Political ideology and innovation

Gaia Dossi and Marta Morando

CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: We study the role of political ideology for a critical group of economic agents: inventors. We document that, in "politically polarizing" fields, inventors patent innovations aligned with their political beliefs. We construct a novel dataset matching data from the US Patent Office (USPTO) with individual Voter Register data for two large US states, and with the universe of US campaign contributions data. We proxy political ideology with individual party affiliation and focus on fields where the ideological distance between Republicans and Democrats is especially large in the general population. We find that, compared to Republicans, Democrats are: i) more likely to file green patents; ii) more likely to file female-health patents, and this persists in the sub-set of male inventors; and iii) less likely to file weapon-related patents. The magnitudes are large and range from one-fourth to one-third of total patent production in these technologies. This pattern is explained by inventors sorting into firms, rather than by within-firm dynamics. Socio-economic status, geography, or differential reactions to monetary incentives cannot explain our findings. Importantly, ideological sorting persists in research organizations, suggesting that inventors may derive intrinsic utility from producing innovation aligned with their beliefs. We rationalize our findings using a stylized model of the labor market where inventors derive amenity value from producing innovation close to their political ideology.

Keywords: political ideology; innovation; inventors (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-12-19
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ino, nep-pol and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp1969.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:cep:cepdps:dp1969

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().