{ "source": "Cooked Index — occupational AI risk register", "page": "https://cookedindex.com/jobs/political-scientists/", "methodology": "https://cookedindex.com/methodology", "notice": "Verdicts are re-examined as evidence accumulates. Re-fetch before relying on this; the page above always carries the current score.", "scored_at": "2026-08-11", "model": "claude-opus-5", "occupation": { "title": "Political Scientists", "soc_code": "19-3094", "category": "Science", "us_employment": 5540, "median_annual_wage": 142080 }, "verdict": "COOKED", "risk_resistance": 33, "contested": false, "near_boundary": true, "dimensions": { "task_resistance": 8, "embodiment": 4, "liability_shield": 1, "trust_premium": 9, "judgment_accountability": 11 }, "reasoning": { "task_resistance": "An 8 reflects that coding open-ended survey responses, drafting country risk briefs, tracking bills through committee, and running cross-national regressions on Polity or V-Dem data are all now first-draftable by a model, while what stays human is elite interviewing, fieldwork in a country where the officials won't talk to a stranger, and designing a research question nobody has framed yet — enough of the job to keep it out of the 0-6 band but not enough to reach mixed-territory 12.", "embodiment": "A 4 covers the occasional overseas fieldwork trip, focus group facilitation, or archival visit, but the modal week is Stata, Qualtrics, a literature database, and a Word document, and no part of the analysis requires the researcher's body to be anywhere in particular.", "liability_shield": "A 1, not a 0, because nothing licenses the title — a PhD is a hiring credential, not a statutory gate — and when a forecast is wrong the institution absorbs it; the only faint personal exposure is IRB approval on human-subjects protocols and security clearance obligations for government contract work.", "trust_premium": "A 9 sits mid-band because congressional staff, agency clients, and journalists do come back to a specific named analyst whose read on a region they've learned to trust, but the bulk of published output — think tank reports, journal articles, contracted country studies — is consumed for its findings and its institution's letterhead, not because the reader knows who wrote it.", "judgment_accountability": "An 11 marks the gap between the methodologically constrained work — model specification, sampling frames, coding rules that peer review polices — and the genuinely unbounded calls like whether a coup is likely in the next six months or whether a sanctions regime will hold, where the analyst commits to a judgment that a principal acts on but where the decision itself, and its consequences, belong to someone else." }, "rationale": "The core output — literature reviews, policy memos, survey instrument drafting, comparative country analyses, legislative and regulatory tracking — is text-in/text-out work that current models produce at usable draft quality, and much of the quantitative work is standard regression and coding of public datasets. No license gates the title, and clients rarely pay for the specific human. What survives is the senior advisory tier: someone who has cultivated sources, reads a political situation that isn't in the training data, and puts their name on a forecast a principal will act on.", "outlook": "Headcount in a field of only ~5,500 contracts as research-assistant and memo-writing roles collapse into AI-assisted workflows, leaving a smaller senior tier built on sources, forecasting reputation, and time in front of principals.", "what_would_raise_it": { "levers": [ { "dimension": "task_resistance", "change": "Task-mix shift: as literature reviews, regulatory tracking and standard regression are absorbed by models, the remaining paid work concentrates in the elicitation tier — expert interviews with in-country sources, closed-door elite briefings, and interpretation of events with no textual precedent (coup, contested election, wartime negotiation). Watch for whether intelligence-community and geopolitical-risk shops (Eurasia Group, Rand, Foreign Service INR) redefine the analyst job description around primary-source elicitation rather than synthesis.", "plausibility": "already happening", "would_add": 4 }, { "dimension": "trust_premium", "change": "Named-analyst attribution requirements in the products buyers actually pay for: if institutional investors and asset managers demand a signed human analyst-of-record on political-risk notes the way sell-side equity research must carry an analyst name under FINRA 2241 / MiFID II research-unbundling rules, the buyer is explicitly paying for the person. Also watch whether journals adopt strict authorship rules barring generative-AI-drafted analysis, and whether expert-witness and congressional-testimony demand (which requires a live human under oath) grows as a share of billings.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 4 }, { "dimension": "judgment_accountability", "change": "Formalized forecast accountability: if government and philanthropic funders require scored, attributable probabilistic forecasts from a named principal investigator — the model of IARPA's ACE/HFC tournaments and ODNI analytic-standards ICD 203 traceability requirements extended to contracted outside analysts — the role owns a consequential call under ambiguity with a track record attached to a person.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 3 }, { "dimension": "liability_shield", "change": "Only a narrow route: FARA registration and lobbying-disclosure regimes require a named human filer, and if expert-witness admissibility rules (post-2023 FRE 702 amendment) are applied to bar AI-generated political analysis without a qualified human expert who can be cross-examined, testimony work becomes human-gated. This does not touch the memo-writing bulk of the occupation.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 2 } ], "ceiling_note": "Realistic ceiling is roughly the mid-40s. There is no licensure body for the title and none is being proposed, so liability_shield cannot move far; embodiment has no route at all. Any gain is concentration into a small senior advisory tier, which means the score can rise while headcount falls." }, "adjudication": { "method": "two independent runs agreed on the verdict", "outcome": "corroborated", "run_totals": [ 33, 31 ], "run_verdicts": [ "COOKED", "COOKED" ] }, "employment_history": { "points": [ { "y": 2017, "emp": 6320, "wage": 115110 }, { "y": 2018, "emp": 5660, "wage": 117570 }, { "y": 2019, "emp": 6010, "wage": 122220 }, { "y": 2020, "emp": 6010, "wage": 125350 }, { "y": 2021, "emp": 5650, "wage": 122510 }, { "y": 2022, "emp": 5660, "wage": 128020 }, { "y": 2023, "emp": 5580, "wage": 132350 }, { "y": 2024, "emp": 5950, "wage": 139380 }, { "y": 2025, "emp": 5540, "wage": 142080 } ], "from": 2017, "to": 2025, "change_pct": -12.3, "comparable_from": 2019, "spans_soc_revision": true }, "pivots": [ { "slug": "law-teachers-postsecondary", "title": "Law Teachers, Postsecondary", "verdict": "EXPOSED", "risk_resistance": 59, "median_wage": 128500, "overlap": 85, "skills_to_close": [ "Learning Strategies", "Management of Personnel Resources", "Instructing", "Monitoring" ] } ], "license": "https://cookedindex.com/terms" }