Elections

After local newspapers close, political polarization among voters increases, according to new research in the Journal of Communication.

Journalists were much more likely to rely on academic experts when their coverage of midterm congressional elections focused on political strategy than when it focused on public policy issues, finds a new study published in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly.

The national electorate often is framed in terms of partisan or generational divides. But there’s another important polarization of the electorate to consider: the health divide.

“Racially conservative” attitudes were the primary reason white Southerners abandoned the Democratic Party after party leaders began to advocate for civil rights legislation during the last half of the 20^th century, finds a new study from researchers at Princeton and Yale universities.

Eugene Scott is a longtime political reporter who writes about identity politics for the Washington Post’s The Fix. Before joining the Post in 2017, he covered breaking news at CNN Politics. And prior to that, he reported on local politics for the Arizona Republic, Kansas City Star and Charlotte Observer.

Contrary to popular belief, U.S. military veterans haven’t always been affiliated with the Republican Party — in fact, throughout much of the 1970s and 1980s and into the early 1990s, veterans were more likely to be Democrats, according to a new analysis published in Sociological Spectrum.

In more recent decades, veterans have begun to lean increasingly toward the Grand Old Party, researchers found.

Voters who cast ballots in Texas and Michigan in November 2016 rarely lacked a photo ID, but those who did were disproportionately people of color, two new working papers show.

Political humor has a long tradition in America, but ironical “fake news” is a phenomenon that distinguishes the current cultural moment. Indeed, in recent years a whole body of scholarly literature has focused on this field of political entertainment and its effects. A 2011 study from scholars at Ohio State University adds to this literature by examining how precisely such satire registers differently among liberals and conservatives — how humor is filtered through certain predispositions.

It’s difficult to choose which research articles to spotlight here as the most interesting or compelling — because scholars are doing so much interesting and compelling work. They’re continually asking tough questions to try to understand problems and trends within the digital news/social media space.