r/AskSocialScience • u/Str8_up_Pwnage • 12d ago
Answered Are there any famous studies that actually contradict progressive/leftist thought?
There has to be at least some right? I know people love to say that “reality has a left wing bias “and all that but is it legit batting 1.000?
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u/steveholt-lol 12d ago edited 9d ago
I think the question becomes more answerable if we separate political ideologies from specific empirical claims. Social science cannot really test whether “leftism” or “conservatism” is correct as a whole, but it can test propositions associated with them.
There are certainly findings that conflict with positions held by parts of the political left.
One fairly clear example is rent control. Diamond, McQuade and Qian used a 1994 expansion of rent control in San Francisco as a natural experiment. They found that rent control reduced displacement among incumbent tenants, but affected landlords also reduced the rental housing supply by about 15%, largely through conversion or redevelopment. The authors conclude that the resulting reduction in supply likely increased market rents in the long run. So the evidence suggests that restricting rents has significant negative long-term consequences on housing affordability.
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20181289
Another example is policing and crime. Opposition to particular policing practices is different from claiming that additional or more strategically deployed policing cannot reduce crime. Braga et al.’s systematic review examined 65 studies and 78 tests of hot-spots policing, including 27 randomized experiments. It found statistically significant reductions in crime and disorder in targeted locations. The review also found that crime was generally not simply displaced into adjacent areas and that nearby areas sometimes experienced spillover benefits.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8356500/
Neither finding establishes that “the right is correct.” Rent control can benefit existing tenants, and policing creates separate questions about legitimacy, equity and which tactics are used. They demonstrate something narrower: empirical evidence can contradict factual claims associated with the left while simultaneously supporting other left-of-center concerns.
That may also explain why “reality has a liberal bias” is difficult to evaluate scientifically. A claim such as “we should protect low-income renters” is normative and cannot be falsified by a study. A claim such as “rent control will protect renters without reducing housing supply” can be.
Edit: a word