Public K-12 education in the United States is distinctively a local affair: school districts are governed by local boards of education, composed of lay members typically elected in non-partisan elections. These boards have decision-making power over hundreds of billions of public dollars and oversee complex agencies that, in addition to preparing…

Unlike many other countries, in Sweden there are more significant paths to political leadership than the university degree. Most Swedish political parties offer leadership training programmes that include practical and ideological content and several have a design rooted in the popular education movement. This article explores how party political…

In academia, plagiarism is considered detrimental to the advancement of sciences, and the plagiarists can be charged with sanctions. However, the plagiarism cases involving three rectors of universities in Indonesia stand out, as they could defend their stand for not committing academic misconduct despite evidence found. By analyzing the three…

International survey researchers are increasingly turning to a geospatial sampling approach known as gridded population sampling for finer resolution and a more updated sampling frame than conventional census-based sampling. To date, there have been no direct comparisons of accuracy between survey results derived from the two methods. This…

Based on the theory of social change, cultural evolution, and human development, we propose a mechanism whereby increased danger in society causes predictable shifts in valued forms of intelligence: (1) Practical intelligence rises in value relative to abstract intelligence; and (2) social intelligence shifts from measuring how well individuals…

In the November 2016 U.S. presidential election, many state level public opinion polls, particularly in the Upper Midwest, incorrectly predicted the winning candidate. One leading explanation for this polling miss is that the precipitous decline in traditional polling response rates led to greater reliance on statistical methods to adjust for the…

The past few years have seen a rise in interest in local elected offices, specifically in school board seats. These seats hold unequivocal power over what school districts can do in terms of advancing equity and excellence in education. We explore one facet of what became a playbook of anti-equity efforts in school districts during the COVID-19…

Although most education policy decisions are made at the state level, America has been having a national debate over the future of our schools for the last several years. Arguments have raged over COVID-related closures and the resultant student learning loss, Critical Race Theory, school funding, parental choice, college debt, and more. The 2022…

This short report looks more deeply into the question of whether student voters make a difference to UK election results by: (1) taking the 25 constituencies with the highest proportion of full-time students -- those where they are thought to make up more than 17.5 per cent of the electorate; (2) considering the results in these seats for the last…

Presidential elections can be forecast using information from political and economic conditions, polls, and a statistical model of changes in public opinion over time. However, these "knowns" about how to make a good presidential election forecast come with many unknowns due to the challenges of evaluating forecast calibration and…

This paper examines the impact of ethnic and racial diversity on the public's willingness to invest in public goods. Challenging the prevalent assertion that increasing diversity reduces support for investing in public goods, it argues that this relationship is substantially shaped by the context in which people live because demographic changes…

Education is central to creating well-informed citizens capable of participating in social and political life. However, civic education in some liberal democratic societies has often focused on teaching students the mechanics and structure of party politics, overlooking many of the public virtues that help to sustain democratic life. In this…

This article explores the causes of the epistemological crisis that gave rise to conspiracy theories which culminated in large swathes of the U.S. population refusing to accept the outcome of a democratic election. An epistemological crisis is defined by a blurring of facts and falsehoods to the degree that blatant and obvious propaganda holds…

Alongside the Disney theme park, miles of beaches along both the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, Florida's long southern peninsula is filled with political, social, and cultural differences. The state's diversity comes as close to any geographic location in the world characterised by the term 'internationalism,' racially, ethnically, and…

In the immediate aftermath of the November 2016 election, Mark Lilla argued in the "New York Times" that in order to win, the Democratic party would need to replace identity politics with a unifying vision of citizenship. In this essay, Derek Gottlieb and Amy Shuffelton explore Lilla's use of the two major terms -- identity and…