A majority of people in Germany consider the influence of science on politics to be too small. The current data from the Science Barometer 2024 demonstrate that this figure - 47 percent - is, for the first time since the survey was first carried out in 2014, higher than the proportion of people who think the level of influence of just right. Prof. Julia Metag, a communications specialist at the University of Münster, is a member of the Advisory Board for the study and she has an explanation for the development. "At the moment, the link between scientific and political debates is less apparent," is what she suspects. "It was different during the Covid pandemic, when scientific findings relating to the virus were crucial for political decision-making and were discussed publicly." Although Metag wishes politicians were more open to scientific findings as regards climate change, it is important, she says, to make a strict division between scientific and political statements. "Otherwise, we risk losing trust in science," she says.
55 percent of people trust science, which is about the same level as last year. "That’s a good, solid figure," says Metag, "but what is much more important is that the number of people who do not trust science has dropped to nine percent." In other words, the assumption among experts that mistrust was increasing after the surprising rise by five percent last year has not proved to be true. As regards trust in scientific topics relating to climate change, the writers of the study again noted an increase: over the past eight years, trust in research on climate change has risen from 39 to 59 percent.
This is also thanks to the increasingly wide-ranging formats of science communication, comments Julia Metag. "A lot has happened in this respect in the last twenty years, especially in universities," she says, adding that everyone has an opportunity to get comprehensive information on scientific topics. Accordingly, over 80 percent stated that they felt well to very well informed about research topics.
What is slightly more worrying on the other hand, says Metag, are the structural problems in journalism. In many media companies, jobs are disappearing, and it is often science writers who are the first to go. As a result, the quantity and the quality of science reporting has declined in recent years. This is also reflected in the results of the Science Barometer, where 60 percent of those questioned thought it likely that journalists gave a distorted picture of research results.
This year, for the first time, people’s assessments of scientific freedom were asked for. 45 percent of those questioned thought it was good or very good. This was surprising, says Julia Metag, because these figures cannot be confirmed by other studies. According to a survey carried out by the German Centre of University and Scientific Research (Deutsches Zentrum für Hochschulund Wissenschaftsforschung), four out five professors, postdocs and PhD students felt that the state of the science system, as regards autonomy and freedom of research, was good to very good. The discrepancy between the studies might be due to the methodology used by the Science Barometer. The term ’scientific freedom’ seemed to be too abstract for many of those questioned, which is why 40 percent did not opt for "good" or "bad" but selected the option "partly".
The Science Barometer is a study carried out annually by the organisation "Science in Dialogue" ("Wissenschaft im Dialog"). This year, 1005 people aged 14 and over were questioned in telephone interviews on a variety of topics relating to trust in science and scientific freedom.
Trust in research remains stable
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