Why Conservatives Lost Confidence in Science: A Field-theoretic Conception of Political Polarization

• In Event: 340 - Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology Paper Session. What Would Bourdieu Do? New Approaches to Field Studies in Science, Knowledge and Technology

Abstract

Previous sociological research has indicated that confidence in the scientific community has become politically polarized over the past several decades, with political conservatives displaying lower confidence in science than liberals. However, the processes that produced this polarization remain poorly understood. In this paper, I argue that explaining the decline of confidence in science among conservatives requires a move towards a field-theoretic conception of political ideology. This field-theoretic conceptualization emphasizes that liberalism and conservatism are not static belief systems held by specific groups of political actors, but rather the meaning of liberalism and conservatism exist in a constant state of redefinition as groups of actors with different sets of beliefs strategically reposition themselves in the political field with respect to the labels of “liberal” and “conservative.” Following this theoretical framework, I use data from the 1980 through 2014 General Social Survey to demonstrate that the decline in confidence in the scientific community among conservatives is the result of compositional changes in ideological self-identification. Namely, this polarization resulted from individuals with morally conservative attitudes increasingly self-identifying as political conservatives. My results demonstrate that morally conservative individuals have displayed low confidence in science since before any polarization was evident between self-identified political conservatives and liberals. Thus, as moral conservatives increasingly took on the label of political conservatism in the 1990s and 2000s, a negative association between political conservatism and confidence in the scientific community emerged.

Author

• Austin Kozlowski, University of Chicago