Left-Wing Bias Is Corrupting Sociology

While the American electorate is evenly split between two parties, academic disciplines are skewed to the left. In economics — a field closely tied to politics and policy — Democratic-leaning professors outnumber Republicans by about five to one. Other social sciences are even more imbalanced. On its face, this reality raises an uncomfortable question: When scholars in these fields critique Republican-led policies, are they speaking as impartial experts or as partisan advocates?

In principle, the scientific method should insulate research from ideology. As the late U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously put it, everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. Yet social-science research, which deals with complex human behavior, is unusually vulnerable to bias. Given that the enterprise is dominated by a single political orientation, it is reasonable to ask whether that compromises the quality of the scholarship.

I examined this question in a recent article in the journal Theory and Society. Focusing on sociology — my own academic discipline — I asked whether its well-documented political monoculture impacts the scientific quality of sociological research. To find out, I compared sociology to three other major social sciences: economics, political science, and psychology. All four lean left, but sociology is in a league of its own: For every Republican in the field, there are 44 registered Democrats. Nearly one in five sociology professors identifies as far left — more than quadruple the rate in economics and more than double the rate in political science or psychology.

My research considered two important benchmarks of research integrity: transparency and rigor, both hallmarks of “open science.” Born out of psychology’s replication crisis in the 2010s, the open-science movement is an effort to make scholars practice what they have always preached. There is nothing new about the expectation for scientific research to be transparent and reproducible. However, in reality, many fields of inquiry have failed to live up to that basic standard. As a remedy, the adherents to the open-science movement have promoted novel practices, such as research preregistration, that reduce temptations for “p-hacking,” “data dredging,” and other questionable styles of research. At the very minimum, scholars are expected to share the data and code used in their research so the results can be independently verified.

Economics, psychology, and political science have embraced these reforms enthusiastically. The American Economic Review and other leading economics journals require replication packages for every empirical article. Political-science journals have adopted mandatory verification policies. Sociology, by contrast, scores far lower on the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) metric — an institutional measure designed by the Center for Open Science that tracks whether journals actually enforce these practices. Its average score is less than one, compared to between four and six in peer disciplines (economics, political science, and psychology).

The second benchmark of research integrity has to do with what economists call the “credibility revolution.” Since the early 2000s, empirical economics has undergone a transformation: It is no longer acceptable to make causal claims — however “soft” — without employing robust strategies to isolate cause and effect. Consequently, there has been a surge in randomized field experiments and innovative quasi-experimental designs. Political science has followed suit. In sociology, by contrast, fewer than 10 percent of recent articles in leading journals employ designs that allow for credible causal inference. In economics, the figure is more than 70 percent, and over 60 percent in political science. (This issue is less relevant in psychology, where causally tight laboratory experiments have always been the dominant research approach.)

These differences are not subtle. Across each aspect of research integrity, sociology is a major outlier, lagging far behind economics, political science, and psychology. Those methodological deficits are strongly related to sociology’s extraordinary level of left-wing skew. The discipline is afflicted by a political monoculture and cares little about transparency of research.

Why is sociology so resistant to methodological improvements that have reshaped its peer disciplines? Some argue that the field is too fragmented to adopt common standards, or that qualitative scholars have reasonable objections to transparency requirements designed for quantitative work. These explanations carry some weight. But they overlook a deeper dynamic: Sociology has explicitly tied its mission to political advocacy.

Since Michael Burawoy’s presidency of the American Sociological Association in 2004, the movement for “public sociology” has encouraged researchers to align their work with social-justice activism of a decidedly anti-capitalist persuasion. According to Burawoy, public sociology comes to fruition when sociologists “carry it forward as a social movement beyond the academy.”

Whatever its moral appeal, this orientation erodes the scientific norm of disinterestedness. When scholarship is judged by its political usefulness as opposed to its empirical rigor, it is hardly surprising that practices demanding transparency and causal precision are treated as secondary — or even as obstacles.

As Christian Smith argued in The Sacred Project of American Sociology, the field has become less about scientific discovery and more about advancing progressive moral aims. Undergraduate sociology textbooks often function less as neutral teaching tools than as “re-socialization manuals” for political activism.

This activist turn has consequences. Ideological homogeneity discourages adversarial scrutiny and marginalizes dissent. Methodological shortcuts become more tempting when they support politically congenial conclusions. And as rigorous, heterodox scholars exit the field, the monoculture deepens. The product is weaker science — and a discipline increasingly distrusted by the public.

The backlash is already visible. Florida’s decision to remove sociology from its general-education core was justified by claims that the discipline has become politicized at the expense of objectivity. My own research lends credibility to these claims. The irony is that by subordinating science to political advocacy, sociology has invited political scrutiny into its own affairs.

The Trump administration has demanded greater viewpoint diversity in American universities. Many academics dismiss this as partisan meddling. But the example of sociology suggests otherwise. The demand is not just about balance or scorekeeping. It goes to the heart of what makes science trustworthy.

A discipline dominated by partisan outlook is not only alienating to outsiders; it is more likely to drift away from the rigorous practices that keep bias in check. Political monocultures retard intellectual progress, undermine methodological rigor, and erode public credibility.

The lesson of sociology is clear: Viewpoint diversity is not a political concession. It is a scientific necessity. Academic disciplines ignore this fact at their peril.