Conspiratorial thinking is an indelible part of American politics; indeed, conspiracy theories proliferated in North America even before the founding of the United States. A current headwind of trends appears to facilitate a surge in conspiratorial thinking, including the increased spread and accessibility of misinformation, steady declines in public trust in authority figures, and an increasingly polarized electorate marked by mutual partisan animosity. The annual symposium of the UC Irvine Center for Neuropolitics brought together experts in law, political science, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology to discuss why and how conspiracy thought develops and persists. This paper synthesizes the insights from that symposium, addressing the foundations of conspiracy thinking in both individuals and society as a whole, and its place in the current American political landscape. Through integrating various disciplinary perspectives, the symposium aimed to identify possible pathways to alleviating the prevalence and influence of conspiratorial thinking.

Ever since the advent of recombinant DNA technology in the early 1970s concerns have been expressed about the misuse potential of this and subsequent biotechnology breakthroughs. This article focuses on the securitization of gain-of-function (GOF) virology research in the United States, utilizing an updated theoretical framework that distinguishes between “riskification” and “threatification.” The paper examines three distinct cases, two historical, one ongoing. It argues that early attempts to govern GOF research primarily employed a riskification approach, characterized by self-governance by the scientific community. However, the controversy over the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic led to a shift toward threatification, bringing in high-level political actors like the U.S. President and Congress, resulting in the adoption of more restrictive, legally-enforced oversight measures. The article concludes that the application of this theoretical distinction provides a better understanding of how the governance of dual-use research has evolved in the United States.

Political violence is widespread in potential but uneven in expression. I propose a two-level integrative framework that helps explain the capacity for and expression of political violence, derived from the broadening interdisciplinary behavioral science research on violence. The first level of this framework centers on species-typical psychological mechanisms (common across humans) that regulate coalitional dynamics such as moralization, identity categorization, and collection action for violence. The second level focuses on individual-level catalysts: person-specific variable traits that predispose some individuals to cross the threshold into violent action. While each perspective is supported by extensive research across the social sciences, political science has yet to synthesize them explicitly into a single coherent model. Integrating these two levels offers a comprehensive foundation for analyzing a broad spectrum of political violence, at once both reconciling and moving beyond fruitless nature-vs-nurture type stalemates to help explain both the ubiquity and variability of an ancient vice.

Using an adoption design and data from a U.S. sample of adoptive and biological siblings and their parents, we examine the role of pre-birth (e.g., genetics) and post-birth factors (e.g., family socialization) in shaping numerous measures of political engagement, several of which have not been studied before in the context of an adoption design. Our results provide suggestive evidence that pre-birth factors play a larger role in shaping children’s political engagement than post-birth factors. More specifically, we find that the sense of responsibility to stay politically informed and vote and contacting a politician seem to be more heavily influenced by pre-birth factors than post-birth factors. Future studies should replicate these findings using larger samples and also build on our results by examining a wider array of acts of political engagement.

Stress is a response to external environmental conditions that encourages individuals to pursue changes in their lives. We examine the relationship between stress and federal and provincial political leaders’ approval ratings. We theorize that, as a strategy to cope with the pandemic stresses outside of their direct control, individuals will redirect their frustrations toward incumbents. We hypothesize that greater experiences with stress will negatively correlate with the approval of political incumbents even among members of incumbents’ political in-group. We analyze data from the COVID-19 Monitor survey, a multi-wave, cross-sectional survey of over 56,000 Canadians. On three out of four measures, we find that stress negatively impacted incumbent approval, and that these negative impacts occur among the incumbent’s supporters and non-supporters. On the fourth measure, we find the effect of stress on approval is moderated, positive or negative, by whether regional leaders took action to limit the spread of coronavirus disease 2019.

In 2024, the U.S. Government introduced, and then quickly rescinded, a new policy to oversee Dual Use Research of Concern (DURC) and Pathogens with Enhanced Pandemic Potential (PEPP). This research explores how biosafety practitioners interpreted and assessed the policy itself and discussed challenges to implementation. An inductive, grounded theory approach was used to identify key insights from qualitative data generated at a 2-day deliberative workshop with 45 biosafety officers, compliance professionals and researchers; analysis was supported using NVivo software. Participants described the policy’s ambiguous language, lack of actionable federal guidance, limited legal scope and unfunded administrative burdens as significant barriers to implementation. Although supportive of the policy’s goals, workshop participants stressed the need for more precise definitions, practical examples and practitioner-informed implementation strategies. The findings demonstrate that durable and effective biosafety and biosecurity oversight requires early, substantive engagement with those operationalizing policy.

Policymakers often consult university scientists as they design and administer policies to address issues facing contemporary democracies, including climate change and global pandemics. Subsequently, democratic theorists have become interested in how science advising generates both challenges and opportunities for democratic governance. As a work of applied political theory, this article contributes to current debates over the political implications of scientific expertise—and engages with Zeynep Pamuk’s writings, in particular—through a sustained focus on impending regulatory decisions surrounding novel gene editing technologies. I show how political decisions have created incentives for university scientists to commercialize research and develop partnerships with biotechnology corporations. In turn, the academic-industrial complex has both compromised the integrity of scientific research and also impaired scientists’ capacities to offer disinterested advice in the public interest. I conclude by recommending the development of a more robust and expansive regulatory environment that can restore public trust in scientific expertise.

Previous research on the underpinnings of support for conspiracy theories has explored the role of both generalized trust and political trust, but scholars have yet to explore whether both generalized and political anxiety are related to support for conspiracy theories. While studies have shown that general measures of anxiety predict support for conspiracy theories, researchers have not yet devoted much attention to understanding whether feelings of political anxiety are also related to conspiracy theory endorsement. Using data from an original survey fielded in 2023 that includes a measure of generalized anxiety and an eight-item measure that specifically captures political anxiety, we find that political anxiety is not related to conspiracy theory support, and that generalized anxiety is weakly related to conspiracy theory support. Thus, although there are good reasons to be concerned about the ill effects of political anxiety, it does not appear to be strongly related to conspiracy theory endorsement.

This study examines the impact of Colombia’s mental health system reforms (1999–2021) on suicide mortality trends using national vital statistics data (51,924 suicide-related deaths). Through joinpoint regression and interrupted time series analyses, we assessed age-standardized suicide rates (ASSRs) across demographic subgroups. Results revealed no statistically significant associations between policy reforms and suicide trends, despite Colombia’s progressive legislative advancements, including Law 1616 (2013) and expanded mental health services. Key findings include (1) declining ASSR for adolescents (−0.75% annually, p < 0.001) but rising rates among women (+3.8% post-2012, p < 0.05); (2) rural areas consistently exhibited higher ASSRs than urban settings; and (3) reforms showed nonsignificant immediate or sustained effects (p > 0.05). The study underscores the complexity of suicide determinants, suggesting that structural factors (e.g., socioeconomic disparities) may outweigh health-sector interventions. These findings highlight the need for integrated, context-specific suicide prevention strategies in Colombia and similar settings.

In many countries, overall animal experimentation is not significantly decreasing or becoming less severe. Does this show that these countries’ programs to promote alternatives and the “three Rs” of “replace, reduce, refine” are failing? Scholars and activists sometimes take this for granted, but representatives of “three Rs” programs have disagreed. This article makes two contributions to the debate: one conceptual and one normative. First, it draws attention to the distinction between evaluating impact (whether a program makes a difference) and evaluating sufficiency (whether a program makes enough of a difference to achieve its goals). Total numbers are typically unhelpful in assessing impact, but depending on goals, they can be relevant in assessing sufficiency. Second, this article argues that an overall decrease in harm to animals in experimentation is a sensible policy goal. This article concludes with suggestions for how to go beyond the “three Rs” to effect overall change.

The Biden administration requested comments regarding “Public and Private Sector Uses of Biometric Technologies” in the Federal Register from October 2021 to January 2022. This generated 130 responses, helped shape the “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights,” and resulted in Executive Order 14110 on “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.” While the Trump administration immediately rescinded this executive order, these comments provide insight into salient AI biometrics technologies and relevant political players. We first identify AI biometric technologies before asking which institutions and individuals commented (RQ1), and what the substance and tenor of responses were regarding the opportunities and threats posed by AI biometrics (RQ2-a) based on respondent type (RQ2-b). We use text mining and qualitative analyses to illuminate how uncertainty about AI biometric technology in this nascent policy subsystem reflects participants’ language use and policy preferences.