Abstract
In Anti-Scientific Americans, Matthew Motta explains why some people are more likely to hold anti-intellectual attitudes than others and assesses how those attitudes both shape and are shaped by contemporary politics. The book offers a unifying theoretical framework that conceptualizes anti-intellectualism as the dislike and distrust of experts, identifies its social and political roots, and evaluates its policy consequences. Motta builds his model using hundreds of public opinion surveys spanning several decades, providing a comprehensive treatment of the subject.
For Motta, anti-intellectualism is not simply a cultural current, as Richard Hofstadter (1963) suggested, but a measurable attitude with direct political consequences. He defines it as the rejection of experts’ claims to superior knowledge in academic and scientific fields and the resistance to accord them the deference they traditionally held in policymaking. Central to the book’s argument is the claim that anti-intellectualism produces policy-relevant effects distinct from populism. Motta introduces the “Bidirectionality Thesis”: experts’ growing influence can generate hostility, while hostility encourages elites to curtail experts’ authority. Elites’ willingness to denigrate scientific expertise and pursue policies that defy consensus has, he argues, trickled down into public consciousness, deepening partisan polarization. This two-way dynamic underscores the importance of studying anti-intellectualism as a relatively new phenomenon in mass politics.
Theoretically, the book’s originality lies in connecting anti-intellectualism to works on political behavior, public opinion, and governance. Motta offers a group-centric theory that highlights how distrust in expertise conditions receptivity to information and willingness to defer to technocratic policymaking. Although primarily a study of mass attitudes, the book indirectly contributes to executive studies by showing how public hostility to experts constrains executive reliance on technocratic policymaking.
The book’s empirical core draws on panel surveys, cross-sectional data, and experiments to measure both the prevalence and consequences of anti-intellectualism in the United States. Motta shows that roughly one-third of Americans have endorsed anti-intellectual views since the mid-1940s, with religious commitments and political identities strongly shaping who adopts them. He further demonstrates that attitudes toward experts are not reducible to partisanship or ideology; they constitute a distinct dimension of public opinion with measurable effects.
Motta’s empirical strategy also addresses concerns about reverse causality. He finds no evidence that anti-intellectualism itself drives partisan or ideological self-identification, religiosity, or orientations toward limited government. Instead, he highlights the importance of elite cues in activating anti-intellectual predispositions, with implications for public acceptance of expertise in areas such as health and environmental policy. A key turning point, as he provides preliminary evidence, came in 2010, when the Tea Party movement forged a durable link between Republican identity and anti-intellectual attitudes. More importantly, policy views and anti-intellectualism can reinforce each other. Nevertheless, this raises important questions about the scope conditions of Motta’s framework. Does the US case shed light on other advanced democracies? Is strong party identification a necessary condition for the politicization of anti-intellectualism? And if so, does this limit the theory’s applicability to settings with weaker attachments, such as Latin America? These questions clarify whether anti-intellectualism requires partisan mobilization.
The book’s strengths are substantial. It offers conceptual clarity, empirical innovation, and a timely focus on the politics of expertise. Its structure is highly effective. By moving from conceptual definition to measurement, prevalence, social and political origins, bidirectional dynamics, and policy consequences, Motta allows readers to see anti-intellectualism not only as an attitude but as a politically consequential force. Clearly written, the book is well suited for courses on political behavior, American politics, and public policy. It also stands as a strong empirical example for scholars working with panel data, experimental survey designs, and the study of public opinion over time. The more important issue is interpretive: some claims, especially regarding the Tea Party’s role in linking Republican identity to anti-intellectualism, rely on indirect evidence, a limitation Motta acknowledges.
The book’s US-centric scope restricts comparative leverage, particularly given the importance of cross-national variation in the politicization of expertise. Future research would benefit from systematic comparisons across different institutional contexts and policy sectors. Moreover, while the book convincingly shows that anti-intellectualism shapes attitudes toward expert policymaking, it pays less attention to the institutional side: how executives and bureaucrats strategically respond to or exploit anti-intellectual sentiment once in power and how elite cues actually spread. This is a pressing question for policy scholars interested in technocratic institutions and state-science relations. It may also help clarify whether anti-science behavior is aligned with anti-establishment sentiment.
The book’s conclusions carry clear implications for policymaking. Motta suggests that fostering more positive orientations toward the scientific community could serve as the foundation for strategies aimed at boosting public support for evidence-based policymaking. Yet he also underscores the vulnerabilities created by anti-intellectual predispositions: Americans who hold such views are particularly susceptible to misinformation, with consequences for policy implementation. Populists can weaponize anti-intellectualism: first as a campaign strategy to mobilize voters, and later as a governing strategy to consolidate power while sidelining scientific or bureaucratic expertise that might constrain them. While Motta persuasively distinguishes anti-intellectualism from populism, the relationship between the two could be further clarified, particularly regarding whether non-populist leaders also deploy anti-intellectual rhetoric or whether it remains primarily a populist tool.
Overall, Anti-Scientific Americans is a rigorous and important contribution that deepens our understanding of the relationship between public opinion, expertise, and policymaking. Motta demonstrates that hostility to experts is not an epiphenomenon but a central force shaping how citizens evaluate government action. The book highlights a crucial tension: executives increasingly rely on expert knowledge to manage complex societies, yet that very reliance may fuel public resentment that undermines expert authority. Future research should extend Motta’s framework beyond the United States, probing whether the bidirectional dynamics of expertise and hostility operate similarly in other institutional and political contexts. This is a carefully argued and empirically rich book that deserves close attention from political scientists, policy scholars, and practitioners alike.
