https://phys.org/science-news/political-science en-us The latest news on political science Around the world, political violence increased by 27% last year, affecting 1.7 billion people. The numbers come from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), which collects real-time data on conflict events worldwide. https://phys.org/news/2023-08-scientists-method-armed-conflicts.html Mathematics Political science Tue, 01 Aug 2023 12:26:35 EDT news610111592 The Social Media Archive at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research has released data focusing on the impact of Facebook and Instagram on key political attitudes during the U.S. 2020 elections. https://phys.org/news/2023-07-facebook-instagram-presidential-election.html Social Sciences Political science Thu, 27 Jul 2023 14:00:01 EDT news609672171 The United States has more than 10 times the number of mass shooting incidents than other developed countries, yet little research has shown the distribution and types of shootings, geographically. https://phys.org/news/2023-07-mass-states.html Social Sciences Political science Wed, 26 Jul 2023 11:00:01 EDT news609579701 Organized crime casts a long shadow, driving violence and an illicit economy. But our research, published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, has uncovered some more subtle dimensions to its influence, too. We've found that organized crime can undermine the civic honesty of ordinary, law abiding people. https://phys.org/news/2023-07-mafia-threatens-democracy-ordinary-people.html Social Sciences Political science Tue, 25 Jul 2023 11:18:03 EDT news609502681 When people who publicly reject COVID-19 vaccines later die from the disease, observers have complex reactions to their fates, a new study suggests. https://phys.org/news/2023-07-people-anti-vaxxers-die-covid-.html Social Sciences Political science Mon, 24 Jul 2023 14:59:03 EDT news609429541 Partisan politics played a role in exacerbating public health challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. A new study suggests that partisan politics could also play a role in addressing those challenges—at least when it comes to getting people vaccinated. https://phys.org/news/2023-07-partisan-politics-health.html Social Sciences Political science Thu, 20 Jul 2023 13:05:04 EDT news609077101 ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by the company OpenAI, has a self-declared human alter ego. Her name is Maya, she's 35 years old and hails from a middle-class family in a suburban town in the United States. Maya is a successful software engineer who values self-direction, achievement, creativity and independence. She is also undeniably liberal. https://phys.org/news/2023-07-chatgpt-liberal-values.html Social Sciences Political science Tue, 18 Jul 2023 15:53:16 EDT news608914393 Young citizens across the globe vote at relatively low rates, which contributes to political parties' de-prioritizing issues that matter to youth, from climate change to well-paying jobs. https://phys.org/news/2023-07-low-cost-online-interventions-young-voters.html Social Sciences Political science Mon, 17 Jul 2023 13:26:04 EDT news608819162 Putting truth to the test in the "post-truth era," Boston College psychologists conducted experiments that show when Americans decide whether a claim of fact should qualify as true or false, they consider the intentions of the information source, the team reported recently in Scientific Reports. https://phys.org/news/2023-07-intentions-source-affect-americans-true.html Social Sciences Political science Mon, 17 Jul 2023 11:38:03 EDT news608812681 People who believe in conspiracy theories are more likely to have antisemitic opinions than non-believers, new research shows. https://phys.org/news/2023-07-reveals-people-antisemitic-views.html Social Sciences Political science Mon, 10 Jul 2023 15:16:02 EDT news608220961 Incorporating animal welfare into policymaking may improve policy and practice, according to Rutgers research. https://phys.org/news/2023-07-policymakers-animal-welfare-decisions.html Political science Thu, 06 Jul 2023 14:00:01 EDT news607852949 A small team of biostatisticians and engineers from Princeton, Harvard, and MIT, has found via survey, that Chinese scientists working in the U.S. no longer feel welcome in the country. https://phys.org/news/2023-07-aftermath-china-survey-chinese-scientists.html Social Sciences Political science Tue, 04 Jul 2023 09:30:03 EDT news607680074 People can be prone to believe in conspiracy theories due to a combination of personality traits and motivations, including relying strongly on their intuition, feeling a sense of antagonism and superiority toward others, and perceiving threats in their environment, according to research published by the American Psychological Association. https://phys.org/news/2023-06-simple-people-conspiracy-theories.html Social Sciences Political science Mon, 26 Jun 2023 09:06:03 EDT news606989161 Verbal attacks against marginalized groups can do serious harm to the victims. Yet many instances of hate speech are never reported or prosecuted. "We see it in sports, on the street, in schools and in our parliaments," says Jimena Zapata of LMU's Chair of Philosophy of Mind, adding that the large proportion of unreported hate speech incidents is extremely worrying. https://phys.org/news/2023-06-people-condemn-speech-severely-nonverbal.html Social Sciences Political science Thu, 22 Jun 2023 11:09:03 EDT news606650941 In an article titled "A Meta-analysis of Correction Effects in Science-Relevant Misinformation" published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, University of Pennsylvania social psychologists and communication scholars Man-pui Sally Chan and Dolores Albarracín explain the circumstances under which corrections of misinformation about science are most likely to work or fail, as well as the characteristics of the corrections most likely to succeed. https://phys.org/news/2023-06-factors-misinformation-science-successful.html Social Sciences Political science Tue, 20 Jun 2023 17:22:04 EDT news606500522 Recent U.S. elections have raised the question of whether "microtargeting," the use of extensive online data to tailor persuasive messages to voters, has altered the playing field of politics. https://phys.org/news/2023-06-microtargeting-people.html Political science Tue, 20 Jun 2023 17:10:07 EDT news606499801 A group of political scientists from Harvard University, working with a colleague from Yale University, has found via simulations that politically motivated gerrymandering in the U.S. tends to cancel out as both sides change voting borders. In their study, reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Christopher Kenny, Cory McCartan, Tyler Simko, Kosuke Imai and Shiro Kuriwaki used simulations to compare congressional mapping in the U.S. using data from the 2020 census. https://phys.org/news/2023-06-simulations-politically-gerrymandering-evens-national.html Political science Fri, 16 Jun 2023 10:48:46 EDT news606131321 The debate around deploying armed forces for domestic policing operations in high-crime areas is often framed as a tradeoff between preserving public safety and maintaining civil liberties. Proponents argue that military policing reduces crime, while detractors claim it leads to more human rights abuses. https://phys.org/news/2023-06-evidence-military-policing-crime.html Social Sciences Political science Thu, 15 Jun 2023 12:27:29 EDT news606050844 The Russia-Ukraine conflict has clearly revealed that the global food supply chain acts as a complex network, connecting nations and facilitating the spread of disruptions from local to distant regions. https://phys.org/news/2023-06-indirect-effects-russia-ukraine-conflict-revealed.html Economics & Business Political science Thu, 15 Jun 2023 11:00:07 EDT news606039474 A group of researchers from the Nicolaus Copernicus University, the SWPS University in Warsaw, and the University of Waikato in New Zealand have for some time been scientifically looking at the relationship between different types of identifications with a group and attitudes towards, for example, science, vaccines and workplace behavior. https://phys.org/news/2023-06-narcissism-ecology.html Social Sciences Political science Tue, 13 Jun 2023 11:31:36 EDT news605874690 The persistent gender gap in voting for Democrats versus Republicans is, in part, because a higher proportion of women than men voters are Black and because Black voters have historically voted overwhelmingly Democratic, according to a new study by a team of sociologists. https://phys.org/news/2023-06-long-standing-gender-racial-gaps-voting.html Social Sciences Political science Mon, 12 Jun 2023 15:00:02 EDT news605780798 The addition of "trust" and "distrust" buttons on social media, alongside standard "like" buttons, could help to reduce the spread of misinformation, finds a new experimental study led by University College London (UCL) researchers. https://phys.org/news/2023-06-social-media-distrust-buttons-misinformation.html Social Sciences Political science Tue, 06 Jun 2023 12:56:42 EDT news605274999 Women environmental defenders were victims of murder, displacement, repression, criminal prosecution, and physical harassment, reports a Nature Sustainability paper based on an analysis of 523 cases from a global database of environmental conflicts. This issue is predominantly concentrated in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, but also occurs in North America and Europe. https://phys.org/news/2023-06-women-globally-retaliation-environmental.html Social Sciences Political science Tue, 06 Jun 2023 11:05:09 EDT news605268306 Risk assessment instruments (RAIs) are widely used to inform high-stakes decision-making in the criminal justice system and other areas, such as health care and child welfare. These tools typically assume a relation between predictors and outcomes that does not vary with time. But because societies change, this assumption may not hold in all settings, generating what a new study calls cohort bias—a bias resulting from cohort-wide influences not experienced by past or future cohorts. https://phys.org/news/2023-06-tools-crime-young-cohorts-social.html Social Sciences Political science Mon, 05 Jun 2023 16:53:04 EDT news605202782 For the past few years, American democracy has been perceived as backsliding. Politicians' refusal to accept election results despite a lack of evidence of fraud, the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and state-level restrictions on voting access and aggressive gerrymandering are all signs of democracy in crisis. https://phys.org/news/2023-05-highlights-importance-democratic-norms-party.html Social Sciences Political science Tue, 30 May 2023 16:17:43 EDT news604682260 In October 2020, two rival candidates for office in Utah made an unusual television ad together. Incumbent Republican Gov. Spencer Cox and his Democratic challenger, Chris Peterson, appeared in the same spot to note they were both "dedicated to the American values of liberty, democracy, and justice for all people," as Cox said, and that "our common values transcend our political differences," as Peterson put it. https://phys.org/news/2023-05-false-assumptions-election-malfeasance-death.html Social Sciences Political science Tue, 30 May 2023 13:27:49 EDT news604672066 Eugenia Rho believes in the importance of first impressions, especially during vehicle stops. https://phys.org/news/2023-05-vehicle-illuminates-importance-officer-words.html Social Sciences Political science Mon, 29 May 2023 15:00:04 EDT news604573058 A large-scale study to see if politically partisan cues can induce people to get COVID-19 vaccines found that, yes, they can. https://phys.org/news/2023-05-counter-stereotypical-messaging-needle-vaccinations.html Social Sciences Political science Fri, 26 May 2023 13:02:06 EDT news604324923 Thousands of state-sponsored propaganda tweets on the Iranian nuclear deal have been analyzed using artificial intelligence by experts at the University of Portsmouth. https://phys.org/news/2023-05-ai-propaganda-tweets-iranian-nuclear.html Social Sciences Political science Thu, 25 May 2023 13:42:54 EDT news604240969 Political parties regularly claim to have their finger on the pulse and be able to read the public mood. Yet a new study challenges the idea that being political makes you good at understanding others: it shows gender, not politics, is a far more important factor in determining people's social skills. https://phys.org/news/2023-05-gender-trumps-politics-people-ability.html Social Sciences Political science Wed, 24 May 2023 14:00:03 EDT news604145081