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We tend to have strong feelings when it comes to politicians, ranging from disgust to enthusiasm. So just how deep-seated are these feelings? Bert Bakker, Matthijs Rooduijn and Gijs Schumacher studied physical reactions to political messaging and found that the human body actually reacts to politics.

Members of parliament in Iceland tweet less than once a day on average, whereas parliamentarians in Turkey tweet six times a day on average. In Canada, the Netherlands, Turkey and the US upwards of 97% of active politicians are on Twitter, but in Austria the number is only 47%. These are some of the early findings offered up by the Twitter Parliamentarian Database (TPD), built by the researchers from the UvA's Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research and Sweden's Chalmers University of Technology.

Politics, above COVID-19 cases or deaths, determined whether states enacted mask mandates during the first months of the pandemic, a new study finds. States with Republican governors delayed imposing indoor mask requirements by an average of nearly 30 days, controlling for other factors.

Mail-in voting has come under partisan scrutiny, but according to Stanford research, it does not appear to benefit one political party over the other. However, challenges to mail-in and absentee voting remain as states and voters make a shift this November. As the coronavirus persists and the U.S. November election nears, some states are expanding options for voters to cast their ballot either by mail or absentee - a decision that has raised concerns that mail-in voting could favor one political party over the other.

Every four years, U.S. presidential campaigns collectively spend billions of dollars flooding TV screens across the country with political ads. But a new study co-authored by Yale political scientist Alexander Coppock shows that, regardless of content, context, or audience, those pricey commercials do little to persuade voters.

It is conventional wisdom that Americans cherish democracy - but a new study by Yale political scientists reports that only a small fraction of U.S. voters are willing to sacrifice their partisan and policy interests to defend democratic principles.

Microtargeting allows political players to send tailored messages to citizens in order to influence them. This could explain the successful Leave campaign in the UK, not to mention the surprising election of Donald Trump. But what about the Netherlands? UvA communication scientist Tom Dobber decided to investigate.

Where various ethnic groups live together, cities grow at a slower rate. That is the conclusion reached by a researcher from the University of Basel and his colleagues based on worldwide data that shows how the diversity of language groups in 1975 has influenced urban growth 40 years later. The scientists have reported their findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

With the nation deeply polarized, research by David Broockman and Joshua Kalla has found that advocates for hot-button issues can improve their chances of changing an opponent's mind when they ask questions, listen sincerely and engage them with stories. (Photo by Tania Liu via Flickr The nation is locked in a state of polarization unprecedented in the past half-century, with deep, volatile divisions around issues of politics, race, religion and the environment.

V oter ID laws are becoming more common and more strict, and the stakes for American democracy are high and growing higher by the year. New research from the University of California San Diego provides evidence that voter ID laws disproportionately reduce voter turnout in more racially diverse areas.

The way politicians communicate with constituents has never been more important than during the Covid-19 pandemic, say experts. Dr Nikki Soo of Cardiff University led a study with Dr James Weinberg and Dr Kate Dommett at the University of Sheffield, which investigated how people reacted to different communications they might receive from an MP.

New research by academics from four Universities including the University of Birmingham has found that anti-immigrant attitudes in the UK softened immediately following the Brexit referendum of 2016, among both Leave and Remain supporters. The report, ' A Populist Paradox? How Brexit Softened Anti-Immigrant Attitudes ' concludes that attitudes towards anti-immigration and anti-refugees were significantly softer even several months after the referendum.

Study suggests that TV appearances by Bolsonaro led to millions more Brazilians ignoring social distancing in the days following broadcast. The attitude of a leader can have a significant and possibly devastating impact on individual health and the healthcare systems of a nation Tiago Cavalcanti Jair Bolsonaro's public undermining of pandemic prevention efforts reduces social distancing in the parts of Brazil where his voter base is strongest, according to a new study using location data from over 60 million phones.

The coronavirus has disrupted state primaries and forced the prospect of major reforms for the 2020 election. Election officials across the nation are mulling expansions or transitions to mail-in voting while Congress is fielding calls for a nationwide vote-by-mail program. In examining voter data in three states with staggered rollouts of vote-by-mail programs ' California, Utah and Washington ' the researchers found that the introduction of mail-in voting did not have an effect, on average, on the share of voter turnout for either Republicans or Democrats.

Mayoral governance in Bristol has boosted the visibility of city leadership and helped promote Bristol on the national and international stage, a new study has found. The research by UWE Bristol and the University of Bristol also showed the mayoral model of leadership had unnecessarily restricted the role of councillors and reduced citizens' belief in their ability to influence decisions.

Our researchers are the history detectives, unearthing exciting things from our past and helping us learn from our ancestors. We are also the home to important cultural archives available for study. Here's From finding long a lost medieval chapel fit for a king, to discovering documents from our royal past.

From the fields of science to sociology, politics and philosophy, here is what Stanford research says about love and romance, in the past and present day. For centuries, people have tried to understand the behaviors and beliefs associated with falling in love. What explains the wide range of emotions people experience? How have notions of romance evolved over time? As digital media becomes a permanent fixture in people's lives, how have these technologies changed how people meet? Examining some of these questions are Stanford scholars.

Name: David Broockman Degrees: B.A. Yale University, 2011; Ph.D. UC Berkeley, 2015 Research interests: I study how voters and politicians make decisions, generally using real-world field experiments that allow for rigorous causal inferences. My recent research focuses on voter persuasion and how to measure how well voters' views are represented.

Channels McGill University News and Events In the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, an unusual experiment suggested that it might be possible to influence American voters to adopt less polarized positions. Posing as political researchers, a research team from McGill and Lund Universities approached 136 voters at the first Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton presidential debate in New York.

Who - or what - is to blame for the  xenophobia, political intolerance and radical political parties spreading through Germany and the rest of Europe? A new study from Rice University and Washington University in St. Louis shows a major factor is people's proximity to former Nazi concentration camps.