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Social scientists’ testimony before Congress in the United States between 1946-2016, trends from a new dataset
Congressional hearings are a venue in which social scientists present their views and analyses before lawmakers in the United States, however quantitative data on their representation has been lacking. We present new, publicly available, data on the rates at which anthropologists, economists, politi...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Public Library of Science
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7094826/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32210428 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0230104 |
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author | Maher, Thomas V. Seguin, Charles Zhang, Yongjun Davis, Andrew P. |
author_facet | Maher, Thomas V. Seguin, Charles Zhang, Yongjun Davis, Andrew P. |
author_sort | Maher, Thomas V. |
collection | PubMed |
description | Congressional hearings are a venue in which social scientists present their views and analyses before lawmakers in the United States, however quantitative data on their representation has been lacking. We present new, publicly available, data on the rates at which anthropologists, economists, political scientists, psychologists, and sociologists appeared before United States congressional hearings from 1946 through 2016. We show that social scientists were present at some 10,347 hearings and testified 15,506 times. Economists testify before the US Congress far more often than other social scientists, and constitute a larger proportion of the social scientists testifying in industry and government positions. We find that social scientists’ testimony is increasingly on behalf of think tanks; political scientists, in particular, have gained much more representation through think tanks. Sociology, and psychology’s representation before Congress has declined considerably beginning in the 1980s. Anthropologists were the least represented. These findings show that academics are representing a more diverse set of organizations, but economists continue to be far more represented than other disciplines before the US Congress. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7094826 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | Public Library of Science |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-70948262020-04-03 Social scientists’ testimony before Congress in the United States between 1946-2016, trends from a new dataset Maher, Thomas V. Seguin, Charles Zhang, Yongjun Davis, Andrew P. PLoS One Research Article Congressional hearings are a venue in which social scientists present their views and analyses before lawmakers in the United States, however quantitative data on their representation has been lacking. We present new, publicly available, data on the rates at which anthropologists, economists, political scientists, psychologists, and sociologists appeared before United States congressional hearings from 1946 through 2016. We show that social scientists were present at some 10,347 hearings and testified 15,506 times. Economists testify before the US Congress far more often than other social scientists, and constitute a larger proportion of the social scientists testifying in industry and government positions. We find that social scientists’ testimony is increasingly on behalf of think tanks; political scientists, in particular, have gained much more representation through think tanks. Sociology, and psychology’s representation before Congress has declined considerably beginning in the 1980s. Anthropologists were the least represented. These findings show that academics are representing a more diverse set of organizations, but economists continue to be far more represented than other disciplines before the US Congress. Public Library of Science 2020-03-25 /pmc/articles/PMC7094826/ /pubmed/32210428 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0230104 Text en © 2020 Maher et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Research Article Maher, Thomas V. Seguin, Charles Zhang, Yongjun Davis, Andrew P. Social scientists’ testimony before Congress in the United States between 1946-2016, trends from a new dataset |
title | Social scientists’ testimony before Congress in the United States between 1946-2016, trends from a new dataset |
title_full | Social scientists’ testimony before Congress in the United States between 1946-2016, trends from a new dataset |
title_fullStr | Social scientists’ testimony before Congress in the United States between 1946-2016, trends from a new dataset |
title_full_unstemmed | Social scientists’ testimony before Congress in the United States between 1946-2016, trends from a new dataset |
title_short | Social scientists’ testimony before Congress in the United States between 1946-2016, trends from a new dataset |
title_sort | social scientists’ testimony before congress in the united states between 1946-2016, trends from a new dataset |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7094826/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32210428 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0230104 |
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