Excited to be sharing a new (working) paper that I've been working on for the last 2-3 years. "Partisan Disparities in the Use of Science in Policy" with @timlapira.bsky.social and Dashun Wang. osf.io/preprints/so... Some highlight results to follow - ThreadSky

alexanderfurnas.com • 403 days ago

Excited to be sharing a new (working) paper that I've been working on for the last 2-3 years. "Partisan Disparities in the Use of Science in Policy" with @timlapira.bsky.social and Dashun Wang. https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/aep9v

Some highlight results to follow

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tlscherer.bsky.social•401 days ago

Fantastic work! Do you have a breakdown of topics overall somewhere? That is, an ordering of which topics have the most science citations, regardless of partisanship?

alexanderfurnas.com•401 days ago

Behold: The share of congressional committee documents (hearings & reports) that cite science at least once by issue area

gbdonart.bsky.social•401 days ago

Labour? US Congress?

alexanderfurnas.com•400 days ago

you mean why the british spelling? they issue classifications are done by a british company in this dataset

gbdonart.bsky.social•400 days ago

Good to know. Thanks.

alexanderfurnas.com•401 days ago

hmmm good question let me look

alexanderfurnas.com•401 days ago

Not right to hand, but I can pull something together

alexanderfurnas.com•403 days ago

We find a six-fold increase in the rate at which policy docs produced by congressional committees and ideological think tanks cite science over the last 25 years. But this growth masks large partisan differences. Both increasing, but gap widening w/ Dems using science more across all fields & issues

alexanderfurnas.com•403 days ago

The VAST majority of science is cited only by one "side." Only ~5% of cited scientific articles are cited by both Dems and Reps.

Across areas, partisans cite *substantively* different work (see clusters of embedded papers cited by House Energy & Commerce or "Weather" related think tank docs)

alexanderfurnas.com•403 days ago

Not only do partisans cite science about different stuff (even within high-level issues), when we match out-partisan-produced policy documents on content, they *still* cite science that is more substantively than matched co-partisan produced policy documents.

alexanderfurnas.com•403 days ago

Partisans also cite differentially impactful science. Dems and Left leaning think tanks tend to cite science that is more highly cited by academics, for example.

alexanderfurnas.com•403 days ago

Finally, the differences we observe in the citation practices of partisans producing policy documents mirror differences in the level of trust we see for scientists and scientific institutions among partisan political elites from an original survey.

jwlockhart.bsky.social•403 days ago

Fascinating to think about this alongside, e.g., Aaron panofsky's stuff

nathankalmoe.bsky.social•403 days ago

Good work!

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