Toward a Conservative Social Science

By Jesse Smith, November 10, 2025

While left-leaning ideological imbalance can be found in most sectors of higher education, its consequences are especially pronounced in the social sciences. These fields deal with issues of human nature, social structure, and historical explanation, questions inseparable from matters of political controversy. Partisan skew among social scientists thus introduces substantial risk that research programs will be partial or distorted in ways that systematically amplify progressive understandings of social reality and minimize their conservative counterparts. The most effective strategy to alleviate these concerns is to establish a conservative social science.  

To see why this is necessary, we must first consider the mechanisms by which the partisan commitments of psychologists, sociologists, or political scientists shape their research practices. First, these commitments affect what sorts of questions researchers are inclined to ask. For instance, the research literature on racial inequality is extensive, while comparatively little attention has been given to the formative or integrative effects of military service. As a matter of social science, we know a lot more about phenomena that matter to progressives than conservatives. 

Second, partisan commitments inform the tacit assumptions underlying research programs, from the development of hypotheses through the design of research instruments and interpretation of results. This concern, which I have described elsewhere as paradigmatic progressivism, is especially consequential in part because it often operates outside the awareness even of social scientists themselves.

In short, our understanding of social reality is heavily constrained, and sometimes distorted, by ideological imbalance in social science. If these disciplines are to effectively carry out their function of delivering reliable and useful insights about the societies they study, reform is in order.

A common proposal to this effect is renewed commitment to objectivity. Social scientists, it is argued, can do good, unbiased work if only they commit to keeping their partisanship in check. But this solution is partial at best. Philosophers broadly agree that values and science cannot be fully disentangled, least of all in the social sciences. The practice of science involves thousands of decisions from the macro (“What should I study?”) to the micro (“How should I phrase this survey question?”). There is no single “objective” answer to such questions, so social scientists inevitably lean on their personal judgments, which in turn reflect potentially partisan values. The presence of values is unavoidable and does not inherently compromise research programs, but can do so if the range of values represented in the practice of research is too selective.

To address a functionally progressive social science, then, depoliticization is not sufficient either in principle or practice. The corrective needed today, rather, is a conservative social science.

Before explaining what this means, it is crucial to clarify what it does not mean. It is not a proposal for social science to begin from right-wing conclusions and then find evidence to support them. It is not for social science to intentionally align its claims with the platform of the GOP. Nor is it to impose categories on social reality that redescribe it in partisan terms, applying some right-wing equivalent of “white supremacy” or “the carceral state.” It is not, in short, a social science that simply reproduces the problems of existing ideological imbalance, but with the opposite partisan valence.

Rather, a conservative social science is one that can work in tandem with existing progressive paradigms, providing triangulated perspectives by applying a conservative lens to the study of society. The lens is a useful analogy for the theoretical frameworks through which researchers view their subjects. Microscopes, telescopes, X-rays, and heat vision each reveal aspects of reality that differ from both one another and the naked eye.  Yet each is valid in its own fashion. 

Similarly, a conservative social science would provide a lens that formulates questions or perceives phenomena in a way informed by the resources of the conservative intellectual tradition. It would reflect sensibilities regarding the value of tradition, the necessity and fragility of social order, and the recognition of social goods other than equity (such as opportunity or meaning). This perspective might correlate with political conservativism, but would not be bound by partisan commitments or circumstances. It would rather observe Max Weber’s distinction of science and politics as fundamentally different activities.

Though this formulation is abstract, it is not difficult to identify concrete research areas where progressive dominance constrains or undermines knowledge, and a conservative perspective would offer a valuable supplement and corrective. The study of the criminal justice system, the welfare state, secularization, family breakdown, political violence, populism, racial inequality, gender relations, and many other topics would all benefit from a close empirical examination through a conservative lens. The development of a conservative social science would produce the dual benefits of a) contributing to a more complete, reliable understanding of the major institutions and trends shaping society, and b) enhancing the overall trustworthiness of the social scientific enterprise for a politically diverse and rightfully suspicious public. Of course, the establishment of a conservative social science nearly ex nihilo is an ambitious proposition. Such an undertaking would require enormous institutional and intellectual resources, as well as long-term commitment, to meaningfully address the present challenges of ideological imbalance. Yet as the will for reform reaches a peak amidst academia’s current crisis, there may not be a better moment to implement reforms that place higher education on stronger ground to weather future trials.