The evolution of partisan political attitudes towards research: a comparative investigation

Over the last decades, research policy and the role of research in policy has undergone major changes in OECD countries. In the decades following WWII, the primary concern of research policy in most countries was to expand access to higher education and funding for research. During these decades, control over universities and the mode of research funding was not subject of major reform. From the 80s and onward, the growth in the expansion of education and public funding of research slowed down. Around the same time, OECD countries started to introduce university autonomy reforms and output-based performance monitoring and funding. The rapid growth of research funding, led to increasing expectations towards the capability of research to solve societal problems, and research became increasingly important in the development of policies in other policy-areas, as observed through increasing reliance on scientific expertise in policy-making processes. Although these general trends are observable in many countries, there is considerable variation in the content of research policy reforms, use of research in policymaking, and political expectations towards research. According to recent literature, partisan politics may contribute to explaining this variation, since parties systematically differ in their attitudes to the control and utilization of research. This literature either focus on partisan political positions in recent decades, or on how partisan politics affect the use of expert commissions. Thus, we lack a clear picture of the historical importance of partisan politics for major changes in research policy and the historical evolution of political attitudes towards the use of research in policy. To address these shortcomings, this paper asks; How did variation in partisan political attitudes towards research policy and research in policy-statements, expressed in party manifestos and parliamentary debates, evolve from the 70s and onward. To answer this question, I will utilize a combination of qualitative and quantitative content analysis. In an initial stage, I utilize qualitative content analysis to identify text-segments of a sample of party manifestos and minutes from parliamentary debates that are relevant to the research question. In a second stage, I utilize this content analysis to assess to what extent relevant segments of text can be automatically identified utilizing supervised learning methods using a combination of regular expression and other features, and to extract relevant text. This stage determines my population of interest. Therefore, a final sample will be selected at this stage. In the final stage of my analysis. I conduct a qualitative content analysis of my sample, distinguishing between expectations to research, research as warrants for policy and research policy. To code research policy, I will follow Jungblut’s (2016) approach, emitting policy-statements solely concerned with the organization and provision of university education. Furthermore, I will code which issue areas policy-expectations are directed towards, and in which issue-areas policy is used as a policy input. Thus, this analysis seeks to put future research in a position to address whether and how partisan politics matter for research policy and research in policy.