Society

Americans were more likely than people living in the UK to feel threatened by China's growth as a world power, a new survey shows.... Read more

On June 24, the Supreme Court released a decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, upholding the constitutionality of a 2018 Mississippi law banning abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The court also ruled 5-4 to overturn Roe v. Wade, a 1973 decision that protects pregnant people's right to... Read more

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last week, not only did it abolish the constitutional right to an abortion, but it also triggered restrictions in 13 states, more than half of which are in the Southern United States.... Read more

Employers looking for ways to support their workers seeking abortions in states where it's now illegal or soon will be don't have it easy.... Read more

Lower income people bore the brunt of the economic repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, efforts to reduce poverty were adopted in Canada and the United States. But how did partisan politics shape each government's response? Exploring the political dynamics at play, a team of researchers including McGill... Read more

Policymakers are faced with an exceptional challenge: how to reduce harm caused by firearms while maintaining citizens' right to bear arms and protect themselves. This is especially true as the Supreme Court has hobbled New York State regulations restricting who can carry a concealed weapon.... Read more

Society recognizes that many politicians lie. In five new studies, researchers have examined how conservative and liberal Americans responded to media reports of politicians' falsehoods. Even accounting for partisan biases in how much people dismissed the reports as fake news and assumed the lies were unintentional, the studies consistently identified... Read more

Some Americans still say no to getting any COVID-19 vaccination even as others are currently committing to their fourth shot. What accounts for differences in attitude between the fully vaccinated and those who opt out? The biggest factor could be political ideology, a new survey from the University of Houston... Read more

The "anomie" concept—that the society is disintegrating and losing moral standards—explains why people with low socioeconomic status trust politics less than those with a higher one, concludes a new study published in the scientific journal Social Psychological Bulletin.... Read more

Over the past century, unions have successfully campaigned for a minimum wage, holiday and sickness pay, equal opportunity rights, maternity and paternity rights and a two-day weekend for British workers, among other benefits.... Read more

When the COVID pandemic broke out and Italy experienced a strict lockdown, news stories started reporting anecdotal evidence about women forced to live under the same roof with abusive partners. However, scholars such as Selin Koksal, a Ph.D. Candidate in Public Policy at Bocconi University in Milan specializing in population... Read more

The U.S. Supreme Court's decision Friday striking down the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade and 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey rulings, foreshadowed in a rare leak last month, is likely to have wide, but varying, effects nationally, several UO experts said.... Read more

Mass shootings are a source of shared anguish and outrage among Americans and are becoming more frequent. Extreme risk protection orders (ERPOs), also known as gun violence restraining orders or "red flag" laws, are designed to help prevent these shootings. Below, UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program (VPRP) experts explain... Read more

Climate change influences the likelihood and duration of armed conflicts in Africa. This is the finding of a study carried out by a team from the INGENIO Institute, a joint center of the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) and the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), together with the University... Read more

A Northeastern expert believes that a three-month gas tax break, suggested by President Joe Biden, is a bad policy proposal amid an existential environmental crisis.... Read more

Climate policy is currently in the balance, as was evident this month in Bonn at the first round of UN negotiations since the start of the Ukraine war. On the one hand, governments must become more ambitious, increasing the costs of climate-damaging economic activity and, if necessary, securing this externally... Read more

In Europe, far-right parties have emerged as the most vocal defenders of restricting welfare benefits to citizens only.... Read more

The U.S. Supreme Court will soon decide the fate of Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that established the nationwide right to choose an abortion. If the court's decision hews close to the leaked draft opinion first published by Politico in May 2022, the court's new conservative majority will... Read more

The United States has struggled with a spate of horrific mass shootings. As is often the case, people try to make sense of the violence by talking about what happened.... Read more

Lawmakers in Congress are poised to pass the first gun control legislation in three decades. Among the elements in that legislation is support for states to pass what are called "red flag laws."... Read more

The premise is simple, and it seems like common sense: If Republicans and Democrats could come together for good faith dialogue, the conversations would reduce tensions and ease the corrosive polarization that threatens U.S. democracy.... Read more

Violent extremism could be defined as support for violence to achieve political, ideological or social objectives. Under the umbrella of this type of mindset, violent acts are seen as a legitimate means of imposing a way of life in which there is no room for diversity. But what really underlies... Read more

Personalizing outreach to legislators to include the local economic impact of an issue can increase engagement with research among Democratic, but not Republican, legislators.... Read more

A state's risk of a coup is negatively associated with its army's degree of mechanization, understood as the extent to which militaries depend on tanks and armored vehicles in relation to personnel.... Read more

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have influenced governments' narratives around sustainability, but have not led to substantial changes in legislative action and resource allocation decisions, according to a paper published in Nature Sustainability. These findings suggest that the SDGs have had a limited political impact, and that policymakers... Read more

British Columbia has become the first province to be granted an exemption under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act to remove criminal penalties for possession of opioids, cocaine, methamphetamine and MDMA for personal use.... Read more

Federal officials say the FBI's database of people prohibited from purchasing firearms only works if it has "complete, accurate and timely information."... Read more

As Australia continues to take on refugees from Ukraine, education experts are calling for essential supports as new research from the University of South Australia shows that rural and regional schools can be under-resourced and ill-prepared to support refugee children and their families.... Read more

With the Toronto Police Service's release of race-based data on strip searches as part of its Race and Identity-based Data Collection Strategy, we can clearly see who it chooses to subject to strip searches.... Read more

Parenting style—helicopter parenting (disciplinarian) versus free-range explorer (nurturing)—may be a key to the country's political future. A new study out of Carnegie Mellon University has found a person's parenting style tips their hand to the adoption of future government policies across a wide range of social issues, including education, elder... Read more

The economic downturn of 2008-09 has often been described as a financial-sector crisis, featuring failing banks. But it was much more than that. Many people with stagnant or dropping incomes, having borrowed to sustain their standard of living, found themselves deep in debt when the economy sagged and joblessness increased.... Read more

Women in the United States are still less likely than men to express a desire to take on leadership or managerial roles, according to an analysis of data from leadership studies conducted over six decades.... Read more

Should journalists always treat an issue even-handedly? Our research reveals that when it comes to climate change, many Australians would prefer they didn't. For general news, people want news outlets to reflect a range of views so they can make up their own mind about an issue. However, when it... Read more

Federal district judges appointed by Republican presidents were found to be less likely to require mask wearing in the courtroom during the COVID-19 pandemic, finds a new study from the School of Law at Washington University in St. Louis. The results are published in the SSRN Electronic Journal.... Read more

Police use of violence, especially against Black people, may threaten police agencies' effectiveness by reinforcing residents' legal cynicism and leading to disengagement from police. For example, after the killing by police of George Floyd, a Milwaukee police official said local residents cooperated less with police than they did before the... Read more

If the Supreme Court rules to overturn Roe v. Wade this month, lawmakers and law enforcement may have varied means to go after women and health care providers who participate in abortions in large part because of technology that didn't exist before the 1973 landmark ruling protecting abortion rights.... Read more

The House passed the Protecting Our Kids Act on Wednesday, hours after hearing harrowing testimony from gun violence survivors and their families, and two weeks after a shooter killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.... Read more

Wastewater surveillance involves testing sewage to obtain data about a population's health. While the technique is decades old, it has gained recent international prominence for its ability to predict pandemic surges, detect new SARS-CoV-2 variants and provide useful data when traditional testing methods reach capacity. With its success, the field... Read more

Since the police killing of George Floyd in May 2020 and the subsequent mass mobilizations for police defunding and abolition, the defund movement has continued to organize.... Read more

The first protected category of the United Nations refugee convention is race. The 1951 convention defines a refugee as a person who is outside their country of residence or nationality "owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or... Read more

Opinion remains divided regarding how guns should factor into American society, especially those weapons designed for military warfare.... Read more

A new research study from Umeå University in Sweden shows that incidents with fatal police violence in the U.S. are 66% more likely to occur in formerly "redlined" areas.... Read more

Regardless of race, ethnicity and even political party preference, two separate UCLA-led surveys reveal that majorities of people in each group support access to legal abortion in the United States.... Read more

As U.S. cities rethink the role of law enforcement in nonviolent 911 emergencies, new Stanford research uncovers the strongest evidence yet that dispatching mental health professionals instead of police officers in some instances can have significant benefits.... Read more

When a sexual assault survivor tells their story to a journalist, they may have any number of reasons for doing so, but almost certainly not because that reporter would be required to pass the information on to university administrators. Yet Title IX, the landmark gender equality in higher education legislation,... Read more

A recent analysis in Campbell Systematic Reviews examined the effects of media on two aspects of radicalization: the support of the use of radical violence in the name of a cause or ideology (called cognitive radicalization) and the actual involvement in such violence (called behavioral radicalization).... Read more

In the wake of the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 children and two teachers dead, legislators in Washington, D.C., and across the country are debating "red flag" laws or extreme risk protection orders (ERPOs).... Read more

Dr. Michael Rodriguez is tired of "thoughts and prayers."... Read more

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, we've been inundated with data in the form of charts and graphs that show important metrics related to the virus. For example, bar graphs have been used to plot the number of cases in various countries, and line graphs have been used to show trends in... Read more

While there are many factors contributing to the scourge of gun violence in the United States, one thing is clear: The data—and the majority of Americans—support laws that sensibly restrict access to firearms under certain conditions.... Read more