This repository contains anonymized data for a metascientific study on the influence of political preferences on historians' assessments of published history abstracts. The corresponding paper by Louis Schiekiera and Helen Niemeyer has been published as "Political bias in historiography - an experimental investigation of preferences for publication as a function of political orientation" in F1000Reserach.
The scripts are prepared so that the data will be directly loaded from the GitHub repository link without downloading the data manually. Since parts of the data for the main analysis are anonymized because they are sensitive (e.g. age, gender,political orientation), only the descriptive statistics are fully reproducible.
This study examines the influence of political preferences on historians' assessments of the publishability of contemporary history abstracts by investigating whether historians favor abstracts that align with their political orientation.
In an online experiment, 75 historians evaluated 17 fictitious contemporary history abstracts from 17 pairs, each presented with either a progressive or conservative stance. The participants made initial intuitive assessments regarding the publishability of each abstract and later provided more considered responses, also rating their Feeling of Rightness (FOR) regarding their initial judgments.
The results revealed a significant interaction effect between an abstract’s political stance and historians’ political orientation, consistent with the observation that right-wing historians prefer conservative abstracts, left-wing historians prefer progressive abstracts, and moderate historians show no preference for either. Overall, participants preferred progressive abstracts, largely reflecting a majority of left-leaning historians in our sample. Moreover, after reconsidering their responses and providing FOR ratings, participants’ initial decisions did not significantly change.
Our study suggests that political preferences influence research evaluations and are not diminished by more deliberate processing, as demonstrated through the case study of historians.
If you use the data or the code, please cite the paper as follows:
Schiekiera, L., & Niemeyer, H. (2025). Political bias in historiography - an experimental investigation of preferences for publication as a function of political orientation. F1000Research. https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.160170.1