Original title: Science under Threat? A Natural Experiment in Economics
Dominic Rohner, Oliver Vanden Eynde, Philine Widmer · August 2026
Academic freedom is under growing strain worldwide. To see how political pressure affects researchers, economists studied a real-world event: the U.S. government published a blacklistA list of words that the government flagged as potentially problematic. of flagged wordsWords that the government listed as suspect. in early 2025. Researchers tracked whether economists stopped using those words. The shift worked through financial dependence: universities that rely heavily on federal money felt the pressure most. When the list came out, economists at these heavily funded schools sharply reduced their use of the flagged terms. They changed their actual paper content, not just their wording, pulling back on topics tied to gender, race, and environment. Scholars at less dependent schools or UK institutions did not react the same way. The results show that researchers respond strongly to political pressure.
You are a student in a class. The teacher posts a list of topics that are 'off-limits' for discussion. You start avoiding those topics in your essays, even though the teacher never said you couldn't write about them. Here, the U.S. government's blacklist is like that teacher's list, and the economists are the students who stop using those words in their research papers.
When the U.S. government flagged certain words as suspect, economists at federally funded universities dropped those words from their papers. The effect was strongest for topics like gender, race, and environment. This suggests that political pressure can shape what researchers publish, even without explicit censorship.
The abstract doesn't say. The study focuses only on economics and on a single U.S. government blacklist from early 2025. It cannot say whether similar effects occur in other fields or countries, or whether the effect persists beyond the immediate period. The analysis does not establish whether the word changes actually affect policy or public discourse.
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Science under Threat? A Natural Experiment in Economics — Dominic Rohner, Oliver Vanden Eynde, Philine Widmer
Abstract licence: CC0
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.