Left-Wing Bias Is Corrupting Sociology

"For every Republican in the field [of sociology], there are 44 registered Democrats. Nearly one in five sociology professors identifies as far left — more than quadruple the rate in economics and more than double the rate in political science or psychology....

My research considered two important benchmarks of research integrity: transparency and rigor, both hallmarks of “open science.” Born out of psychology’s replication crisis in the 2010s, the open-science movement is an effort to make scholars practice what they have always preached. There is nothing new about the expectation for scientific research to be transparent and reproducible. However, in reality, many fields of inquiry have failed to live up to that basic standard. As a remedy, the adherents to the open-science movement have promoted novel practices, such as research preregistration, that reduce temptations for “p-hacking,” “data dredging,” and other questionable styles of research. At the very minimum, scholars are expected to share the data and code used in their research so the results can be independently verified.

Economics, psychology, and political science have embraced these reforms enthusiastically. The American Economic Review and other leading economics journals require replication packages for every empirical article. Political-science journals have adopted mandatory verification policies. Sociology, by contrast, scores far lower on the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) metric — an institutional measure designed by the Center for Open Science that tracks whether journals actually enforce these practices. Its average score is less than one, compared to between four and six in peer disciplines (economics, political science, and psychology)...."