Politics is making us sick: The negative impact of political engagement on public health during the Trump administration

Objectives To quantify the effect of politics on the physical, psychological, and social health of American adults during the four-year span of the Trump administration. Methods A previously validated politics and health scale was used to compare health markers in nationally representative surveys administered to separate samples in March 2017 (N = 800) and October 2020 (N = 700). Participants in the 2020 survey were re-sampled approximately two weeks after the 2020 election and health markers were compared to their pre-election baselines. Results Large numbers of Americans reported politics takes a significant toll on a range of health markers—everything from stress, loss of sleep, or suicidal thoughts to an inability to stop thinking about politics and making intemperate social media posts. The proportion of Americans reporting these effects stayed stable or slightly increased between the spring of 2017 and the fall of 2020 prior to the presidential election. Deterioration in measures of physical health became detectably worse in the wake of the 2020 election. Those who were young, politically interested, politically engaged, or on the political left were more likely to report negative effects. Conclusions Politics is a pervasive and largely unavoidable source of chronic stress that exacted significant health costs for large numbers of American adults between 2017 and 2020. The 2020 election did little to alleviate those effects and quite likely exacerbated them.

How Voters Respond to Presidential Assaults on Checks and Balances: Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Turkey

Why do voters support executive aggrandizement? One possible answer is that they do so because they think this will ease their preferred leader’s hand in putting their partisan vision into action, provided that the leader will continue winning elections. We study this phenomenon through a survey experiment in Turkey, by manipulating voters’ perceptions about the potential results of the first presidential election after a constitutional referendum of executive aggrandizement. We find that voters from both sides display what we call “elastic support” for executive aggrandizement; that is, they change previously revealed constitutional preferences in response to varying winning chances. This elasticity increases not only when citizens feel greater social distance to perceived political “others” (i.e., affective polarization) but also when voters are concerned about economic management in a potential post-incumbent era. Our findings contribute to the literature on how polarization and economic anxiety contribute to executive aggrandizement and democratic backsliding. 1

The presidential election of the human body: applying contextual learning to promote connections between the student and the curricular content

Using real-world situations to engage students in learning specific content is preconized by educational research as an effective strategy. However, motivating students to establish personal and emotional connections with the curricular content is challenging. We presented a didactic strategy named The presidential election of the human body, created to use the presidential election context to engage students in studying cell function and structure using role-playing and appropriation of scientific concepts. Four groups of students (N=124) of the science and mathematics teacher training program chose a cell of the human body to impersonate, they studied the biology of their cell, and they ran in a presidential election campaign. They created slogans, videos, and materials for their campaign, and on the day of the election, the group of the students voted for the best slogan. The didactic strategy was capable of stimulating the appropriation of the characteristics of the cells they represented. The majority (75%) of the elected candidates represented cells that are linked to the nervous system. Musicality and humor were the most frequent styles that appeared in the slogans. Students strongly agreed that they enjoyed the activity and considered it valuable for contextualizing the learning of anatomy and physiology. Thus, the activity is a didactic resource to stimulate the students to embrace the content they are learning in a contextualized momentum of a presidential election.

Political Endorsements by Scientific Organizations Reduce Trust in Scientific Expertise During COVID-19

High-profile political endorsements by scientific organizations and publications have been common in recent years, which raises concerns about political backlash against the endorsing organization in particular and scientific expertise in general. In a pre-registered large-sample online controlled experiment, I randomly assign subjects to receive information about Nature's endorsement of Joe Biden for the 2020 U.S. presidential election in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Seeing the endorsement message leads to large reductions in self-reported trust in Nature among Trump supporters. This distrust translates into lower demand for COVID-related information provided by Nature, as evidenced by substantially reduced requests for Nature articles on vaccine efficacy and emerging COVID variants when offered. The endorsement also reduces Trump supporters' stated trust in scientists in general, suggesting "reputational externalities" on the scientific community. Treatment effect estimates for Biden supporters are positive but small and often statistically insignificant across outcomes. Finally, I find little evidence that the endorsement is successful at changing subjects' views about Biden and Trump. These results show political endorsement by scientific organizations can undermine public confidence in the endorsing organization and in the scientific community.

Religion in Indonesia's Elections: An Implementation of a Populist Strategy?

In Indonesia's political strategic environment, Islamic narratives have been among the main narratives, but have not always been dominant. The 2014 presidential election displayed the beginning of a rising trend of Islamic narratives within the political context in Indonesia. Since then Islamic narratives influenced the strategy of Indonesia's populist leaders, as particularly seen during the 2017 Jakarta gubernatorial election and 2019 presidential election. This paper analyzes how populism as a strategy was used in recent Indonesian elections. For this purpose, it uses the conception of populism as a political strategy proposed by Weyland. Building on this approach, the paper explains the strategic adjustments made in the use of populism from 2014, 2017, and 2019 in Indonesian political events. It argues that the strategic environment faced by populist actors in Indonesia's 2019 election affected their decision to choose Islamic narratives as an instrument for mass mobilization.

Analyzing Political Polarization on Social Media by Deleting Bot Spamming

Social media platforms are part of everyday life, allowing the interconnection of people around the world in large discussion groups relating to every topic, including important social or political issues. Therefore, social media have become a valuable source of information-rich data, commonly referred to as Social Big Data, effectively exploitable to study the behavior of people, their opinions, moods, interests and activities. However, these powerful communication platforms can be also used to manipulate conversation, polluting online content and altering the popularity of users, through spamming activities and misinformation spreading. Recent studies have shown the use on social media of automatic entities, defined as social bots, that appear as legitimate users by imitating human behavior aimed at influencing discussions of any kind, including political issues. In this paper we present a new methodology, namely TIMBRE (Time-aware opInion Mining via Bot REmoval), aimed at discovering the polarity of social media users during election campaigns characterized by the rivalry of political factions. This methodology is temporally aware and relies on a keyword-based classification of posts and users. Moreover, it recognizes and filters out data produced by social media bots, which aim to alter public opinion about political candidates, thus avoiding heavily biased information. The proposed methodology has been applied to a case study that analyzes the polarization of a large number of Twitter users during the 2016 US presidential election. The achieved results show the benefits brought by both removing bots and taking into account temporal aspects in the forecasting process, revealing the high accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed approach. Finally, we investigated how the presence of social bots may affect political discussion by studying the 2016 US presidential election. Specifically, we analyzed the main differences between human and artificial political support, estimating also the influence of social bots on legitimate users.

Power Consolidation of Jokowi's Administration: The Role of the Social Media and Political Issues in Indonesian Democracy

Joko Widodo (Jokowi) is the first Indonesian Democratic President elected by the peripheral people and not the elite. Jokowi is the only Indonesian President that is not the leader of any political party. Therefore, the President was faced with the issues of power consolidation in the initial administrative years. Some professional elites failed the President because they assumed a possible overthrown. During the presidential election in 2019 with Prabowo Subianto, Jokowi took K. H. Ma'ruf Amien as a vice presidential candidate and was attacked by China and the Indonesian Communist Party (ICP/PKI). However, Jokowi was re-elected for the second period (2019-2024) due to his close relationship with Indonesians, which is different from other presidents. Received: 23 August 2021 / Accepted: 24 November 2021 / Published: 3 January 2022

Citizen Engagement and Social Media

Social media has transformed election campaigns around the world. While it is difficult to determine to what extent social media influence voters' decisions, there is no doubt that social media platforms impact on candidate advertising and public debate during elections. This research, the methodological formulation of which is based on a case study, seeks to investigate the use of social media during political campaigns to collect signatures of support. In the elections of 2018, aspiring candidates for presidential election required a certain number of signatures of support in order to register as official candidates. We collected social media data on a weekly basis from the Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube accounts of seven candidates and contrasted this data with the number of signatures validated by the electoral authority. We found no relationship between the level of support received and the use of social media in the case of any of the candidates. However, we observed candidates who did achieve the required number of signatures and who did receive official presidential candidate status as a result of their high level of visibility. This research contributes methodologically to the current literature and provides empirical evidence regarding independent candidates in Mexico.