BACKGROUND Throughout human history, a disproportionate degree of political power around the world has been held by men. Even in democracies where the opportunity to serve in top political positions is available to any individual elected by the majority of their constituents, most of the highest political offices are occupied by male leaders. What psychological factors underlie this political g...

In his recent book Left Turn, Tim Groseclose concludes that, in a world without media bias, the average American voter would be positioned at around 25 on a 0–100 scale, where 0 is a right-wing Republican and 100 is a left-wing Democrat. In this world, a balanced media might include some TV networks promoting the view that abortion should be illegal under all circumstances and subject to crimin...

Article history: Received 7 August 2014 Received in revised form 23 February 2015 Accepted 17 March 2015 Available online 11 April 2015 The relationship between cognitive ability and stated political preferences in the United States is examined with data from the General Social Survey, which includes a brief vocabulary test (Wordsum) as a measure of verbal ability. Since the 1970s, liberal and ...

BACKGROUND Can political controversy have a "chilling effect" on the production of new science? This is a timely concern, given how often American politicians are accused of undermining science for political purposes. Yet little is known about how scientists react to these kinds of controversies. METHODS AND FINDINGS Drawing on interview (n = 30) and survey data (n = 82), this study examines ...

In this paper, we investigate the interactions among oligarchs, political parties, and voters using an agent-based modeling approach. We introduce the OLIGO model, which is based on the spatial model of democracy, where voters have positions in a policy space and vote for the party that appears closest to them, and parties move in policy space to seek more votes. We extend the existing literatu...

How do the discourses of biology and politics interact? This article uses the case of Carl Vogt (1817-1895), a German zoologist, physiologist, and radical political activist in the German revolutions of 1848-49, to examine the traffic across the discourses before, during, and after the revolutions. It argues that the key metaphors of the “state-as-organism” (used largely by political theorists)...

The prevalence of overweight and obesity is growing at an accelerated pace in disadvantaged populations. Indigenous populations all over the world, whose lifestyle is changing rapidly and drastically, seem to be particularly prone to show an increased prevalence of overweight and its co-morbidities among adults. The aim of this study was to evaluate the association between socioeconomic and nut...