Divided in Politics, United in Science?

In U.S. politics, Republicans and Democrats have grown so opposed that they often struggle to agree on even the most basic facts, making it exceedingly difficult for them to have meaningful debates or conversations. Yet there exists a narrow and often-overlooked area of knowledge and scientific evidence that even political leaders with opposing views both turn to time and time again. 

“Though there are pretty stark differences in what Democrats and Republicans rely on, there’s this small but stable subset of [scientific] papers that receive bipartisan attention,” says Alexander Furnas, a research assistant professor at the Kellogg Center for Science of Science and Innovation (CSSI). “The science that both sides engage with is an important matter we should be thinking about, measuring, theorizing about, and trying to expand.” 

Furnas investigated this rare yet critical common ground in a study with Dashun Wang, the Kellogg Chair of Technology and a professor of management and organizations. The researchers focused on the policy documents published in congressional committee reports and hearings from 1995 to 2021 and published by 121 U.S.-based think tanks starting from 1999.  

Across roughly 425,000 citations made to nearly 200,000 distinct scientific papers, only 6.7 percent of the papers were cited by both Republicans and Democrats. This small subset of bipartisan-cited papers was much more likely to include papers considered “high impact,” based on how often scientists cited them relative to the average paper in the same year and field of study. Papers referenced by both parties were cited 63 times more often than average, and they also received much more media attention.  

“The overlap is small, but it carries outsized influence,” says Wang, who directs the CSSI and the Northwestern Innovation Institute as well as codirects the Ryan Institute on Complexity. “It signals work that has reached a level of robustness and relevance that transcends ideology—science that becomes difficult for anyone to ignore.”  

Papers cited by only one party, in contrast, were cited about 35 times more often than the average paper in the same year and field. So while both partisan- and bipartisan-cited papers featured research that was viewed as highly important by the scientific community, the bipartisan-cited papers were nearly twice as impactful.  

In addition, the researchers found that when both Republican- and Democrat-led think tanks cited a particular scientific paper, that paper tended to receive significantly (36.9 percent) more citations in subsequent policy documents.   

On average, the bipartisan-cited papers are “rare and disproportionately influential …; [they’re] really field-defining and canonical on an issue,” Furnas says. “It is possible that, some of the time, one side cites [a paper] favorably, and the other side cites it disfavorably, but both sides are forced to engage with it at the very least.” 

Uneven common ground 

Still, Furnas and Wang discovered that the bipartisan-cited papers were mainly concentrated in select subject areas, underscoring limitations to Republicans’ and Democrats’ willingness to engage with the same science.  

The scientific papers cited by both parties mostly addressed topics that tend to be less politically contentious, such as drug prices, economics, and markets. In contrast, there were very few, if any, bipartisan citations to papers about more-divisive topics such as gender, race, social inequality, or environmental governance.  

“While we don’t prove causation, [bipartisan citation] seems like it’s driven by the ideological and political considerations of the issues that the science might speak to,” Furnas says. “And what we see is a distinct unevenness.”  

For example, because the political considerations of Democrats and Republicans differ on the subject of diversity, they are likely to respond in very different ways to scientific papers about the topic. 

“There’s robust academic research about the material and organizational benefits of diversity,” Furnas says. “So if a left-of-center think tank is writing about diversity and equity programs, they may cite that research. But if a right-of-center think tank is writing against diversity and inclusion programs, I wouldn’t expect them to cite that research about the material benefits to diversity in organizational decision-making.”  

A collective understanding 

The study’s findings underscore the continued need for leaders from both sides of the political spectrum to develop a more-wholistic understanding of the state of the world as well as of the core issues affecting society and the best ways to address them.  

“For effective democratic governance, we need policymakers to understand what the world actually looks like and to have a similar sense of how the mechanics of the world and policy interventions function,” Furnas says.  

That kind of collective understanding would be crucial toward helping Republican and Democratic leaders spend more time discussing policies and their trade-offs from the lens of their different ideologies and values instead of squabbling about the facts.  

“Then people can decide as a society, ‘Which of those worlds do we want?’” Furnas says. “And then we can actually work on getting to that society because we have some idea of what our policies are actually going to do.” 

“I think we don’t have that yet,” he continues. “But this [study] is a little window into where maybe that sometimes is the case and how we might have more of it.”