Will AI replace Political Scientists?

Many of your tasks are within reach of AI. The role will change, so it pays to act now.

Task exposure to today's AI

53/100

High exposure

This is the occupation's typical task mix. Your own score can be up to 30 points higher or lower depending on how you work: routine share, people contact, judgment and how much you already use AI.

Get your personal score

Will AI replace Political Scientists?

Not entirely. Today's AI tools can take on about 53% of the typical work in this occupation, mostly: disseminate research results through academic publications, written reports, or public presentations. The parts that stay human include: Interpret and analyze policies, public issues, legislation, or the operations of governments, businesses, and organizations.; Collect, analyze, and interpret data, such as election results and public opinion surveys, reporting on findings, recommendations, and conclusions.; Develop and test theories, using information from interviews, newspapers, periodicals, case law, historical papers, polls, or statistical sources..

People who learn to use AI for the automatable parts keep the edge. The 3-phase plan below shows where to start.

Which tasks AI can take on

The largest tasks in this occupation, their share of the working week, and how much of each today's AI tools can do.

TaskAutomatable

Disseminate research results through academic publications, written reports, or public presentations. 70%

Maintain current knowledge of government policy decisions. 60%

Collect, analyze, and interpret data, such as election results and public opinion surveys, reporting on findings, recommendations, and conclusions. 57%

Interpret and analyze policies, public issues, legislation, or the operations of governments, businesses, and organizations.AI already used 55%

Develop and test theories, using information from interviews, newspapers, periodicals, case law, historical papers, polls, or statistical sources.AI already used 53%

Consult with and advise government officials, civic bodies, research agencies, the media, political parties, and others concerned with political issues. 50%

+ 8 more tasks (31% of the week) in the full test.

Your human edge

Interpret and analyze policies, public issues, legislation, or the operations of governments, businesses, and organizations.
Collect, analyze, and interpret data, such as election results and public opinion surveys, reporting on findings, recommendations, and conclusions.
Develop and test theories, using information from interviews, newspapers, periodicals, case law, historical papers, polls, or statistical sources.

AI tools to try

ChatGPT / Claude for literature and writingAI research tools (e.g. Elicit, Consensus, Semantic Scholar)Copilot for data analysis code (Python, R)

Related roles

A 3-phase AI learning plan

Phase 1

Faster literature and writing

Literature search and summaries with AI, always checked against the papers.
Drafts of methods, reports and grant text.
Reference management and formatting.

Project

Use AI to screen and summarise 40 papers on one policy debate, verify every claim against the source PDFs, and draft a 10-page literature review with formatted citations in under a week.

Phase 2

AI for data analysis

Analysis code in Python or R written with AI help.
Visualisation and statistics explained step by step.
Reproducibility: version code and prompts.

Project

Rebuild one past election or survey analysis as an AI-assisted R or Python script with versioned code and prompts, and compare its regression output and charts against your original results.

Phase 3

AI as a research method

Classification, extraction or modelling with AI on your data.
Validate against human labels or ground truth.
Ethics, data protection and disclosure of AI use.

Project

Use an LLM to code 500 legislative texts or open survey responses by policy frame, validate against 100 hand-coded items, report accuracy and kappa, and write an AI-use disclosure.

Take the free 11-question test