Social scientists' testimony before Congress in the United States between 1946-2016, trends from a new dataset

PLoS One. 2020 Mar 25;15(3):e0230104. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0230104. eCollection 2020.

Abstract

Congressional hearings are a venue in which social scientists present their views and analyses before lawmakers in the United States, however quantitative data on their representation has been lacking. We present new, publicly available, data on the rates at which anthropologists, economists, political scientists, psychologists, and sociologists appeared before United States congressional hearings from 1946 through 2016. We show that social scientists were present at some 10,347 hearings and testified 15,506 times. Economists testify before the US Congress far more often than other social scientists, and constitute a larger proportion of the social scientists testifying in industry and government positions. We find that social scientists' testimony is increasingly on behalf of think tanks; political scientists, in particular, have gained much more representation through think tanks. Sociology, and psychology's representation before Congress has declined considerably beginning in the 1980s. Anthropologists were the least represented. These findings show that academics are representing a more diverse set of organizations, but economists continue to be far more represented than other disciplines before the US Congress.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
  • Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

MeSH terms

  • Anthropology / statistics & numerical data*
  • Datasets as Topic
  • Government*
  • Humans
  • Industry
  • Policy Making*
  • Politics*
  • Psychology / statistics & numerical data*
  • Public Health / economics*
  • Social Sciences / statistics & numerical data*
  • Time Factors
  • United States

Grants and funding

CS University of Arizona CS TM National Science Foundation #1824092 https://www.nsf.gov/ Publication of this article was funded in part by Purdue University Libraries Open Access Publishing Fund. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.