General
Republican Science Denial Has Nasty Real-World Consequences
A substantial number of Republican voters are losing faith in science. As of April 2020, 14 percent reported to Pew Research that they had little or no faith that scientists would “act in the best interest of the public.” By October 2023, that figure …
A substantial number of Republican voters are losing faith in science.
As of April 2020, 14 percent reported to Pew Research that they had little or no faith that scientists would “act in the best interest of the public.” By October 2023, that figure had risen to 38 percent.
Over the same period, the share of Democrats who voiced little or no confidence rose much less and from a smaller base line — to 13 percent from 9 percent.
“Empirical data do not support the conclusion of a crisis of public trust in science,” Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, historians of science at Harvard and Caltech, write in their 2022 article “From Anti-Government to Anti-Science: Why Conservatives Have Turned Against Science.” But the data “do support the conclusion of a crisis of conservative trust in science.”
A paper published by the Journal of the American Medical Association on July 31, “Trust in Physicians and Hospitals During the COVID-19 Pandemic in a 50-State Survey of U.S. Adults,” by doctors and health specialists at Harvard, Northeastern, Rutgers, the University of Rochester and the University of South Carolina, reports that “in every sociodemographic group in this survey study among 443 455 unique respondents aged 18 years or older residing in the US, trust in physicians and hospitals decreased substantially over the course of the pandemic, from 71.5 percent in April 2020 to 40.1 percent in January 2024.”
“During the COVID-19 pandemic,” the authors write,
In “The Polarization and Politicization of Trust in Scientists,” a paper presented last week at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, James Druckman and Jonathan Schulman, of the University of Rochester and the University of Pennsylvania, write:
Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University, wrote by email:
Trump’s MAGA movement, Dallek argued,
The most recent precipitating event widening the split between Democrats and Republicans regarding the trustworthiness of science has been the partisan divide over how to deal with the Covid pandemic, especially support for and opposition to mandatory vaccination.
Between 2018 to 2021, the General Social Survey found that the spread between the percentage of Democrats and Republicans who said they have “a great deal of confidence in the scientific community” rose to 33 points (65-32) from 13 points (54-41).
