A new study by James Manzi of the U.K.’s Oxford University has now confirmed what everyday Americans have seen for themselves at college and university campuses across the country.
His paper, The ideological orientation of academic social science research 1960–2024 (March 16, 2026) examined whether a leftist viewpoint predominates in certain disciplines of higher education. Earlier studies show that over the last several decades, American university and college faculties have “disproportionately self-identif[ied]” as broadly left-of-center relative to the general public, and an “overall body of research also generally agrees that humanities and social sciences faculties are further to the left than those in other disciplines.” The issue Manzi examined was the extent to which these scholars’ orientation was measurable in their “research output.”
He selected eleven social science disciplines (anthropology, communications, criminology, economics, ethnic studies, gender studies, political science, psychology, public administration, public health, and sociology). Using the OpenAlex database and its metadata, he analyzed and scored approximately 600,000 English-language social science abstracts published between 1960 and 2024, using a 2025 U.S. ideological spectrum based on eleven points between “far right” (scored as 0), to neutral or “centrist” (5) to “far left” (scored 10).
Manzi’s key findings were first, that almost all (“roughly 90 percent”) of politically relevant social science articles in the 1960–2024 timeframe leaned left, and the mean political stance of every social science discipline he examined “was left-of-center every year during the period.” Topping the list were gender studies and ethnic studies (scoring 7.6 and 7.4, respectively); public health (mean score 6.6), public administration (6.3), and criminology (6.2) all scored left of center as well. The least left-leaning score, 5.7, was for economics. Significantly, these “consistently left-of-center disciplinary averages were driven less by the prevalence of far-left viewpoints than they were by the near absence of right-of-center works in most disciplines.” The political imbalance – the vacuum on the right-of-center – invariably skewed everything leftwards.
Trendwise, every discipline (already left-of-center) showed further leftward movement between 1990 and 2024, and disciplines that scored higher on leftward orientation also generally displayed greater ideological/ political homogeneity.
This study provides “the first systematic, cross-disciplinary evidence of the long-run political orientation” of social science scholarship and reveals “both the persistence and the intensification of its leftward tendencies.” The absence of any centrist viewpoints, never mind any actually right-leaning biases, is a disturbing indication of how ideological orientation bleeds over into academic research, including disciplines that are very often influential in justifying gun control measures.
The field of public health, for one, has been increasingly used to advance the theory of violent crime as an “epidemic” driven by access to firearms, with the “cure” being more gun control. In 2024, one glaring example was a gun control advocacy document titled, Firearm Violence: A Public Health Crisis in America, issued by the Biden Administration’s U.S. Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy. It wasn’t until President Donald Trump took office that Murthy’s anti-gun tract was scrubbed from the official Department of Health and Human Services website, ending the conflation of gun control and public health at the federal government level. The effort to paint gun control as a necessary public health intervention continues nonetheless: last year, for instance, saw the publication of a guns-cause-cavities study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
The same empirically tenuous science has been used to rationalize gun control in the context of other leftist hobbyhorses, like climate change (Firearm violence and climate change represent intersecting public health crises in the United States, here, and Brady United’s Will Climate Change Increase Gun Violence?).
The ideological left (whether leftist, progressive, radical left or far left) has reliably championed ever more civilian gun control, and “science” is simply a convenient tool to justify such measures. Former President Joe Biden, which the study pegs at “center left” (score of 6), was the most anti-Second Amendment President ever. Biden, while not a “progressive” like Elizabeth Warren (score of 7) or “leftist” (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, at 8), consistently sought to impose bans on the manufacture and sale of “assault weapons” and “high capacity” magazines, a repeal of the bipartisan Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, the greater implementation of “red flag” laws, increased background checks for private firearm transfers, and other restrictions.
For Americans, the disciplines the study examined represent a worrying liberal echo chamber that played, and continues to play, a role in shaping what are considered to be acceptable worldviews. The implication for America’s gun owners is more specific. Biden’s “center left” gun control is the least one can expect from the ideological left, and a more extreme anti-freedom agenda may lie ahead, no doubt supported by this type of scientifically-slanted “scholarship.”
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