Polarized Technologies

Gaia Dossi and Marta Morando

No 26064, RFBerlin Discussion Paper Series from ROCKWOOL Foundation Berlin (RFBerlin)

Abstract: We link U.S. patent and inventor records to individual voter register files and map politically polarized policy issues to related technologies. Compared to Republicans, Democrats are one-third more likely to patent technologies addressing climate-change mitigation or women's reproductive health, and one-third less likely to patent weapons and related technologies. These gaps are not explained by differences in inventive ability or by sorting across organizations or teams. Party-technology alignment has strengthened over the past two decades, a period of rising political polarization in U.S. society. Technology diffusion is also politically polarized: Democrats are more likely than Republicans to cite aligned technologies and less likely to cite misaligned ones. Together, these findings are consistent with political polarization and societal views being important drivers of the direction and diffusion of technological change and operating, at least in part, through inventors' technology choices, with implications for innovation policy.

Keywords: Diffusion; Innovation; Partisanship; Polarization; Technology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 I10 J24 O31 O33 O44 P00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-03
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