Studying Science Scientifically Speaker Series: Alexander Furnas

Alexander Furnas is a research assistant professor at the Center for Science of Science and Innovation in the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, a Faculty Associate at Institute for Policy Research, and the Ryan Center on Complexity. He received a Ph.D in Political Science at the University of Michigan in 2020 in American Politics (major subfield) and Quantitative Methods (minor Subfield). Furnas specialize in the role of information and expertise in the policymaking. His dissertation examined the conditions under which Congress uses privately provisioned information produced by outside organizations in the policymaking process. More generally, he studies interest groups, Congress, the intersection of science and politics, policy making and elite political behavior using survey, text analysis and network methods. Furnas also has ongoing research projects on congressional staff capacity, interest group ideal point estimation, lobbying firms, and text reuse detection. 

Abstract:
Science, long considered a cornerstone in shaping policy decisions, is increasingly vital in addressing contemporary societal challenges. However, it remains unclear whether science is used differently by policymakers with different partisan commitments, whether scientists with different partisan commitments produce substantively different science, or whether partisan policymakers in the federal government fund science at different levels. Here we combine large-scale datasets capturing science, policy, and their interactions, to systematically examine the partisan differences in the use, production, and funding of science in the United States. We find that the use of science in policy documents has featured a roughly 75 percent increase over the last 25 years, highlighting science’s growing relevance in policymaking. However, the pronounced increase masks stark and systematic partisan differences in the amount, content, and character of science used in policy. Democratic-controlled congressional committees and left-leaning think tanks cite substantially more science, and more impactful science, compared to their Republican and right-leaning counterparts. Moreover, the two factions cite substantively different science, with partisans citing the same papers less than half as often as expected from a null model. Indeed, partisans cite notably different science from each other even when they are addressing the same policy area. We find that the uncovered large partisan disparities are rather universal across time, scientific fields, policy institutions, and issue areas, and are not simply driven by differing policy agendas. Probing potential mechanisms, we field an original survey of over 3,000 political elites and policymakers, finding substantial partisan differences in trust toward scientists and scientific institutions, potentially contributing to the observed disparities in science use. Some of the differences we observe in partisan policymakers use of science may be driven by supply-side factors, as we observe substantive differences in the topics that scientists with different partisan affiliations themselves produce. This result is robust across all fields of science. Finally, using novel federal account-level appropriations data we demonstrate that between 1980-2020, Republicans have funded science and research related accounts at a higher level than their democratic counterparts. These results are not restricted to the Department of Defense, but rather are spread across multiple agencies, with Republican control of the House of Representatives being particularly influential in higher levels of science funding.

About the speaker series:
The CIRSS Friday Speaker Series continues in Fall with a new theme of "Studying Science Scientifically: State of the Art and Prospects for the Science of Science.”   With increasingly rich data sources, exciting new technologies for understanding natural language, and modeling methodologies adapted from diverse domains of scholarship, the opportunities to observe, measure, and model the structure and dynamics of the scientific enterprise abound as never before. We are inviting some of the leading thinkers and most innovative researchers to present at this talk series to illustrate the breadth of advances that have been made, and the many more yet to be made. 

We meet most Fridays, 11am-noon Central time, on Zoom.  Everyone is welcome to attend.  More information, including upcoming speaker schedule and links to recordings, is available on the series website.  For weekly updates on upcoming talks, subscribe to our CIRSS Seminars mailing list.  Our Fall series is led by Timothy McPhillips and Yuanxi Fu, and supported by the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) and the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.