Call for examples of politically-biased research

We're looking for examples of politically-biased research in social science. The fields we're most interested in are political psychology, social psychology, developmental psychology, and economics, but any example from social science would be appreciated. Please send them to [email protected].

A canonical form of bias would be cases where the researchers embed their political ideologies into their research and papers. There are some examples in this paper, and more here.

Most uses of scales like Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) would likely be good examples, especially when they're linked to conservatism without disclosure of where conservatives place on the scales (as far as we know, most conservatives don't endorse the items, don't score above the midpoint on SDO or RWA.)

We'd love to learn about any other caricature scales, with properties similar to RWA and SDO – that is, scales with extreme or cartoonish items that participants rarely endorse.

Additionally, any scale that has the following characteristics would be worth sending along:

• Only a small minority of participants positively endorse the beliefs or possess the traits (score above the midpoint), say fewer than 20%
• The scale or construct has a derogatory label like SDO and RWA. In our field, a good test would be whether a leftist would consider it an unfavorable quality.

In the above case, assuming general population samples, it's mathematically likely that most conservatives will not endorse the relevant views. We are especially interested in those cases, where conservatives are linked to views or traits that most of them do not hold or possess.

If there are any caricature scales that are written from a conservative perspective, we'd love to have them as well. We assume the examples of bias in most social sciences will be cases of left-wing bias, given the fact that leftists dominate most of these fields, but we're interested in any kind of political bias. (We wouldn't be surprised, for example, to find conservative or libertarian biases in some economics work.)

The key feature is the presence of ideological tenets and value judgments in the research itself, either explicit or implicit, in labels, items, and so forth.