Politicized Scientists: Credibility cost of political expression on Twitter

Eleonora Alabrese, Francesco Capozza and Prashant Garg

No 2025-09, Discussion Papers from Nottingham Interdisciplinary Centre for Economic and Political Research (NICEP)

Abstract: As social media is increasingly popular, we examine the reputational costs of its increased centrality among academics. Analyzing posts of 98,000 scientists on Twitter (2016–2022) reveals substantial and varied political discourse. We assess the impact of such online political expression with online experiments on a representative sample of 3,700 U.S. respondents and 135 journalists who rate vignettes of synthetic academic profiles with varied political affiliations. Politically neutral scientists are viewed as the most credible. Strikingly, on both the ’left’ and ’right’ sides of politically neutral, there is a monotonic penalty for scientists displaying political affiliations: the stronger their posts, the less credible their profile and research are perceived, and the lower the public’s will¬ingness to read their content, especially among oppositely aligned respondents. A survey of 128 scientists shows awareness of this penalty and a consensus on avoiding political expression outside their expertise.

Date: 2025
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-pol and nep-sog
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/nicep ... ers/2025/2025-09.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:not:notnic:2025-09

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Nottingham Interdisciplinary Centre for Economic and Political Research (NICEP) School of Economics University of Nottingham University Park Nottingham NG7 2RD. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Hilary Hughes ().