Social Science Space

Humanity has a long history of dealing with things like pandemics. What history shows us is that the only practicable interventions are social and behavioral. How can we slow the movement of the new infection through the population while medical science catches up with treatments or vaccines?

When will the United States, and frankly the world, be able to cast a dispassionate eye on the U.S. elections […]

Political scientist Joshua Holzer identifies a number of proven electoral strategies used elsewhere that could replace the United States’ Electoral College.

Whomever they vote for, says Cary Wu, Americans who are trusting are more likely to have either cast their ballots already or will on election day than Americans who do not trust easily.

A pandemic is an epidemic occurring on a scale that crosses the globe. A condition is not a pandemic merely […]

Robert Dingwall cites a short story from 1957 which highlights why the development of a vaccine needs to always keep an eye on its safety, no matter what the pressures are for its immediate release.

This panel, “How Can Social Statistics Help Us Fight COVID-19,” organized by the Campaign for Social Science and SAGE Publishing and held on September 21, featured three speakers giving their perspectives on the role of timely, appropriately representative, and reliable social statistics in informing the COVID-19 response and recovery planning.

or 30 years, social scientists have been trying to educate scientific elites in the value of taking ordinary people with them rather than dismissing skepticism about science-based actions. This work has just gone out the window, argues Robert Dingwall.

Evidence reviewed by a National Association of Public Administration working group finds that voting by mail is rarely subject to fraud, does not give an advantage to one political party over another and can in fact inspire public confidence in the voting process, if done properly.

What is WeChat, and what does it do? Apart from ethnically suspect attacks on the platform itself, its ability to socially engineer discussion in China is a genuine concern.

The author of a new book on the response to the coronavirus tries first to understand how apparently sane people could think it made sense to implement damaging policies, and secondly asks how the public might ensure that such a disastrous episode can never happen again.

Could the 2020 iteration of the United States Census, the constitutionally mandated count of everyone present in the nation, be the last of its kind?