Academic Capture

Is Social Science Research Politically Biased?

In new research, Matthew C. Ringgenberg, Chong Shu, and Ingrid M. Werner ask if academic research exhibits political slants. They develop a new measure of the political slant of research and study how it varies by discipline, demographics, and the political party of the sitting United States president. Finally, they show that their measure is related to the researchers' personal political ideology, suggestive of an ideological echo chamber in social science research.

Event Notes: Academic Bias Under the Microscope

That scholarship often reflects conscious and unconscious biases has long been an open secret in academia. On April 22, Professors Christian Leuz, Anat Admati,...

The Uber Files Reveal The Risk of Private Interests Controlling Our Data

Researchers discovered that the introduction of Uber had negative impacts on transportation, findings that required cooperation with public authorities when Uber refused to share...

“Uber Has Higher Prices and Worse Service Than the Taxi Industry Had Ten Years Ago”

Following the Uber Files leaks, transportation expert Hubert Horan explains why Uber is “hopelessly uneconomic” and how its engagement with policymakers and academics aided...

Relationships With Academics at the Center of the Uber Files Revelations 

The Guardian’s exposé on Uber’s strategy of engaging with top academic researchers to produce corporate-friendly research calls to mind concerns regarding academic lobbying and...

Academic Gatekeepers, Real and Imagined, Are Threatening the Credibility of the Field of Political Finance 


One objective of political finance is to hold power to account. However, gatekeeping, both direct and indirect, is keeping important work from being conducted...

A Call for Comments: Have You Been Affected by Academic Gatekeeping?

On Friday, ProMarket published a piece by Renée Adams about the impact of academic gatekeeping in political finance. Do you have a similar story...

“This Isn’t the Kind of Journalism That Serves Democracy Best”: How Place and Privilege Came to Define American News

In an interview with ProMarket, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign professor Nikki Usher discusses how news in the US came to be produced and...

Iowa’s “Butter-Margarine War”: T. W. Schultz’s Fight for Academic Freedom

During the Second World War, economists at Iowa State College published a pamphlet titled “Putting Dairying on a War Footing,” which would later come...

Why Big Tech Companies Should Engage With Academia, and Why They Don’t

“Academic engagement” of a Big Tech firm: that job should exist. But it has not happened, and it probably won’t happen, unless we get...

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