Study: 90% of Social Science Research Leans Left

If I asked you to guess what percentage of university professors lean left, you’d probably guess it was the vast majority and you’d be correct. There are various estimates that suggest about 60-80% of university professors are left or far-left.

Since 1989, the UCLA-Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) has maintained a successor faculty survey that asks professors to identify their political leanings every three years (figure 1).

According to the most recently available HERI survey, liberal and far-left faculty members grew from 44.8 percent in 1998 to 59.8 percent in 2016–17. Liberal and far-left faculty no longer make up a plurality of American academics. They are now the clear majority.

There’s a separate question to be asked about how this lopsided composition impacts the work these professors do. And, according to a researcher at Oxford who recently looked into it, there has been a bit of a gap in the research on this topic. However, using the power of AI to work through immense amounts of data, he was able to go through hundreds of thousands of papers covering 1960-2024 and sort out those that seemed to have any political valence at all. Of those he found 90% leaned to the left.

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.

Last week the Chronicle of Higher Education interviewed James Manzi who is getting his doctorate at the University of Oxford. He was careful not to claim too much for his results.

There are two research strands that are incredibly relevant that pre-exist this paper. So one is a research effort to try and identify the political ideology of university professors. That’s gone on since the late ‘50s.

There’s been a second strand which then tries to ask the question, Does political ideology of individual academic researchers have any effect on their professional behavior? So the evidence on that — first of all, it’s widely contested what effect it has. And those effects appear to be nuanced. The evidence that there are direct biases in classroom instruction, in grading, in graduate-level admissions are either unobserved or they’re at most small effects.

There is, on the other hand, a fair amount of research indicating that it may have an impact on research decisions — so, what topics do I think are interesting?

It was notable to me that while there had been a lot of research on those questions, there hadn’t been a comprehensive attempt to say, Let me take a large body of academic-research output and try and identify, does it have a particular ideological orientation?

Again, he’s careful not to say this is proof of causation or bias, but his study did show a strong correlation between the makeup of professors and the make-up of the research that gets produced.

His study also seemed to agree with pre-existing conventional wisdom about which disciplines within the university were the most liberal and the least liberal. So, for instance, economics departments produced more balanced research and Ethnic and Gender Studies were the least balanced politically.

Another interesting finding was that the more left-leaning the research output was, the more homogenous it seemed to be. Again, Manzi avoids going beyond the evidence in his paper to offer explanations that he can’t prove. 

What he is willing to say is that nothing in his finding really counters what you might call a conservative intuition that this is about liberal bias and left-wing ideological pressure to conform to an approved narrative.

It does make sense to me, though, why someone might look at the top-level findings, and if you’re of a certain mindset — that a lot of these disciplines have not just been leftward tilting, but corrupted by intense ideological bias — you might say that it confirms what you previously thought about these disciplines and about the poor ideological health of the social sciences in general.

At a minimum, it’s consistent with that prior belief, right? It doesn’t contradict that prior belief. But again, to re-emphasize, it doesn’t demonstrate that that prior belief is true, either.

You can’t say it’s true based on this data alone, but it fits with that conclusion pretty nicely.

For those of us who have seen how the left operates on campus, shouting down opposing views and demanding compliance from allies, I think there is plenty of outside evidence that confirms our suspicions. Academia has become badly biased and the research it produces is also badly biased. Why? Because it is produced in an ideological bubble under threat of public protests, firings and the inability to work in many fields for those who refuse to toe the line.

It will be interesting to see if anyone on the academic left takes this up and admits it’s a problem for universities to be this biased.

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