Social Science Leftward Drift Timeline

A large LLM‑based content analysis of ~600,000 abstracts shows the social sciences moved sharply left in the 1960s, stabilized in the 1970s–80s, rose again after 1990, and surged in the mid‑2010s. About 90% of politically relevant articles lean left across 1960–2024, with policy‑proximal fields (economics, political science) less extreme than feeling‑focused fields (sociology, gender studies). — If academic research is systematically ideologically skewed, it affects public policy, trust in expertise, and how evidence is interpreted in politics and culture.