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🚨 Our latest paper is out today in Science! We uncover stark and systematic partisan differences in the amount, content, and character of science used in policy, which mirror differences in political elites’ trust in science. Four years in the making. Led by Zander Furnas 1/n

ok, but maybe it's a more recent phenomenon, given the rising political polarization. Nope. These trends are stable over time, suggesting that the low degree of bipartisan engagement with science is a longstanding but previously unknown feature of the US policy landscape. 7/

Do they at least cite substantively similar papers to inform their policy? Not really. We use deep-learning methods to project papers onto an embedding space. For the same committee but under diff party control, we see they draw from many distinctive clusters of science. 8/

ok. but maybe for the same committee, they focus on different issues or topics. Nope. we see that for policy documents that are highly similar to each other, the science they cite predictably differs. And this highlights a problem: 9/

Evidence-based policymaking in its idealized form synthesizes all relevant arguments and evidence. Yet committees in Congress and ideological think tanks do not appear to create these broad syntheses, instead citing substantively different science when working on the same issue.

To further unpack whether this is solely due to differing positions, we move beyond comparing the two factions and instead compare them with a third, common reference point: science itself. Ds tend to cite the kind of science that scientists themselves consider important 11/

We offer among the first empirical evidence on the partisan differences in the trust of science among political elites, suggesting that the differential attitudes toward science may partly explain the observed partisan differences in the use of science in policy. 13/

These findings must be interpreted with care. There are numerous additional analyses in the paper and many nuances and discussions on how to interpret these findings. Check out the paper: science.org/doi/10.1126/sc… and an extensive SM: science.org/doi/suppl/10.1… 14/