&gt; Jonathan Haidt has shown[1] that non-economics social sciences skew more than 14-1 liberal to conservative (and that universities have not always been so skewed).<p>This seems to be measured by &quot;Democrat&quot; vs. &quot;Republican&quot;. An alternative hypothesis is that mainstream American political views have skewed strongly towards the right in recent decades, but that shift did not touch the academy, and also that America became more prominent in research in recent decades (so more researchers labeled themselves by American political parties).<p>Anecdotally, it seems like there&#x27;s a liberal&#x2F;conservative split <i>within the Democratic party</i>, exemplified by Sanders&#x2F;Hillary. I wonder what you get if you figure out some good way to quantify that, and then redo the statistics.<p>This is only frightening if you think that there&#x27;s a lot of ideological conformity within the label &quot;Democrat&quot;, or that the <i>specific ideologies</i> with the label &quot;Republican&quot; need representation. There are probably good arguments for those, but they&#x27;re not completely obvious.