Political Language in Economics

Does political ideology influence economic research? We rely upon purely inductive methods in natural language processing and machine learning to examine patterns of implicit political ideology in economic articles. Using observed political behavior of economists and the phrases from their academic articles, we construct a high-dimensional predictor of political ideology by article, economist, school, and journal. In addition to field, journal, and editor ideology, we look at the correlation of author ideology with magnitudes of reported policy relevant elasticities. Overall our results suggest that there is substantial sorting by ideology into fields, departments, and methodologies, and that political ideology influences the results of economic research. ∗We thank Daron Acemoglu, Navin Kartik, Max Kasy, Rajiv Sethi, Cosma Shalizi, Laurence Wilse-Samson, and seminar audiences at CIFAR, NYU, IAS, University of North Carolina, Columbia Business School, Clemson University, the Santa Fe Institute, and ETH-Zurich for valuable comments and feedback. Natalie Carlson, Goran Laraveski, Natasha Plotkin and Qing Zhang provided excellent research assistance. We thank the AEA and JSTOR for the provision of data and are grateful to the Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Center for Leadership and Ethics for partial funding. All errors are our own.