White supremacists are using the debate around women’s reproductive rights to promote racist and extremist agendas, finds a new study released today – following news on Friday that millions of women in the US will lose the constitutional right to abortion. US white nationalists are heading on to a Neo-Nazi website, ‘Stormfront’, in order to […]

View Full Article - Hate Sites Using the Wider Abortion Argument to Spread Racism and Extremism

In his original plan for the city of Philadelphia, William Penn declared that every home should have ample space “for gardens or orchards or fields, that it may be a green country that will never be burnt and always be wholesome.” Before militiamen or throngs of protestors, the Boston Common nourished grazing cattle. Urban agriculture […]

View Full Article - How American Cities Can Promote Urban Agriculture

The Trump administration had been working hard to roll back the nation’s environmental regulations on the grounds that they are an economic burden on business. But evidence from California tells a very different story. For the past half century, California has been the richest U.S. state – even as it has led the United States […]

View Full Article - How Environmental Policies Can Promote Economic Growth

By Mary King and Lisa Dodson In November 2020, voters in Multnomah County, home to the city of Portland, resoundingly approved the creation of a new, universal preschool program—a program that could serve as a model for desperately needed preschool and childcare investments for the entire country. All three- and four-year-olds in Multnomah county will be able […]

View Full Article - New Preschool Program in Oregon is a Model for the Nation—But Challenges Remain

By Sanya Carley and David M. Konisky Energy insecurity—defined as the inability to pay one’s energy bill or avoid utility disconnection—is a pervasive and growing problem in the United States. Approximately 4.7 million low-income households were unable to pay an energy bill over the past year, 4.8 million received a notice for utility disconnection, and 2 million […]

View Full Article - What the U.S. Government Can Do to Address Energy Insecurity

In the media, a prevalent narrative is that Donald Trump lost the 2020 elections because of the way he handled the COVID-19 pandemic. Several researchers determined that Trump would have won the electoral vote and lost the popular vote, as he did in 2016, if the pandemic had not occurred or if it had been […]

View Full Article - Researchers Quantify the Role of the Pandemic in the 2020 U.S. Elections

In recent years, the idea of tuition-free colleges and universities in the United States has made its way into mainstream political debates. In many ways, this idea makes good economic sense. Federal subsidies that help state governments eliminate undergraduate tuition and fees at public universities shift tax burdens to the federal government. This, in turn, […]

View Full Article - Why State Spending on Higher Education May Not Improve the Economy in Many States

The 2020 elections saw robust gains for Republican women in state legislatures and Congress. Republican women increased their numbers from 13 to 31 in the U.S. House of Representatives, and from 662 to 729 in state legislatures nationally. The impressive performance of Republican women in elected office led CBS News to label 2020 as “The […]

View Full Article - The Partisan Gap Among Women in Elective Office in 2020 and Beyond

Banning right-wing extremists from social media can reduce the spread of anti-social ideas and conspiracy theories, according to Rutgers-led research. The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, examined what happens after individual influencers with large followings are banned from social media and no longer have a platform to promote their extreme […]

View Full Article - Permanent Twitter Ban of Extremist Influencers Can Detoxify Social Media

The number of students who enroll in college and take on debt without receiving a college degree is striking. Of all students enrolled in America’s public four-year universities, less than 60 percent will graduate with a degree within six years. Even fewer enrollees graduate from two-year colleges, where only about 30 percent earn a credential […]

View Full Article - Why Performance-Based Funding Fails to Improve College Graduation Rates – and How States Can Do Better

American cities have long been unequal places – with big class and racial gaps that often overlap. Residents of particular neighborhoods often experience many severe deprivations all at once. Scholars try to understand these overlapping urban inequalities by mapping concentrations of racial and ethnic groups along with those areas that experience concentrated poverty, using U.S. […]

View Full Article - Why Growing Urban Inequality is as Much About White Affluence as Minority Poverty

The instructional models that are used to train police officers across the U.S. at the academy, in-service, mid-rank, and leadership levels are in many cases antiquated, inadequate, and in critical need of immediate transformation, according to a new report released by American University’s School of Public Affairs (SPA). Entitled “Re-Envisioning Police Training in the U.S.: Rejecting […]

View Full Article - Police Training Needs Urgent Reforms, New Report from American University Reveals

By Fernando Tormos, Gustavo García-López, and Mary Angelica Painter After a hurricane strikes, governments and electric utility companies go to work restoring a sense of normalcy to their communities. Typical disaster recovery efforts include providing food and shelter to the displaced and medical services to the injured, and turning the power back on. While governments […]

View Full Article - How Inequality and Politics Influence Government Responses to Natural Disasters

The drawing and redrawing of electoral districts – which happens every ten years after the Census – is a hotly contested ritual in American politics. At the center of these disputes is partisan gerrymandering, a process in which elected officials draw electoral districts to increase the likelihood their own party will win more seats in […]

View Full Article - Why Independent Redistricting Commissions Should Draw Electoral District Maps

Gun violence increased by more than 30% in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new study by Penn State College of Medicine researchers. The researchers said that stress, domestic violence, lack of social interactions and greater access to firearms might have contributed to the increase. According to the researchers, these findings come at a time […]

View Full Article - U.S. Gun Violence Increased 30% During COVID-19 Pandemic

Ideally, local governments as the smallest jurisdictions in the American political system allow citizens to engage in a direct and substantive way. Local elections are one way this happens, as citizens select about half a million elected officials, one for every 450 adults, to serve in more than 85,000 U.S. local governments. But despite their […]

View Full Article - The “Money in Politics” Debate and Effective Ways to Improve Local Democracy in America

In the 1980s and 1990s, concerns about teen pregnancy voiced by policymakers and pundits helped garner support for welfare reform – as the public reached a consensus that teen pregnancy contributes to poverty and was encouraged by overly lenient welfare programs. Resulting welfare changes in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 […]

View Full Article - How Focusing on Teen Pregnancy as a Personal Moral Failing Deepens Social Inequality

Egg and sperm donations in the United States have long proceeded under the cloak of secrecy. Twenty-five years ago, when I first started interviewing patients who used donors to conceive a child, many intended parents struggled with whether eventually to tell their child about the nature of his or her conception. While some professionals in […]

View Full Article - The Case for Ending the Anonymity of Egg & Sperm Donations in the United States

By Henna Budhwani and Kristine Ria Hearld Contraception is complicated. Reproductive health scholars can comfortably weigh the protective benefits of condom use compared to the convenience of intrauterine devices. However, for most people, contraception continues to be a sensitive subject not appropriate for casual conversation – and consequently many Americans lack an adequate understanding of […]

View Full Article - Challenging Assumptions About the Use of Contraception by U.S. Muslim Women

BINGHAMTON, N.Y. — States with Democratic leaders tended to have responded more strongly to COVID-19 and have seen a lower rate of the spread of the virus, according to new research led by faculty at Binghamton University, State University of New York. Binghamton University Professor of Political Science Olga Shvetsova and her colleagues wanted to gain […]

View Full Article - Democrat-Led States Tended to Have Stronger Response to COVID-19, Which Improved Health Outcomes, Study Shows