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Today, the Netherlands is holding its elections, a crucial opportunity for every Dutch citizen to express their satisfaction or discontent with society through vote. Unfortunately, there is a tendency for marginalized groups, including Muslims, to abstain from voting despite the significance of this democratic process.

Remote moderation by video encourages frank discussion Published on Wednesday 15 November 2023 Last updated on Wednesday 15 November 2023 Focus groups that feed views, experiences and opinions into politics, business and research might yield more open interaction and discussion within groups by moving moderators to a separate room, shows new research.

Using generic terms in politics may be exacerbating political division, a new study suggests. Statements such as "Democrats want to have tougher gun laws” and "Republicans want to ban abortion,” can heighten perceived differences between the two political parties, the study says. Researchers at the University of Michigan, Columbia University and Stony Brook University studied political polarization due to individuals making broad generalizations about certain groups based on inconsistent evidence.

New heat map charts unequal civic opportunity in the U.S. Local faith institutions and social organizations are the top providers of civic engagement, and civic opportunity decreases as poverty levels increase, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University's SNF Agora Institute P eople in many parts of the United States possess few chances for the robust community engagement that underpins healthy democracies, according to a new report that for the first time maps civic opportunity across the country.

People are beginning to reconsider their reproductive decisions due to complex concerns about climate change, with many choosing to forego childbearing, or reduce the number of children they have as a result, finds a new study by UCL researchers. The research, published in PLOS Climate , is the first systematic review to explore how and why climate change-related concerns may be impacting reproductive decision-making.

For many people, science has become a question of faith - the acceptance of research results increasingly depends on whether they fit in with their own world view. This poses new challenges for science communication. Simply preparing content in an appealing and accessible way for the public in order to close gaps in knowledge and present new innovations is no longer enough.

In a couple of weeks, Dutch citizens aged 18 and above will be participating in an upcoming election. What are the opinions of adolescents and young adults when it comes to politics'. Erasmus SYNC Lab investigated this in collaboration with the Hot Politics labs from the University of Amsterdam. The findings reveal that less than one in three young people (30%) are interested in Dutch politics.

A new EPFL developed tool, Quotebank , has helped researchers provide the first large-scale data-driven evidence of a drastic shift towards a more negative political tone beginning at the start of Donald Trump's primary campaign in June 2015. A vast majority of Americans believe that the tone and nature of political debate in the United States has become more negative in recent years and more than half have the impression that Donald Trump is responsible.

Waterloo Engineering researchers are developing new technologies to combat disinformation - a robust solution to fake news By John Roe Faculty of Engineering Cutting-edge technologies gave the world fake news, but researchers from the University of Waterloo's Faculty of Engineering are developing even newer technology to stop it.

What is the dynamic between political debate in the Dutch House of Representatives and reactions, commentary and framing on social media? Academics of the Utrecht University Faculty of Humanities and Data School, investigated this question. The researchers analysed data from various public sources: publicly accessible groups and accounts on X (previously Twitter) and Telegram where the Dutch language is used.

Vital forest is cleared every day, with major climate effects. Satellites have revolutionized measurement of the problem, but what can we do about it? Imagine if France, Germany, and Spain were completely blanketed in forests - and then all those trees were quickly chopped down. That's nearly the amount of deforestation that occurred globally between 2001 and 2020, with profound consequences.

According to research by linguists Leo Lentz and Henk Pander Maat (Utrecht University), a simpler speech from the throne is better understood and more positively assessed. Lentz and Pander Maat rewrote the 2022 Dutch speech from the throne, leaving the content unchanged but the wording more accessible.

Cross-national research carried out by the University of Southampton and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VUA) into public opinion on LGBT+ rights has shown that anti-immigrant prejudices, particularly towards Muslims, contributes to explaining some of the widespread shifts in tolerance towards the LGBT+ community.

More and more often Utrecht researchers experiment with citizen science, research that involves collaboration with citizens. For instance, by having them collect data. PhD candidate Fleur Froeling went one step further: she asked Dutch people which subject they would like to research scientifically, and involved a group of citizens in every step of the process.

An anti-gay protest by Muslims elicits more sympathy for the LGBTQ+ community than when it is organized by natives. This is especially true if the observer already held a negative view of ethnic minorities, according to an experimental study conducted by political scientists Alberto López Ortega and Stuart Turnbull-Dugarte (University of Southampton) among over 2,300 British and Spanish citizens.

An international research group with ETH professor Dominik Hangartner has found that solidarity with refugees in Europe has remained stable, despite repeated refugee crises. While there is a tendency to view refugees from Ukraine more positively, this does not come at the expense of other groups. Russia's attack on Ukraine has resulted in one of the largest movements of refugees since the Second World War.

The Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) is participating in a European research project, called SOLARIS, to analyse the political risks associated with multimedia content created using Artificial Intelligence (AI). The objective is to propose regulatory innovations in this regard from the field of Law in order to fight against fake news and disinformation created with this technology.

A clear majority of East Germans can identify with democracy as an idea, but less than half are satisfied with their everyday experience of democracy. This was the result of a representative survey of 3,546 people from the eastern German states conducted by the Else-Frenkel-Brunswik Institute of the University of Leipzig, the results of which were presented today (June 28) at the Federal Press Conference in Berlin by the study's directors Oliver Decker and Elmar Brähler.

In politics, tailored ads make sense, but with real limits to the tailoring. 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. Now, a newly-published study led by MIT scholars finds that while targeting is effective in some political contexts, the "micro" part of things may not be the game-changing tool some have assumed.

Researchers used Linkedin data to track where professionals want to move within the EU For professionals looking for a new job, Eastern European countries have not been very attractive so far. That's the finding of a study by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany, together with a Dutch colleague.