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Social Science Research Council
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The Social Science Research Council is an independent nonprofit that for 100 years has mobilized social & behavioral science for global policy impact. ssrc.org
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The SSRC has deep experience designing events and programs that bridge silos and build innovation networks connecting researchers, practitioners, and stakeholders, fostering productive new collaborations that link knowledge to practice.

Learn more: www.ssrc.org/how-we-work/...
October 29, 2025 at 6:07 PM
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Applications are now open for the 2026 African Peacebuilding and Developmental Dynamics fellowships. Apply now to advance your research, strengthen your networks, and shape Africa’s peacebuilding future. Please share widely!

Deadline: Jan 16, 2026

Learn more: ssrc.org/programs/afr...
Applications are now open for the African Peacebuilding and Developmental Dynamics (APDD) program’s fellowship awards — formerly known as the African Peacebuilding Network and Next Generation Social Sciences in Africa (APN and Next Gen) fellowships. Deadline: January 16, 2026, 11:59 PM EST
October 22, 2025 at 4:51 PM
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We are excited to announce that our African Peacebuilding Network and Next Gen program is evolving into the African Peacebuilding and Developmental Dynamics (APDD) program. Read more about this exciting change below:
www.ssrc.org/news/2025/10...
African Peacebuilding and Developmental Dynamics APDD builds on over a decade of advancing African-led research and scholarship on peacebuilding, governance, and developmental changes in conflict-affected countries and sub-regions in Africa.
October 15, 2025 at 5:34 PM
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This past weekend, the SSRC partnered with @wallacefoundation.bsky.social for a Peer Learning Convening on the theme “Retooling for Impact: Adapting Strategy and Practice for the Future.”
Panel image: Monica Barra, Bonita Buford, Rose Ojo-Ajayi
October 8, 2025 at 7:29 PM
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In the APA's American Psychologist, a large-scale meta-analysis identifies the treatment and patient characteristics of U.S. service members and veterans who drop out of psychotherapy.
psycnet.apa.org/record/2024-...
Dropout has been identified as a significant problem among military populations seeking psychotherapy (Goetter et al., 2015; Hoge et al., 2014), yet an overall estimate of its exact prevalence and predictors does not exist. The aims of the current meta-analysis were to estimate outpatient psychotherapy dropout rates for this population and evaluate potential moderators of this event. In total, 283 articles—comprising data from 719,465 U.S. service members and veterans—met all inclusion criteria and were included in the meta-analysis. The average weighted dropout rate for all outpatient therapies was 25.6%, 95% CI [22.4%, 29.2%], and prediction interval [1.9%, 85.9%]. Furthermore, dropout was 27.0% for cognitive behavioral therapies (CBTs), 25.3% for trauma treatments, 27.6% for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), 28.9% for individual therapies, and 9.8% for intensive outpatient settings. Findings from metaregression analyses using mixed-effects models indicated that higher dropout was linked with the following after accounting for other moderators: younger age, CBTs, nonmanualized approaches, VA versus Department of Defense settings, individual versus group therapies, and weekly versus intensive outpatient formats. Dropout was not linked with other client, therapist, treatment, and research variables. Taken together, dropout estimates were obtained for a range of military populations and treatment characteristics, including theoretical orientation, presenting concern, setting, and therapy formats. These estimates may provide potential benchmarks for therapists, administrators, and policymakers serving military populations. Leveraging dropout prevention strategies with at-risk groups highlighted in this study may enhance mental health care outcomes for this high-need population.
September 29, 2025 at 6:14 PM
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In @amanthro.bsky.social, Kristina Nielsen’s investigation of India’s business process outsourcing industry considers the impacts of workers forced to remove their regional accents to meet industry standards.
anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
September 23, 2025 at 5:04 PM
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In @asanews.bsky.social's ASR, interviews with currently incarcerated or recently released men provide insight into why and when people in prison politically mobilize, in a study by David Jonathan Knight.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
Prior studies cast U.S. imprisonment as politically demobilizing. This article complicates that proposition by exploring when, and how, threat under penal confinement leads people to mobilize. Using interviews with currently incarcerated and recently released men across three states, I show that although imprisonment generally fosters political inaction, collective mobilization does arise under certain conditions. First, people in prison mobilize in response to embodied threats—fundamental threats eliciting visceral reactions that signal future harm (i.e., premature death or permanent incapacitation). Second, to collectively mobilize, a subpopulation of similarly threatened prisoners must be present and see the threats as a shared problem. Collective prisoner mobilization is more likely when both conditions are present; mobilization is unlikely when neither condition is present; and individual political contention is more likely when conditions are partially present. This range of political responses among incarcerated people is more dynamic than previously reported. Imprisonment has selective political effects, mobilizing the most repressed individuals within prison to devise new strategies to contest their repression.
September 17, 2025 at 2:51 PM
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In @apsrjournal.bsky.social, Christian Cox, Derek A. Epp, Michael E. Shepherd find, in a panel dataset of over 10 million rural residents, that local hospital closures are linked to lower voting rates in national elections.

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
We investigate how hardships affect rural politics, considering the case of hospital closures. In the last two decades, more than two hundred rural hospitals have closed their doors or drastically reduced their services. Drawing from resource models of voting, our hypothesis is that personal- and community-level deprivations brought about by hospital closures should reduce election turnout. Empirical tests pair geographic information on the location of open and closed hospitals with data from state voter files to create a panel of over 10 million rural residents for the 2016, 2018, and 2020 national elections. Results show that individuals whose nearest hospital closed prior to the proximate election were less likely to vote than their unaffected counterparts. These effects are strongest for older and lower-income residents, but they decay over time so that voting likelihood resembles a pre-closure baseline within 12 months.
September 12, 2025 at 3:10 PM
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In @aeajournals.bsky.social AER, Joseph S. Shapiro and Reed Walker estimate the benefits and costs of air pollution regulation in U.S. markets and find that benefits outweigh costs tenfold. www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...
We develop a framework to estimate the marginal cost of air pollution regulation and apply it to assess policy efficiency. We exploit a provision of the Clean Air Act that requires new plants to pay incumbent facilities to reduce emissions. This "offset" policy creates hundreds of local pollution markets, differing by pollutant and location. Theory and transaction data suggest that offset prices reveal marginal abatement costs. We compare these prices to marginal benefits of pollution reduction estimated using leading air quality models and find that, on average, marginal benefits exceed marginal costs by more than a factor of ten.
September 11, 2025 at 6:07 PM
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In @historians.org American Historical Review, an article by Nathaniel George explores the life and beliefs of a Lebanese diplomat, espousing the idea that counter-revolutionism and anti-colonialism equally shaped the history of the Global South. academic.oup.com/ahr/article/...
While great effort has been invested in analyzing the role of revolutionary intellectuals in history, much less attention has been paid to the counterrevolution and its guides. This is especially the case in the former colonial world in the era of decolonization, where anticolonial politics are often portrayed as having been the default position. Lebanese philosopher and statesman Charles Malik was a candid opponent of what he theorized as the “great Asian and African revolution” against imperial rule. Instead, he advocated consciously counterrevolutionary politics that sought to purify the corruptions of “collectivism, materialism, and secularism” brought forward by an age of anticolonial and socialist revolutions. Primarily known as a principal author of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it was in the Lebanese arena that his global political commitments were most directly expressed. This included his decisive role in securing US military intervention during Lebanon’s 1958 civil war, and more fundamentally in his founding role in the Front for Freedom and Man in Lebanon (FFML), the counterrevolutionary, Christian-supremacist alliance in Lebanon’s international civil war (1975–90). Malik’s praxis highlights an overlooked philo-colonial trend in the era of decolonization: native advocates for continued imperial sovereignty over a dependent and rigidly stratified nation-state without equal citizenship. Malik’s ideological and material entanglements on multiple scales foreground the defining part of counterrevolutionary networks in shaping the global history of twentieth century and its inheritance.
August 27, 2025 at 8:45 PM
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In @amanthro.bsky.social, Mallory E. Matsumoto finds that in Guatemala, local practices generate forms of disruption, resistance, and refusal that challenge institutional constraints.
anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
This article takes a scalar view of “friction” (Tsing 2005) and “refusal” (Ortner 1995) between ethnography and the archive. The concept of friction was originally formulated in the context of a globalizing world, but friction's perception and experience are highly local. By recurrently destabilizing interactions, friction generates the constant possibility of contestation at the same time that it fosters ongoing renewal and reshuffling of social relations. Refusal, in turn, is shaped by a combination of individual agency and the contextual parameters delimiting any given social interaction. Based on a K'iche’ Maya narrative recorded by Catholic missionary James L. Mondloch in the area of Nahualá, Sololá, Guatemala, I illustrate how refusal not only informs interpretation of the oral history but shaped its 1968 telling. As debate continues over the ethics and logistics of working with legacy fieldwork data, I consider the frictions that anthropologists have to live with when working with archival data and those that we ourselves may generate.
August 21, 2025 at 2:06 PM
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In @amstatnews.bsky.social, the spatial modeling of record-breaking temperatures in Spain shows the effects of global warming and other geographic factors on the frequency of these events. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Record-breaking temperature events are now very frequently in the news, viewed as evidence of climate change. With this as motivation, we undertake the first substantial spatial modeling investigation of temperature record-breaking across years for any given day within the year. We work with a dataset consisting of over 60 years (1960–2021) of daily maximum temperatures across peninsular Spain. Formal statistical analysis of record-breaking events is an area that has received attention primarily within the probability community, dominated by results for the stationary record-breaking setting with some additional work addressing trends. Such effort is inadequate for analyzing actual record-breaking data. Resulting from novel and detailed exploratory data analysis, we propose rich hierarchical conditional modeling of the indicator events which define record-breaking sequences. After suitable model selection, we discover explicit trend behavior, necessary autoregression, significance of distance to the coast, useful interactions, helpful spatial random effects, and very strong daily random effects. Illustratively, the model estimates that global warming trends have increased the number of records expected in the past decade almost 2-fold, 1.93 (1.89,1.98), but also estimates highly differentiated climate warming rates in space and by season. Supplementary materials for this article are available online, including a standardized description of the materials available for reproducing the work.
August 19, 2025 at 7:22 PM
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In @asrjournal.bsky.social, ten years of mixed-methods data analyzed by @greermellon.bsky.social on hiring outcomes in Florida and California school districts suggests that partisan affiliation does not affect superintendent hiring outcomes.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...
In recent decades, affective polarization and partisan animosity have risen sharply in the United States. To what extent have these trends affected hiring decisions? I examine partisan biases in hiring by considering the case of school district superintendent appointments: chief executives of local U.S. elementary/secondary education systems. I analyze mixed-methods data on a decade of hiring outcomes in Florida and California from 2009 to 2019. Despite rising polarization, the data consistently show that partisan affiliation is not a primary factor in these hiring decisions. Quantitative analyses reveal no significant relationship between changes in board partisan composition and superintendent hiring outcomes within school districts. I find no relationship between board-level partisan composition and superintendent exits. Qualitative findings show hiring decisions are primarily shaped by evaluations of candidates’ interpersonal skills and competence, even among board members with strong partisan views on other policy issues. Board members discuss a strong commitment to building consensus in their selections. While I cannot rule out very small effects, these results show that school boards do not routinely prioritize applicants from their own political party. This study advances research on affective polarization and social closure by demonstrating the contingent nature of partisan affiliation on decision-making and by providing evidence of a strong respect for professionalism in a critical U.S. public sector setting.
August 15, 2025 at 2:40 PM
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In @apsrjournal.bsky.social, Daniel Meierrieks and @danielauer.bsky.social find in a study of 175 countries that higher levels of local political corruption lead to increased terrorist activity.

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
We leverage plausibly exogenous variation in regional exposure to corruption to provide causal estimates of the impact of local political corruption on terrorist activity for a sample of 175 countries between 1970 and 2018. We find that higher levels of corruption lead to more terrorism. This result is robust to a variety of empirical modifications, including various ways in which we probe the validity of our instrumental variables approach. We also show that corruption adversely affects the provision of public goods and undermines counter-terrorism capacity. Thus, our empirical findings are consistent with predictions from a game-theoretical representation of terrorism, according to which corruption makes terrorism relatively more attractive compared to peaceful contestation, while also decreasing the costs of organizing and carrying out terrorist attacks.
August 13, 2025 at 8:13 PM
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In @aeajournals.bsky.social AER, Rafael Di Tella, Randy Kotti, @clpennec.bsky.social, and @vinpons.bsky.social examine a new dataset of US and French candidate websites, finding that candidate ideologies move towards the center between primary and general elections.

www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...
We study changes in political discourse during campaigns, using a novel dataset of candidate websites for US House elections, 2002–2016, and manifestos for French parliamentary and local elections, 1958–2022. We find that candidates move to the center in ideology and rhetorical complexity between the first round (or primary) and the second round (or general election). This convergence reflects candidates' strategic adjustment to their opponents, as predicted by Downsian competition: Using an RDD we show that candidates converge to the platform of opponents who narrowly qualified for the last round as opposed to those who narrowly failed to qualify.
August 12, 2025 at 7:36 PM
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Next Generation Social Sciences in Africa awarded 37 fellowships across three categories, including 9 Dissertation Proposal Fellowships, 17 Dissertation Research Fellowships, and 11 Dissertation Completion Fellowships.

Read more about the fellows and their work: www.ssrc.org/programs/nex...
Headshots of Next Generation Social Sciences in Africa Doctoral Dissertation fellows
August 11, 2025 at 2:38 PM
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In this year’s competitive selection process, African Peacebuilding Network awarded 20 Individual Research Fellowships and 1 Research Policy Fellowship. Explore the work of APN fellows: www.ssrc.org/programs/apn...
Headshots of African Peacebuilding Network fellows
August 11, 2025 at 2:38 PM
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In the APA's American Psychologist, a study by Maria C. Crouch, @lvnryt.bsky.social, and Nyché T. Andrew documents the effects of embedding Alaska Native elders into classrooms in the Rural Health Services program at the University of Alaska.

Read more: psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...
Indigenous science and education provide classification systems for ordering the natural, physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual worlds. Alaska Native groups have shared values about life, kinship, and the interconnectedness of human beings. However, these values and knowledge systems are contested in the European American educational landscape, subjugating Alaska Native peoples through assimilatory acts of settler colonialism (e.g., boarding schools, Eurocentric achievement standards). Decolonization demands action, more than inclusion, to dismantle settler-colonialism and to address all the diverse manifestations and permeations across Tribal Nations. Further, Indigenous psychologies of liberation presume that action needs to take the form of indigenization, cultural-derived antidotes to healing soul wounds, with embodied representations of cultural practices, lives, and epistemologies. Thus, we will discuss the intentional, liberatory act of embedding and reinforcing Alaska Native Elders (i.e., wisdom holders, culture bearers) in the classroom within the Rural Human Services program at the University of Alaska. Using an Indigenous Inquiry Framework, we interviewed four Alaska Native graduates, one non-Native graduate, two allies, and one Alaska Native Elder graduate. Analysis of barriers and Indigenous liberation identified four key domains: (a) transformative healing and love, (b) Indigenous identity development, (c) a generative and holistic education, and (d) allyship. This organization of Alaska Native expertise in the University of Alaska system reflects the growing reclamation of Alaska Native education in the hands of Alaska Native leaders and communities. Alaska Native Elders in the classroom is a fruition of ancestral directives that facilitate space for gathering, deepening, and sharing knowledge, wisdom, and healing.
July 29, 2025 at 5:51 PM
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In @historians.org American Historical Review, a study by Alastair Su @suyh.bsky.social explores the use of opium as a preventative measure against disease during the transport of Chinese indentured laborers in the mid-19th century.

Read more: academic.oup.com/ahr/article-...
In December 1853, British officials at Hong Kong amended the Passenger Acts to allow the substitution of “opium for tobacco” on voyages taking indentured laborers, or “coolies,” from China to the Caribbean. Authorities in the US, Cuba, and Peru followed suit by legalizing and mandating opium in what became known as la trata amarilla. By using fresh evidence to explore the genesis of this little-known cluster of regulations, this article explains the process through which Western officials authorized the provision of opium as a prophylactic against shipborne contagions, linking the circulation of opium with the global movement of Chinese labor. Whereas scholars have tended to present smoking opium either as a harmless restorative or as a tool of social control, this study calls attention to the prevalence of comorbidities between opium dependence and infectious illnesses such as cholera and typhoid to suggest that, above all, the drug served as a volatile resource necessitated by the exigencies of epidemic risk.
July 28, 2025 at 3:10 PM
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With over a century of experience, the SSRC partners with funders to support research that advances knowledge, informs policy, and shapes the public conversation.

Learn more about our grants and fellowships:
www.ssrc.org/how-we-work/...
July 24, 2025 at 6:49 PM
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In @amanthro.bsky.social, Emma Nelson Bunkley finds that in Senegal, women with Type II diabetes combat social stigma from weight loss that negatively affects their physical health and community participation.

Read more: anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
In Senegal, Type II diabetes often causes rapid weight loss. Weight loss is usually the reason women will finally seek out a biomedical diagnosis for their ailment. Loss of weight has many negative connotations for Senegalese women—HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, financial troubles, or an unhappy marriage. When women lose weight, they become the subject of rumors and gossip in their communities. This leads to isolation. Research has shown that isolation has deleterious mental health effects, especially in places as communal as Senegal. Worsening mental health can also exacerbate diabetes. This article explores Senegalese women's experiences with weight loss due to Type II diabetes and the effects their weight loss, in addition to their diabetes, has on their lived experience and their social networks.
July 21, 2025 at 6:19 PM
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In @amstatnews.bsky.social, a statistical model is developed by Jonathan Koh, Erwan Koch, and Anthony C. Davison to analyze how severe thunderstorm indicators vary across space and time in the U.S., especially under the influence of seasonal changes and El Niño events.
Severe thunderstorms cause substantial economic and human losses in the United States. Simultaneous high values of convective available potential energy (CAPE) and storm relative helicity (SRH) are favorable to severe weather, and both they and the composite variable PROD=√CAPE×SRH can be used as indicators of severe thunderstorm activity. Their extremal spatial dependence exhibits temporal non-stationarity due to seasonality and large-scale atmospheric signals such as El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). In order to investigate this, we introduce a space-time model based on a max-stable, Brown–Resnick, field whose range depends on ENSO and on time through a tensor product spline. We also propose a max-stability test based on empirical likelihood and the bootstrap. The marginal and dependence parameters must be estimated separately owing to the complexity of the model, and we develop a bootstrap-based model selection criterion that accounts for the marginal uncertainty when choosing the dependence model. In the case study, the out-sample performance of our model is good. We find that extremes of PROD, CAPE, and SRH are generally more localized in summer and, in some regions, less localized during El Niño and La Niña events, and give meteorological interpretations of these phenomena. Supplementary materials for this article are available online, including a standardized description of the materials available for reproducing the work.
July 17, 2025 at 6:46 PM
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In @asanews.bsky.social ASR, @larivera.bsky.social and @estelabdiaz.bsky.social use qualitative data from elite independent pre K-12 schools to find that admissions processes are structured to exclude applicants at risk of disabilities.

Read more: journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...
Historically, elite schools have selected students in ways that reproduce advantages for dominant groups and exclude groups deemed undesirable. The specific outgroup in question has changed over time, but the underlying logic used to exclude these groups is often related to disability. Yet, disability as a social category has received minimal attention in discussions of elite reproduction. In this article, we draw on qualitative data collected from elite independent pre-K–12 schools to show that disability is indeed a salient basis of selection into elite educational environments, one that begins at the earliest moments of educational sorting: admission to elite early childhood programs. Through interviews with admissions personnel, we show that elite independent schools explicitly structure their admissions processes to identify—and exclude—children who are perceived as having or being at risk of developing any type of disability, regardless of impairment type or support needs. We argue that admissions practices at elite independent schools (1) serve as a form of social closure intended to restrict enrollment to young children perceived as able-bodied and neurotypical, and (2) represent a case of essentializing merit, in which elite gatekeepers construct merit as an intrinsic, rather than achieved, property of individuals.
July 15, 2025 at 6:58 PM
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Jenae Carpenter, the 2025 Rachel Tanur Memorial Second Prize winner, studies the effects of penal power on Luritja people’s lives in central Australia, and comments on the intimate relationships visual ethnographers build with their subjects.

Read more: bit.ly/4nHWIQZ
Marie, a 26-year-old Luritja woman, uses a payphone, late at night, to call her husband in prison.
July 14, 2025 at 4:56 PM
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In @apsrjournal.bsky.social, Adam Auerbach, Shikhar Singh, and Tariq Thachil surveyed small town politicians in India and found that local government officials lack procedural knowledge on how to govern.

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
Governments across the Global South have decentralized a degree of power to municipal authorities. Are local officials sufficiently knowledgeable about how to execute their expanded portfolio of responsibilities? Past studies have focused on whether citizens lack the requisite information to hold local officials accountable. We instead draw on extensive fieldwork and a novel survey of small-town politicians in India to show that local officials themselves have distressingly low levels of procedural knowledge on how to govern. We further show that procedural knowledge shapes the capabilities of officials to represent their constituents and that asymmetries in knowledge may blunt the representative potential of these bodies. Finally, we show that winning office does not provide an institutionalized pathway to knowledge acquisition, highlighting the need for policy-based solutions. Our findings demonstrate the importance of assessing knowledge deficits among politicians, and not only citizens, to make local governance work.
July 11, 2025 at 3:42 PM