A comprehensive study reveals that approximately 90% of academic publication in the social sciences can be identified as taking a left-wing stance.
Conducted by James Manzi of the University of Oxford and published in the journal Theory and Society, the research analyzed 599, 194 English-language articles published between 1960 and 2024. Working across 367 journals and eleven disciplines—including economics, sociology, political science, psychology, criminology, and gender studies—some 180, 311 articles were deemed directly relevant to contemporary political or social debates.
The analysis was conducted multiple times using different AI models, alternative classification methods, and various databases.
Using advanced language models, articles were classified on a 0–10 ideological scale, with 5 representing a neutral position. Most works scored between 6 and 8, indicating a clear left-leaning tendency. No discipline averaged at the center or leaned right, and disciplines such as gender studies and anthropology exhibited the highest left-wing scores. Economics, while relatively plural, still had only 16% of articles in center-right or right positions, with other fields dropping to 0–6%.
The study identifies a persistent trend toward the left since the 1960s, with an acceleration from the 1990s and particularly after 2010.
A high negative correlation (−0.84) was observed between leftward ideological bias and internal diversity, meaning more left-leaning fields exhibit less pluralism and fewer alternative perspectives.
