This piece documents how policymakers have stigmatized mRNA vaccination, in contrast to other forms of vaccine technology, following the COVID-19 pandemic. It further argues that, although it is presently unclear whether elites’ efforts to stigmatize mRNA vaccines have spilled over to shape US public opinion, there is growing reason to believe that it might. Ultimately, mRNA vaccine stigmatization could erode public confidence in mRNA vaccination and limit access to life-saving vaccines. This piece concludes by outlining a research agenda for researchers at the intersection of politics and the life sciences who hope to better understand the causes and consequences of mRNA vaccine stigmatization.

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.

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.

In many countries, a large portion of animal studies serve publicly funded research purposes, yet a transition beyond animal research is politically desired. This article argues that a gradual transition is obstructed by three commitments of traditional science policy: (1) the state should provide resources for research; (2) it should leave the direction of research to the scientific community; and (3) it should set side constraints for research. This framework severely restricts public influence on the amount and kind of animal research conducted with public funds. The public can allocate some extra resources to the innovation of alternatives to animal models or tighten legal side constraints, but neither approach is likely to significantly decrease reliance on animal research overall. A gradual transition away from publicly funded animal research toward new approaches is feasible only if the second commitment is reconsidered, allowing the public greater influence over the research agenda.

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.

COVID-19 deepened the interface between health and security, making information the decisive currency of collaboration. This paper foregrounds the “confidentiality–utility dilemma”: how health and security communities—each premised on strict secrecy in distinct operational contexts—can share information without undermining the other side’s core values. We argue that purposeful managerial design is both necessary and feasible. First, we address the structural limitations of global rule-making and the concomitant drift toward diversification of sources and strengthened capabilities to uncover hidden information that renders security-sector actors increasingly relevant. Drawing on previous assessments and cases, we reformulate the importance of three managerial levers: (1) organizational and structural interventions including two-tier arrangements; (2) tiered classification and de-identification that embed share-by-design access controls for both health and security data; and (3) joint investigations and co-analysis, exemplified by UN-SGM (United Nations Secretary-General’s Mechanism)-type mechanisms, which can act as clearinghouses by enabling full sharing within the team while preserving external neutrality.

Past research has linked stronger physiological threat and disgust responses with conservatism, suggesting a neurobiological basis for ideology. However, replication failures cast doubt on a direct link between physiology and political attitudes. Given interoception’s role in awareness and emotion regulation, we tested whether interoceptive sensibility (i.e., awareness of internal bodily states) moderates the relationship between disgust sensitivity and political orientation. In 632 US citizens, we found that the association between disgust sensitivity and political orientation was moderated by interoceptive sensibility. Among those with lower interoception, higher disgust sensitivity was associated with more conservative ideology and a greater likelihood of Republican identification, whereas this association weakened or disappeared among those with higher interoception. We suggest that among individuals with lower interoception, socially acquired meanings may play a larger role in interpreting disgust-related experiences, strengthening their association with ideology. These findings lay the groundwork for mechanistic, replicable research on psychophysiological antecedents of political cognition.

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.

Genomic biobanks are increasingly embedded in the United States’ criminal justice system and scientific research institutions. Yet, we do not clearly understand how much the public supports these societal uses, why they do (or do not), and whether public perspectives are even meaningful given minimal familiarity with biobanks. Few studies have queried representative samples of the U.S. public, and almost all address only one moment in time and one of the two uses. In contrast, we draw on original survey data that (1) address scientific and forensic biobanks, (2) are representative of the U.S. public, (3) include re-interviews several years later, and (4) mix qualitative and quantitative measures of opinion. We find a public using value-based reasoning to express a mix of optimism and caution. We conclude that well-constructed surveys enable policymakers and experts to consider lay views as they craft policy relevant to genomics.

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.

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.

Over the past 50 years, attention has intensified on Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC) Article X, which obligates states parties to provide international cooperation and assistance (ICA) and ensure the broadest accessibility of biology for peaceful purposes. In the absence of a treaty protocol and institutional support, Article X’s scope of activities and standard for compliance remain up to the interpretation of each state party. The Ninth BWC Review Conference established the Working Group on the Strengthening of the Convention (Working Group) and mandated it to address ICA, including establishing a mechanism to facilitate Article X implementation. Utilizing a mixed-methods methodology, this study characterizes the landscape of Article X and ICA perspectives among BWC delegations and other stakeholders. It identifies concrete opportunities to strengthen Article X implementation, in support of the Working Group’s efforts, including a pillar framework to illustrate alignment across an ICA mechanism’s roles, activities, and resources.

This paper examines Ghana’s COVID-19 response through a biopolitical and biosecurity lens. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, it analyzes how interventions such as lockdowns, biosurveillance, and vaccination campaigns functioned both as technologies of care and instruments of control, expanding state authority over biological and social life. The study shows that biopolitics in Ghana did not replicate Western models but emerged as a provincialized and context-dependent form of power shaped by infrastructural constraints, informal economies, and postcolonial state formation. Pandemic governance was, therefore, adaptive and improvisational, requiring negotiation between epidemiological control and socioeconomic survival. By bringing biopolitics into dialogue with postcolonial theory and necropolitics, the paper conceptualizes pandemic governance as a hybrid regime in which life-preserving and life-abandoning logics coexist. It thus challenges universalist assumptions and repositions the Global South as central to rethinking the governance of life.

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.

Research on psychology and foreign policy offers compelling evidence that leaders’ predispositions to aggression influence their decisions to initiate military conflicts. However, most indicators of leader proclivities are limited both spatially and temporally, reducing their generalizability. To mitigate these issues, this study employs the facial width-to-height ratio (FWHR), a measure of aggression drawn from theories of evolutionary psychology, and available for most leaders in the post-World War II era. FWHR not only provides broad coverage but it also taps into a dimension of leader characteristics overlooked in most international conflict research. Empirical analysis of over 1,700 leaders across 174 countries during 1947–2010 reveals that higher-FWHR leaders are significantly more likely than their lower-FWHR counterparts to initiate conflict. The results are particularly strong early in a leader’s tenure.

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.

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.

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.

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.