Partisan Differences in Political Elites’ Attitudes Toward Science

It is well established that the public at large holds ideologically polarized attitudes toward science on a range of public problems like climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic. It is less clear whether more politically sophisticated elites like elected officials and public affairs professionals hold equally polarized levels of trust in science. We examine the attitudes of political elites in the U.S. in several ways. First, we report results on trust in scientists and scientific institutions from an original survey of 3,500 U.S. political elites, the largest study of its kind ever conducted. Both Republican and Democratic political elites have higher levels of trust in science than Republican voters. Yet among political elites, Republicans have substantially lower levels of trust in scientists and in scientific institutions and less accurate assessments of scientific facts than Democrats. Second, we examine the patterns in the use of science in policy documents from the U.S. Congress and ideological think tanks. We find substantial partisan differences in whether and how much policymakers rely on science. Finally, we conduct a cross-country comparison examining the use of science in official government documents across 35 democracies and find that politicized differences in science use is not a uniquely U.S. phenomenon.