Alexander Furnas, Timothy Lapira and Dashun Wang:
Science has long been regarded as essential to policy-making, serving as one of the primary sources of evidence that informs decisions (1, 2) with its particular epistemic authority (3). Its role has become especially vital, as many pressing societal challenges today—from climate change to public health crises to technological advancement—are intricately linked with scientific progress. However, amid rising political polarization (4), a fundamental question remains open: Is science used differently by policy-makers in different parties? Here we combine two large-scale databases capturing policy, science, and their interactions to examine the partisan differences in citing science in policy-making in the United States. Overall, we observe systematic differences in the amount, content, and character of science cited in policy by partisan factions in the United States. These differences are strikingly persistent across fields of research, policy issues, time, and institutional contexts.
