Society

New research from the UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program finds racial and ethnic differences in how extreme risk protection orders (ERPOs) are perceived and used in California. The study, published in Preventive Medicine, found Black Californians perceived ERPOs as less appropriate and were less willing to ask a judge... Read more

Successful start-up ecosystems are characterized by good transport and telecommunications infrastructure, a high population density, a high proportion of foreign citizens, and numerous qualified employees. IfM Bonn researchers found this and published results in their study, "Start-up activity at the district level and in independent cities: What characterizes successful start-up... Read more

The Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School has released a new report finding that Harris County, Texas's targeted misdemeanor bail reforms are improving public safety and keeping low-level cases out of jail.... Read more

In the 1990s, changes in violent crime rates, social and political unrest directed at law enforcement, and technological innovations set the stage for major changes in administering criminal justice. Several innovative approaches to policing were tested, seeking to take tougher, smarter, more focused approaches to gun violence, gang crime, open... Read more

A 'network state' is ideologically aligned but geographically decentralized. The people are spread around the world in clusters of varying size, but their hearts are in one place.... Read more

A new study suggests that when deciding whether to believe in a conspiracy theory or not, the brain weighs up information from our own direct experience, what the media tells us, the expected cost or reward to us in believing the theory, and our prior views. The study is published... Read more

Debates about using masculine or gender-neutral words to describe leadership positions, jobs and awards affect nearly all domains of society from business to politics and media. Recently, local politicians have considered changing titles such as "alderman" or "councilman" to their gender-neutral counterparts (e.g., "council member"). While some dismiss calls for... Read more

At last, there's action on climate change. The United States recently passed its largest climate bill ever. And Australia is set to usher a 43% emissions target into law this week, although the Greens will try to amend the bill so the climate impacts of new gas and coal projects... Read more

Citizens sometimes just have to live with political decisions they dislike or think are unfair. But if their preferred party leaders communicate that the decisions have been made properly, the feeling of unfairness can diminish according to research from the University of Gothenburg.... Read more

A radical decentralisation of politics and decision-making in Iran is needed to allow Kurdish communities to benefit from natural resources, experts have argued.... Read more

Policy risk negatively affects acquisition completion, but the strength of the effect is dependent on home-host country relations, according to new research published in Global Strategy Journal. The relationship between policy risk and cross-border acquisition completion is negative and strong under conflictive relations, weaker under cooperative relations, and weakest under... Read more

Shouldn't common provisions for procurement within the EU lead to increased central control and better coordination? Yes, but the guidelines introduced during the COVID-19 crisis were at the same time so flexible that they can also result in increased corruption and reduced legitimacy. This is shown by Brigitte Pircher, associate... Read more

Among Germans, 46% have a good opinion of Israel and 34% have a poor opinion. In contrast, many Israelis have a decidedly positive image of Germany, with 63% saying their view of the country is favorable, and only 19% saying it is poor.... Read more

Lauren Prather's new book "Monitors and Meddlers: How Foreign Actors Influence Local Trust in Elections" has been a long time in the making—a full decade, in fact.... Read more

Chief executives of major companies who donate mostly to the Republican Party were more likely to lay off staff to avoid a loss during the pandemic, new research shows.... Read more

YouTube was more likely to recommend videos about election fraud to users who were already skeptical about the legitimacy of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, shows a new study examining the impact of the site's algorithms.... Read more

Don Fullerton is the Gutgsell Professor of Finance at the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a senior scholar at the Institute of Government and Public Affairs. Fullerton, an expert in energy and environmental policy, spoke with News Bureau business and law editor Phil Ciciora... Read more

John Rawls, one of the 20th century's most notable political philosophers, proposed a theory of distributive justice known as "justice as fairness." According to his theory, once a society successfully guarantees equal basic rights and liberties for everybody, the next step should be to properly regulate any ensuing social and... Read more

Leaders of teacher groups who were thought of as humble helped improve professionalism and collaboration among team members, new research has shown.... Read more

Empathizing with your political opponents increases your chances of changing their minds.... Read more

Using the London riots of 2011 as a case study, researchers discovered that a significant number of those living in close proximity to where the riots took place or to the location of someone charged for rioting changed their vote at the following election.... Read more

Most posts in extremist online forums are made by a clique of particularly committed members, a major new study shows.... Read more

Terrorism became a more important issue for voters during the 2017 General Election because of the Manchester bombing, a new study shows.... Read more

Against the backdrop of the United States registering the highest incarceration rates in the world, scholars at the Columbia University Center for Justice, The CUNY Graduate Center and Washington University in St. Louis have identified a distinct pipeline leading from public housing developments to prison.... Read more

Six years ago, the state of Vermont passed what turned out to be a short-lived law mandating disclosure of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, on all food products. That law's effect? A collective shrug of the shoulders.... Read more

Honeybees are disappearing. Contributing factors include the pesticides of industrial agriculture and urban developments encroaching on habitats. Wildflowers and areas of plant abundance are in decline. The bees are losing their food source.... Read more

American democracy is at risk, Stanford scholars and others have warned.... Read more

The Washington, D.C. demonstrations that followed George Floyd's death mark some of the most racially diverse protests against racial injustice. University of Maryland Professors Dana R. Fisher and Stella Rouse find that these participants were not only motivated by systemic racism, but also by other salient issues that were specifically... Read more

A new study by Schar School of Policy and Government researchers concludes that U.S. jails are de facto mental health institutions, with nearly 10 times as many individuals with serious mental illness in prisons and jails than in state psychiatric hospitals.... Read more

During midterm elections this November, voters across the country will head to the polls to decide who should represent them for the next two years in the U.S. House of Representatives. But, in some states, they may have a harder time making their voices heard this year, in part, because... Read more

When the Biden administration announced COVID-19 vaccine mandates on Nov. 4 for businesses with 100 or more employees, protests erupted in cities across the U.S.... Read more

In September 2020, during the height of the first wave of the COVID-19 outbreak, Italians voted on a constitutional amendment to reduce the number of parliamentary members. Furthermore, in seven of the 20 Italian regions, citizens also voted to elect regional governments and regional assembly representatives; finally, in 955 of... Read more

Conspiracy theorist and U.S. far-right media personality Alex Jones was recently ordered to pay US$45 million (£37 million) damages to the family of a child killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting.... Read more

Language used during government COVID-19 briefings was intentionally "vague, slippery and ambiguous" in order to reduce its accountability for its own policies, a new study has found.... Read more

Calls for a boycott of Goya Foods products in 2020 actually caused the company's nationwide sales to rise for a few weeks before subsiding to previous levels, according to new Cornell research.... Read more

There is no shortage of critiques concerning the use of AI in public decision-making processes. Scholars, for example, have described algorithms as a "toxic cocktail for democracy" by pointing at the ever-growing availability of big data that can be manipulated to influence public discourse in specific (problematic) directions. Can we... Read more

Mistrust in the media is widespread among Australians, but this view becomes particularly antagonistic at the far-right fringe where mainstream media are typically viewed as "traitors" and the "enemy of the people." This post from an Australian user on the far-right, social media platform Gab captures this common sentiment: "The... Read more

Benji Backer is a young person with an old story.... Read more

A new study of eligible voters in the 2020 election highlights how many Americans overlook the influence of external factors like child care constraints and transportation difficulties on voter turnout.... Read more

Racially resentful white Americans are less likely to support some gun rights if they believe Black people are exercising those rights more than white people, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.... Read more

An improvement to a computer model may help scientists better predict the future moves of political factions and locate where they might interact with other—often rival—groups, according to Penn State researchers. Predicting those moves could provide an early warning system for potential civil conflicts and violence, they added.... Read more

The higher percentage of enslaved people that a U.S. county counted among its residents in 1860, the more guns its residents have in the present, according to a new analysis by researchers exploring why Americans' feelings about guns differ so much from people around the globe.... Read more

Good news, Mr. President: A new study from a team of political scientists finds that the age of politicians may not be voters' chief concern when they're deciding who to cast their ballots for.... Read more

Although most people who commit violence tend to be teens and young adults, a new study found that the perpetrators of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda were mostly middle-aged men.... Read more

Publicly traded companies are required to disclose the ratio of their CEO compensation to the median pay of their employees—a rule that was adopted beginning in 2018 by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in response to criticism over excessive CEO pay.... Read more

An elusive behavior long overlooked by social scientists is order determination: In many types of competitions, the ranking of contestants is affected by the order in which they are evaluated, so placing a preferred contestant in a favorable spot in the order is a subtle way to boost their chances.... Read more

Newly arrived refugees in Australia have been resilient in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, a new research report has found launched by Settlement Services International and Western Sydney University on 16 August.... Read more

While thermometers have been well into the red across the northern hemisphere, people are panicking about the cost of energy bills once winter starts to bite. According to the latest forecasts in the UK, the minimum price cap for households' electricity and heating costs is set to more than double... Read more

Nearly 70% of America's top executives are affiliated with the Republican Party and 31% with the Democrats, according to the recent paper "The Political Polarization of Corporate America," written by Elisabeth Kempf, associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, Vyacheslav Fos of Boston College, and Margarita Tsoutsoura of... Read more

After the FBI completed a lawful search of former president Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate on Aug. 8, 2022, conservative politicians responded with one of three strategies: silence, circumspection and attack.... Read more