Does political control shape diversity, equity and inclusion scores for nursing education institutions within the USA?: A new digital method for measuring institutional engagement with diversity, equity and inclusion in nursing

Background Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in nursing refers to an organization's explicit commitment to principles and practices that treat all employees and patients equally by recognizing diversity and upholding dignity and human rights. In recent years there has been an upsurge in “anti-DEI” political sentiment and legislation in the United States of America (USA). This study develops a new digital method for measuring institutional engagement with DEI. This can be used to assess the impact of state political control on the commitment of nursing education institutions to DEI principles. Objective To examine how the political climate and mode of funding relates to DEI in nursing schools, using a web mining technique to examine the websites of nursing schools. Setting The study examined websites of all colleges, schools and universities offering nursing qualifications in the USA. Methods Web mining was conducted for the years 2020–2024 using the Wayback Machine. Using code developed for this study, a web tool accessed a URL and then crawled the websites of 730 nursing education institutions using their landing page plus the first level of all linked pages. Nursing school web pages were compared with the DEI Toolkit of the American Association of Nursing Colleges (AACN) and the degree of alignment computed between 2020 and 2024. Results The majority of US nursing colleges returned a moderate-to-high DEI score, with average national scores rising between 2021 and 2024. Historically, institutions in states with Democratic legislative and gubernatorial control showed the highest average scores, although this trend was disrupted in 2024, when institutions in Republican-controlled states scored higher. One possible interpretation of this finding is that DEI scores of nursing institutions are not simply correlated to local political affiliations, but rather reflect patterns of political conflict and legislative activity as they unfold over time. A further finding supportive of this theory is that the lowest DEI scores are to be found in “battleground” states where political power is contested between Democrats and Republicans. Conclusions The study provides healthcare professionals, policymakers and researchers a new digital method for measuring institutional engagement with DEI. It provides a data source to support policy research by helping to investigate whether DEI-restrictive legislation is impacting upon DEI in nursing education institutions. The strongest evidence of an impact of different political ideologies upon the public expression of DEI by nursing education institutions is in those states where neither political party has overall political control.