2025/01/18 by Roderik Rekker · 1 voice · 2 citations
Social Sciences · #Social Media and Politics #Climate Change Communication and Perception #Misinformation and Its Impacts
paper · doi:10.1177/09636625241306352
Citizens’ trust in science increasingly depends on their political leaning. Structural equation models on survey data from 10 European countries ( N = 5306) demonstrate that this science polarization can be captured by a model with four levels of generalization. Voters of populist parties distrust the system and elite in general, which indirectly fuels a broad science skepticism. At another level, right-wingers have less trust in science as a whole than left-wingers. After accounting for this general skepticism, left-wingers and right-wingers are, however, similarly prone to contest ideology-incongruent research fields and specific claims . These findings have three implications. First, research on science skepticism should carefully consider all four levels and their interplay. Second, the science polarization between populist and non-populist voters has fundamentally different origins than the effect of left–right ideology. Third, a four-level model can expose ideological symmetries in science rejection that have previously remained largely undetected in observational studies.