The economic article is a summary of a preprint paper that surveyed thousands of Americans. Seems like a research paper to me, but I don’t know economics well. Am I missing something?
A summary of a research article isn't a research article. Do you think newspapers are scholarly journals? Also, you do understand that anyone can just upload a document to SSRN, right? "Preprint" doesn't actually mean anything academically. Also, the methodology of that paper is absurd: Google trained a model and then asked that model what it thought about AI policy. Can you not think of any way bias might be less than controlled for doing it this way?
Not in any sense of that term are these research papers. Not lazy, sure, but a couple conceptual tables does not a research paper make.