An Empirical Study of the Ideological Component in Russian Economic Science

Ideology plays a significant role in forming economic theories and models, although its influence is often underestimated or denied. In economics, the desire for objectivity prevails. However, historically, economic theories often bear the imprint of certain ideological attitudes. In this paper, the authors analyzed the ideological component of Russian economic science from 1992 to 2023. The total sample consisted of 134,124 scientific publications divided by year. As a hypothesis, we identified five economic ideologies: neoliberalism, socialism, dirigisme, special path and environmentalism. In this work, we classified economic scientific articles based on their ideological coloring using vector representations of texts (embeddings) obtained using the SciRus-tiny model and the LSTM neural network, which acts as a classifier. The accuracy of the model on cross-validation was 77.45%. The array of scientific articles was classified by ideology in the following proportions: dirigisme – 29.86%, environmentalism – 18.85%, special path – 16.60%, neoliberalism – 14.53%, socialism – 12.16% and 8.00% of articles remained unallocated. Our hypothesis was confirmed during the machine analysis of article texts since the smallest number of texts was undetermined during the classification. Further, the authors analyzed the representation of bigrams and trigrams. As a result, bigrams and trigrams found in each ideological group were determined, and the first ten were identified in prevalence for each ideological group separately. Using factor analysis (principal component analysis), we identified ten key micro-themes in each period (1992–1997, 1998– 2002, 2003–2007, 2008–2012, 2013–2017, 2018–2023). Based on the interpretation of the obtained factor loadings of the principal components in each group and the correlation of the bi- and trigrams identified for each ideology, we analyzed how different ideologies manifest themselves and what scientific problems they are associated with. The analysis showed that the most discussed issues in the articles were the problems of government regulation, the labor market, and industrial development throughout the entire period.