Partisan disparities in the production and uptake of science

Scientific institutions are designed to produce and evaluate claims through shared evidentiary and disciplinary standards, yet they are embedded in an increasingly polarized society. This fundamental tension raises the question of whether scientists’ partisan alignment is associated with the production, circulation, and uptake of scientific knowledge. Here we integrate campaign-finance records, faculty rosters, voter-registration data, an original survey of approximately 7,000 active U.S. scientists, bibliometric data, and measures of uptake in policy documents, patents, and news coverage to map the partisan composition of the scientific workforce, the knowledge it produces, and its uptake within and beyond science. We find that U.S. science is politically asymmetric without being ideologically homogeneous: scientists who make political contributions are overwhelmingly Democratic-aligned, and this asymmetry has widened over time, yet the broader workforce includes many Independents and substantial ideological heterogeneity within partisan groups. Among scientists with strong, behaviorally observed partisan alignments, Democratic- and Republican-authored papers are systematically distinguishable in semantic content across all fields, even after conditioning on fine-grained topic and year. Differences in total scientific citation rates are modest and have narrowed over time, whereas citations occur more often within the same partisan author communities than expected under topic- and year-preserving null models. Uptake beyond science also varies by partisan authorship and domain, with the clearest directional selectivity among ideological think tanks. These findings reveal an uneven profile of partisan association across U.S. science, visible in published content and directional attention, but comparatively limited in aggregate scientific recognition. This profile is consistent with a scientific system in which shared evaluative standards coexist with political structure in the production and circulation of knowledge, with implications for science’s capacity to remain a common evidentiary resource in a polarized society.