Research A 40-year study finds higher science funding under Republicans

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https://www.psypost.org/a-40-year-study-...publicans/

INTRO: A sweeping 40-year analysis of United States government spending reveals that federal science and research programs received more funding when Republicans controlled the House of Representatives and the presidency. The new research, which challenges common assumptions about political support for science, was published in the journal Science.

The study was motivated by a need to better understand the relationship between political power and science funding in an era of increasing polarization. The United States government is the largest single funder of research in the world, and its investments set a precedent for other nations. Scientific progress often requires decades of consistent support, a timeline that can conflict with the short-term nature of political cycles.

While high-profile political battles over funding for specific fields like climate science or gun violence research have occurred, there has been no systematic, large-scale evidence showing how partisan control broadly affects the full scope of federal science investment over time. Researchers sought to fill this gap... (MORE - details)

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Nationalism incentivizes people to outpace geopolitical rivals. Republicans are largely the only nationalists in the US.

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INTRO: A sweeping 40-year analysis of United States government spending reveals that federal science and research programs received more funding when Republicans controlled the House of Representatives and the presidency. The new research, which challenges common assumptions about political support for science...

Does this reach back to the Cold War? During the 1980's, the Reagan administration absolutely threw money at science and engineering. It's a big part of what made Silicon Valley the juggernaut that it was for the next few decades. Remember what the democrats derisively dismissed as "Star Wars"? For a few years there, all the engineers in California were working on exotic classified programs like giant lasers, hypersonic airplanes and particle beam weapons. This place was absolutely crawling with KGB spies.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, all those engineers didn't lose a beat and went on to create the internet and personal computing. Of course it couldn't last and it deflated when "Tech" stopped meaning engineering and started to mean e-business. Hardware took second place to content as MSEEs were replaced by MBAs.

The study was motivated by a need to better understand the relationship between political power and science funding in an era of increasing polarization.

Back in the 20th century, science was largely speaking apolitical. Obviously it could be used for political ends (see paragraphs immediately above) but the contents and the results of the science remained pretty much free of political bias. Whether it was the US or Russia, mechanical engineers employed the same principles. During the early 21'st century that changed.

While high-profile political battles over funding for specific fields like climate science or gun violence research have occurred

Climate science is an interesting case. Ostensibly it's a 'hard' natural science supposedly immune from political distortion. But once it became conscripted to justify a massive worldwide cultural, social and economic transformation away from industrialism (in the West anyway, not in China) in favor of some utopian 'eco-friendly' post-industrial paradise, it became impossible for anyone who disagreed with the social change program to be admitted into a climate science doctoral program, or graduate once admitted, or be hired after graduating, or receive tenure after being hired, or be published after receiving tenure. What was still ostensibly a hard natural science (with all the social prestige resulting from that) became an echo-chamber populated disproportionately by activists.

The result was something like sociology, economics, political philosophy and history in Russia during communism, when it was impossible to practice those subjects except through a Marxist lens.

We've seen similar political conscription attempts in public health, immunology and even virology, post-Covid. Attempts to shape entire disciplines so that they only produce desired results to serve predetermined ends.

Gun violence research is something else. That's the domain of sociology, a "social science" very unlike the natural sciences. The social sciences, since their invention in the 19th century, have always been about left-inspired social change agendas. The idea was that if the impressive success of Newtonian physics, engineering and the natural sciences could just be directed towards society and social change, all sorts of atavistic obscurantism could be swept away and a paradise of progress could finally be created. The "social sciences" have always had a political program.

So fast forward to the age of Trump. What we see now is skepticism towards the most politicized (ostensible) sciences, along with calls to reduce their funding. NASA whines about reductions to their science budget, but those cuts could be minimized simply by trimming their huge climate change research budget and directing those funds back towards space and aviation research, the agency's original purpose. Funding for the "social sciences" is slashed, but do any those subjects really justify the money spent on them? (San Francisco is awash in social workers, but has their presence been accompanied by any improvements on the streets? Just the reverse.)

Meanwhile, I hope to see corresponding increases to more traditional STEM subjects that don't exist to serve a particular political program.

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Does this reach back to the Cold War?

According to the study:

Here we leverage a comprehensive database of appropriations—the funding levels denoted in statute and directly set by policy-makers—to capture federal support for science from 1980 to 2020.

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The role of political parties in the shaping of scientific inquiry
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1099483

EXCERPTS: Although scholarship has demonstrated the inextricability of the history of science from the histories of industry and politics, little attention has been paid to the role of political parties in the shaping of scientific inquiry.

A new article in Isis, “The Political Elaboration on Science and Technology of the Italian Communist Party Between the 1960s and the 1980s,” investigates how political parties mediate social change and scientific progress, using the Partito Comunista Italiano as its object of analysis.

[...] In spite of its hierarchical structure, the PCI became a place where senior scientists, young nontenured scientists, politicians and policymakers, technicians, and workers freely debated. Different positions coexisted, but the prevailing one stressed that science was not neutral.

According to this view, the devastation of environment, the arms race, and the compression of workers’ role in factories were not the results of a “neutral” science, but rather those of the development of a military-oriented and consumerist science. The party’s collective reflection on the “non-neutrality” of science led the party leader, Enrico Berlinguer, to formulate the “austerity policy” as a way to give workers back their centrality in productive processes and at the same time establish a non-colonial relation with the Global South.

In the 1970s, when the global oil crisis spurred a panic over energy dependence, tension emerged within the party regarding the construction of nuclear power plants. Although nuclear energy presented a cleaner alternative to oil, and one that would reduce the extraction of resources from the Global South, the nuclear pollution posed an even greater problem. Moreover, the security required to monitor nuclear power sites would mean the increased militarization of the whole Italian society, the construction of an “atomic state” like in the postwar United States.

With the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s and the fall of the Soviet Union, the orientation of the PCI shifted from communism to social democracy and the party changed its name. But these dialogues demonstrate the nature of political parties as “places where ideas are debated, formed, and elaborated,” and remain as a record of the PCI’s efforts to couple science with radical ends.

By framing science within the structure of global inequality, Cozzoli concludes, the PCI aligned themselves with the growing movement in the history of science to recognize contributions and people that have previously gone overlooked... (MORE - details, no ads)