Science, Space & Foreign Aid: The Three Lopsided Cases

Scientific research: the diploma divide isn't the headline

Of the three items in this chapter, scientific research is the closest to a "normal" spending question — about 40% of Americans, in most recent waves, have said the federal government spends too little on it. The GSS only began asking this question consistently in 2002, so the time series is shorter than for the other items in this book, but the partisan pattern across 20 years is clear.

The topline disguises the partisan structure underneath it.

Two readings of Figure 2 are plausible. The first is that science has become partisan-coded in the way the environment has — Republican voters, taking elite cues from a coalition increasingly skeptical of federal scientific agencies, have moved away from the position they held in the 2000s. The second is that the COVID-19 pandemic and the post-pandemic conflicts over federal public-health authority (the CDC, the NIH, FDA approvals) drove a temporary Republican retreat from science-spending support, which may or may not persist. The data alone cannot distinguish these two stories, but the post-2020 drop is real and is large enough to register as more than noise.

The proposal that became this book described scientific research as a domain where "the diploma divide reinforces the partisan divide." On the data, that is half right.

The college / no-college gap on science spending is 9 points. The party gap on the same item is 19 points. Both gaps are real; the partisan gap is more than twice the size of the educational one. On science spending, party sorts harder than education does. This contradicts the common framing that the diploma divide is the dominant axis on attitudes toward science — it is not, on this measure. The Republican voter without a college degree and the Republican voter with one are closer to each other on science spending than the college Republican is to the college Democrat. Education is a real signal; party is a stronger one.

The ideology view sharpens what Figure 2 already showed.

In 2010, the Liberal and Conservative readings on scientific-research spending were within 2 points of each other — both around 40%. The contemporary 21-point gap is the product of one decade's sorting. Whatever happened to American attitudes toward federal science spending during the 2010s, it was a much faster process than the environmental sorting (which took thirty years; §3.4) or the military sorting (forty years; §3.3). On science, the parties separated during the Trump and Biden administrations specifically.

Space exploration: the Republican lead disappeared

Space exploration is a strange spending item. Almost no one says it is the federal government's highest priority — only 8% said "too little" in 1973, and only 20% do today. But its trajectory has gone up over fifty years, while the partisan structure has shifted in the opposite direction from most items in this book.

For the first decades of the GSS, Republicans were more enthusiastic about space spending than Democrats — by a small but consistent margin. In 1973, Republicans were at 14% saying too little and Democrats at 5% — a 9-point gap, with Republicans leading. The Cold War context, the post-Apollo cultural memory, and the Republican Party's traditional alignment with military-industrial and aerospace constituencies all pulled in the same direction. That structure has now disappeared.

Space is unusual in two ways. First, the topline is rising — in a battery where almost nothing is rising across all major demographic axes simultaneously, space exploration is. Second, the partisan gap has narrowed, not widened. Read together, the two trends suggest a domain that has escaped partisan polarization rather than acquired it. The Mars rovers, the commercial-space-flight industry, the increasingly cross-party fascination with the James Webb telescope and SpaceX — these have produced more support across both coalitions, with no obvious partisan-coding mechanism to attach the issue to one team or the other.

The age structure of space-spending support has shifted in a slow but visible way. In 1973, when the Apollo program was still a live cultural memory but the missions had ended, support for more spending was modest across all age groups. By the 2010s, younger Americans (who came of age during the Shuttle and ISS eras) were notably more pro-space than older Americans (whose Apollo enthusiasm had not extended to the post-Apollo programs). By 2024 the cohorts have largely converged at the new, higher level. Whatever the mechanism, space has not become a generational fight in the way many other spending domains have.

Foreign aid: the only domain where the country agrees we spend too much

Foreign aid is, in survey terms, the strangest item in the GSS spending battery. On most spending questions, "too little" is the most common answer. On foreign aid, "too much" is — by a wide margin, across both parties, for the entire history of the question.

Almost no American thinks the federal government is underfunding foreign aid. The same Americans who, in roughly the same waves, told the GSS that education, health, social security, and crime spending were all too low have consistently said that foreign aid spending — actually less than 1% of the federal budget — was too high. This was true in 1973, true in 2000, and still true in 2024.

The interesting story on foreign aid is not on the "too little" side. It is on the "too much" side, and specifically on what the Democratic coalition has done with the question.

The Republican line on foreign-aid-too-much is one of the most stable single-coalition opinions in the entire GSS. Three-quarters of Republicans said too much in 1973; four-fifths say too much in 2024. Through every decade, through every administration, through every shift in the global foreign-policy environment, the Republican coalition's answer to "is foreign aid too high?" has been some version of yes, by about a 4:1 margin.

The Democratic line is the unusual one. In 1973, Democrats were nearly as foreign-aid-skeptical as Republicans (73% saying too much). By 2018, that figure had fallen to 35%. Even after a partial rebound to 46% in 2024, the contemporary Democratic coalition is substantially more pro-foreign-aid than the Democratic coalition of fifty years ago. Democrats moved 27 points down; Republicans drifted 5 points up. The 34-point partisan gap in 2024 is mostly the product of one coalition shifting and the other staying put.

Several mechanisms are plausible. The Democratic coalition has grown more college-educated over fifty years, and college-educated voters in both parties are more pro-foreign-aid than non-college voters. The post-1990 emergence of the AIDS-relief and global-health-philanthropy agendas (Bono, the Gates Foundation, PEPFAR — which was a Bush 43 program but with disproportionate Democratic-coalition celebration) reshaped how foreign aid was culturally framed for liberal-leaning audiences. The Democratic coalition's increasing identification with internationalism and the Republican coalition's increasing identification with "America First" framings — which became explicit in 2016 but were building for decades — pulled the parties in opposite directions on this measure. None of these mechanisms can be measured directly in the GSS data, but the pattern they predict is the pattern Figure 9 shows.

What this chapter changes

Three patterns in one chapter — none of them the same.

Scientific research is a recently polarized domain. The partisan gap opened in the 2010s and is now 19 points on the "too little" measure, with a 9-point college / no-college gap underneath it. Party sorts harder than education on this one. The Republican retreat from federal science spending is post-2016 and post-COVID, not a longstanding feature.

Space exploration is a de-polarizing domain. The 1973 Republican lead has disappeared; both parties now sit around 20% saying too little, with the topline rising as the cultural moment for space (commercial flight, Mars missions) makes it cross-partisan enthusiasm rather than partisan-coded enthusiasm. This is the rare item in this book where polarization has gone in reverse.

Foreign aid is a one-sided-movement domain. The Republican coalition has been foreign-aid-skeptical for fifty years and remains so. The Democratic coalition was equally foreign-aid-skeptical in the 1970s and has moved 27 points since. The largest partisan gap in this chapter exists because of Democratic movement, not Republican entrenchment.

The proposal that became this book described §3.5 as "Elite vs. Popular Priorities." That framing is right for science (college support, working-class skepticism) but wrong for the other two. Space is neither elite nor popular — it is bipartisan minority, the rare item where the parties roughly agree (at a level neither finds compelling). Foreign aid is the inverse: bipartisan majority against, with one coalition slowly defecting. The three items in this chapter share only the property of being low-support spending domains. Past that, they share almost nothing.

This is the closing section of Part II on the spending battery. The next section in Part II turns to the philosophical question that underlies all of these specific spending preferences — what role should the government play, in principle, in solving the problems Americans care about? The general-government-role questions are where the partisan structure on spending preferences resolves into a partisan structure on political philosophy.