Background: Political scientists have repeatedly argued that politicians' behaviour can be influenced by their beliefs about their constituents' ability to hold them accountable. Yet, how such accountability beliefs affect politicians' information processing or behaviour remains understudied. Aims and objectives: I investigate how accountability…

New communication technologies express the transformation of traditional communication technologies in parallel with technological development. New media tools, such as propaganda tools in political elections, have become widespread in recent years. The use of social media in political elections has gained significant importance in recent years.…

Preparing students to enter the workforce and attracting and retaining good teachers are Americans' top educational priorities for the next administration in Washington, regardless of who wins the upcoming presidential election, the 2024 PDK Poll finds. While eight in 10 or more Americans pick those two items as priorities, other policy priorities…

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…

Going back a quarter century to 1992, our last three presidents all made education an integral issue of their campaigns. However, education has been largely absent during the 2016 presidential contest. Why is education not drawing much attention? For most people, education is not as urgent as national security and the economy. Much of education's…

Before the start of this past fall semester, a large Northern California community college, celebrated its 100th anniversary. One of the lead programs featured a panel of current faculty, staff, and students, in addition to a former Japanese American student who attended the college during World War II. Her story offered an opportunity for to…

The 2020 PDK Poll of the Public's Attitude Toward the Public Schools finds that more than half of adults consider public education highly important in their choice for president. And regardless of political party, most Americans agree that the administration in Washington should focus on attracting and retaining good teachers to the profession and…

This article surveys the library and information science (LIS) response to the problems of fake news and misinformation from the 2016 U.S. presidential election to the end of 2018, focusing on how librarians and other information professionals in the United States have articulated the problems and the paths forward for combating them.…

This article analyses the reporting of evidence in Swiss direct-democratic campaigns in the health policy sector, assuming that an informed public helps democracy function successfully. A content analysis of the media's news reporting shows that of 5030 media items retrieved, a reference to evidence is found in 6.8%. The voter receives evidence in…

As the 2012 presidential election approaches, controversy grows over recent statewide legislative initiatives that impose stricter identification requirements on voters. These new voter identification laws--especially those that require voters to produce a government-issued photo ID--are the subject of intense debates. During 2011, seven states…

In this article, Amy N. Farley, Matthew N. Gaertner, and Michele S. Moses examine the use of ballot initiatives as a particularly attractive form of direct democracy for opponents of affirmative action in higher education. Building on previous scholarship, the authors question whether anti-affirmative ballot initiatives validly reflect voters'…

Voters in Ohio sent an unequivocal message to the state's Republican governor and lawmakers that they went too far in reining in collective bargaining for teachers and other public employees. But analysts say the conflict between the GOP and teachers' unions in Ohio and elsewhere is not over. By an overwhelming, 22-percentage-point margin,…

Canadian public school board trustees are generally chosen by way of public ballot in civic elections. A comparison of board governance literature to a local narrative account of public school board elections exposes several gaps between espoused democratic ideals and the realities of public engagement in trustee selection. I investigate the…

The graphic rating scale, a measurement tool used in many areas of psychology, usually takes a form of a fixed-length line segment, with both ends bounded and labeled as extreme responses. The raters mark somewhere on the line, and the length of the line segment from one endpoint to the mark is taken as the measure. An item response unfolding…

With the dollar's continued swoon and grim news on the job front, American economic competitiveness has become a central theme in the presidential election. Stumping in Ohio and Pennsylvania, old-line industrial states hit hard by the flight of manufacturing jobs, Democrats Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama have called for renegotiating the…