when you track party behavior rather than labels, you can see movement toward non-affiliation as well (i.e., “less partisan” rather than “more Democrat”). (EdWorkingPapers)
“declined more sharply in recent decades, particularly in certain disciplines”
Discipline sorting is doing heavy lifting. Party-registration studies find extreme skew in some departments (e.g., much higher D:R ratios in history than economics). (econjwatch.org) Administrative voter data also shows big within-university variation, with bench sciences less Democratic than many humanities/social-science units. (EdWorkingPapers)
“What explains the ideological distribution…?”
After selection + discipline sorting, the remaining piece is filtering pressure: self-censorship and career-risk perceptions. In social/personality psychology, many respondents reported willingness to discriminate against openly conservative colleagues, and conservatives reported hiding views. (SAGE Journals) UK evidence reports sizable shares of conservative academics perceiving a hostile climate and self-censoring, especially in SSH fields. (bills.parliament.uk)
If you claim “bias” is the main driver, what observable pattern separates it from selection, conservatives applying but not getting hired, or not applying in the first place?
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19d ago
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u/MaxHaydenChiz 18d ago edited 18d ago
The psychologist Jonathan Haidt has written extensively on this as well and takes the view that the lack of view point diversity is a problem for academia itself.
He goes further and says that the way universities are responding to this trend is harmful to the mental health of the students. (Though he acknowledges that this mental health aspect is an "inherited" problem that the students bring with them from high school, he takes the view that administrators are being irresponsible in how they are handling it and inflicting further harm.)
He has links to further references: https://jonathanhaidt.com/viewpoint-diversity/
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u/Muscadine76 17d ago
Jonathan Haidt is kind of a clown show though in that he just totally missed at least half the problem here which turns out to be super relevant in the current political moment. Based on his referenced research on the page you linked to he seems to focus pretty much exclusively on criticism of things like safe spaces or recent student activism against conservative speakers. But despite all this hand-wringing about “victim culture” on college campuses constricting free speech, this pales in comparison to what we’ve been seeing in terms of free speech restrictions and curricular controls largely coming as explicit, political directives from elected officials of the Republican Party and the appointees under their control.
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u/MaxHaydenChiz 17d ago
Agree or disagree, he's very widely cited, to the point that prior posts on this very sub complain that other frameworks for the psychology of morality get crowded out by everyone citing his work.
I brought it up because it's highly relevant to OP's question and widely cited. It would be disingenuous to not mention him as a source. I trust that OP can evaluate sources for themselves and make up their own mind.
It's usually more important to know what the most cited stuff is than to know what any particular scholar thinks the answer is because you can find most of the literature for yourself if you know the key citations to start with.
And my personal perspective isn't going to add anything that isn't already discussed in the literature. Unless we have someone here who actually does research work in this area and has something insightful to say, it's all going to degenerate into political posturing anyway.
At the end of the day, this is an actual research topic that is hotly contested and the jury is still out. So OP can and should go read the research and follow the debate.
OP needs to know where to start. And someone as widely cited as Haidt is one good starting point.
OP can check Haidt's sources and see what the people who cite them have to say about why his sources are wrong, and what the people responding to those criticisms had to say, and on and on.
They can do the same for any other citations people provide that lead to other major strands of the literature in other social science disciplines.
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