This study analyzes approximately 600,000 English-language social science abstracts published between 1960 and 2024 to estimate the long-run ideological orientation of disciplinary research output. Large language models (LLMs) were applied to each abstract using a fixed 2025 U.S. ideological spectrum, enabling consistent coding across six decades. Five key findings emerged. First, roughly 90 percent of politically relevant social science articles leaned left 1960–2024, and the mean political stance of every social science discipline was left-of-center every year during the period. Second, all disciplines showed leftward movement between 1990 and 2024. Third, policy-proximal disciplines generally showed limited rightward moderation between roughly 1970 and 1990, though policy-distal disciplines did not. Fourth, disciplines with greater leftward orientation generally displayed greater ideological homogeneity Fifth, sociocultural content was more consistently left-leaning than economic content, and that gap widened over time. Robustness checks using a wide assortment of alternative datasets and analytical methodologies indicated that these findings were unlikely to be artifacts of idiosyncratic assumptions. Methodologically, the study demonstrates the capacity of LLM-based text classification to deliver reliable, large-scale ideological measurement over time, a task previously impractical with human coding alone. Taken together, the analysis provides the first systematic, cross-disciplinary evidence of the long-run political orientation of anglophone social science scholarship, revealing both the persistence and the intensification of its leftward tendencies, particularly in sociocultural domains.
Huge caveat, from the article:In this study, ideology was operationalized as the relative positioning of a given text along a left–right spectrum of U.S. political thought. This includes economic and sociocultural dimensions, each characterized by their association with recognizable ideological actors and institutions. To ensure interpretive consistency over a 65-year period (1960 to 2024), political stance was evaluated against a fixed 2025 reference frame, derived from contemporary U.S. political categories.
This approach involved trade-offs. Using a static ideological scale, anchored to notions such as the 2025 political positions of Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, or the Heritage Foundation, ensured that the LLM’s judgments were grounded in stable, well-defined anchor points. It avoided the problem of ideological drift, in which the meaning of ‘left’ or ‘right’ might evolve over time due to shifting partisan alignments or cultural contexts. However, this came at the cost of temporal anachronism. Texts written in earlier decades may have been judged by standards they would not have recognized.
There is no doubt that the academy leans left, and has done so for a long time. But the core problem with Manzi's analysis is that the entire US political spectrum has moved to the left, especially on cultural issues. On abortion, civil rights, marriage, gender equality and a range of other issues, positions that were once radical left (e.g., support for same-sex marriage) are now mainstream. Judge Glock at National Affairs:
The interaction of politics, policy, and public opinion should change how we look at polarization. In one sense, some conservative Republicans have indeed moved away from what we now consider the center. But the center itself has also changed, and veered emphatically to the left. Both parties, to varying degrees, have followed this shift over time. The changing context helps explain why each party can see the other as "radical" relative to what it considers the center, and why the argument that the right has moved rightward more than the left has moved leftward is unpersuasive.
