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2021-01-21
Knight Foundation;
Knight Foundation's historic $50 million investments in 2019, aimed at accelerating a new field of research at the intersection of technology and democracy, have shown encouraging early signs. This report examines progress among the major research institutions that were funded, considers how the grantees responded under challenging conditions through mid-2020, and details concerns and emerging issues that might be addressed in the coming years. It also details the activities of the Knight Research Network grantees in their initial stages, with primary emphasis on the 11 institutions that were funded in July 2019, although it also makes reference to others that have subsequently been added to the KRN.
2021-11-01
Pew Research Center;
As Pew Research Center surveys have documented, the United States' global reputation has shifted dramatically over the past two decades, often improving or declining depending on who is in the White House and the foreign policies they pursue. At the same time, many other factors have continued to shape how people see the U.S., including its vast cultural reach, its economic model and its divisive politics. A survey of 17 advanced economies highlights the complexity of America's international image. People in other publics find much to admire about the U.S., but they see many problems as well. Americans, for their part, also see both strengths and weaknesses in their society.
2021-10-28
Pew Research Center;
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution states that the country shall have no official religion. At the same time, Christians continue to make up a large majority of U.S. adults – despite some rapid decline in recent years – and historians, politicians and religious leaders continue to debate the role of religion in the founders' vision and of Christianity in the nation's identity.Some Americans clearly long for a more avowedly religious and explicitly Christian country, according to a March 2021 Pew Research Center survey. On the other hand, however, the clear majority of Americans do not accept these views. This report presents findings from surveys focused on American's views on the separation of church and state.
2021-11-01
Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees (GCIR);
The 2020 census was among the most fraught in recent history, with threats to a fair and complete count posed by the global pandemic and the federal administration's attempt to limit the inclusion of immigrants. Fortunately, funders and other stakeholders built on the lessons of census 2010, and the California Census 2020 Statewide Funders Initiative coordinated investments with the state to maximize the number of Californians counted. This report documents learnings from the California Census 2020 Statewide Funders Initiative.
2021-09-07
All Voting is Local;
In Pennsylvania, county jail administrators are not fulfilling their legal responsibility to voters. Jails are required by law to provide registration and voting opportunities to all eligible voters. Currently, Pennsylvania county jails do not have a universal process for voter registration, voting by mail, or voter education. We refer to this as de facto disenfranchisement. The freedom to vote is central to building an America that works for us all, and no eligible voter should be denied this right. Through research, advocacy, and community outreach, we will both support jail administrators with tools to increase rates of voter registration and voting and, critically, hold them accountable to ensure all eligible voters can cast a ballot.
2021-10-04
Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE);
Youth activism and participation in social movements has been one of the defining features of civic life in the past several years: from the anti-gun violence protests after the Parkland school shooting in 2018, to the nationwide actions for racial justice following George Floyd's murder in 2020. Both of those were also election years in which young people achieved historic or near-historic levels of voter turnout. But what, exactly, was the relationship between young people's participation in the streets and at the ballot box?To answer that question, the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) joined a team of researchers to produce Protests, Politics, and Power: Exploring the Connections Between Youth Voting and Youth Movements. This research encompasses two studies that tackled this question with different but complementary perspectives and approaches. The Role of Electoral Engagement in Youth Social Movements is a qualitative study based on interviews and supplemental surveys with young leaders and participants in social movements. The second study, Quantifying the Effects of Protests on Voter Registration and Turnout, uses quantitative methods to study changes in electoral participation in areas where protests took place.
2021-10-28
Institute for Democracy and Higher Education at Tufts University;
This report contains findings from the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement (NSLVE, pronounced n-solve), a landmark study of U.S. college and university student voting. Launched in 2013, NSLVE consists of a database of more than 10 million de-identified student records that have been combined with publicly available voting records for each of the 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, and now, 2020 elections. Participating institutions include two- and four-year public and private colleges and universities, including graduate programs. Campuses must opt in, and at the time of this report, roughly 1,200 colleges and universities from all 50 states and the District of Columbia participate. For this report, we examine 1,051 campuses representing approximately 9 million student voters.
2020-01-17
GivingTuesday;
Giving Tuesday's 2019 Impact Report shares the results of GivingTuesday 2019; but also offers a glimpse into the implications of the generosity that occurred on the day, challenging us to imagine a world where radical generosity is unleashed every single day.
2020-01-30
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace;
In the past two years, the Russian public's appetite for change has increased considerably. A small but growing group of Russians blame President Vladimir Putin for the country's problems, and his capacity to deliver change is now being questioned. Yet the demands for change are taking very different forms, not only in open protests but also through latent discontent, and the public has not identified a specific alternative leader as a potential agent of change.In July 2019, the Carnegie Moscow Center and the Levada Center, Russia's main independent polling agency, conducted a third poll in two years asking 1,600 Russians about their readiness for change. The results show some striking new trends. A total of 59 percent of respondents—17 percent more than two years before—said that the country needed "decisive comprehensive change" (see Figure 1). The Russian publication of this research in November 2019 attracted a lot of attention from the media and political class. An answer came in January 2020 in a form of constitutional changes and the resignation of the government. In his annual address on January 15, Vladimir Putin said: "Our society is clearly calling for change. People want development. . . . The pace of change must be expedited every year and produce tangible results in attaining worthy living standards that would be clearly perceived by the people. And, I repeat, they must be actively involved in this process."
2020-02-01
Open Society Foundations;
Civil Society Organizations and General Data Protection Regulation Compliance: Challenges, Opportunities and Best Practices, a new report from the Open Society Information Program, looks specifically at the ways that the world's most comprehensive data privacy law impacts nongovernmental organizations.It examines, in practical terms, what these kind of organizations have done to comply with the law. It also presents research showing ways that governments, businesses, and some powerful individuals have tried—so far unsuccessfully—to use the law to prevent these organizations from pursuing public interest research and reporting.Finally, the report provides a best practices guide that can be used to ensure compliance and limit risk.
2020-01-28
West Africa Civil Society Institute (WACSI);
The effective implementation of WACSI's interventions is dependent on civil society's contributions and feedback on the Institute's work in promoting an open, safe and prosperous West Africa. WACSI's interventions are guided and inspired by the critical voices from key stakeholders and engagement by different communities and groups across West Africa. At WACSI, we are conscious that civic space affects everything civil society does and everything civil society does affects civic space. A safe, open, free and enabling space for all to form and voice opinions, debate, be heard and peacefully protest, is also an essential prerequisite for achieving the ECOWAS Vision 2020. Civic freedoms including the freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly, safe environments and effective participation are therefore essential. This Op-Ed critically assesses the civic space environment in 2019, predictions for 2020 and issues that need more introspection and collective action.
2020-03-04
West Africa Civil Society Institute (WACSI);
Social accountability is an approach towards building accountability that relies on civic engagement in which citizens participate directly or indirectly in demanding accountability from service providers and public officials. It usually combines information on rights and service delivery with collective action for change. It has become a tool for direct engagement with service providers to ensure that citizens get adequate services or adequate explanation when those services are not available. When social accountability mechanisms are weak, the context becomes more challenging for communities or individual citizens to play a powerful role. Also, social accountability is fundamentally and ultimately a question of power as it requires both social and political pressure to ensure that duty bearers are kept on their toes. This piece will therefore explore the tools and approaches that some African social movements used to effectively drive the social accountability agenda. The tools we are exploring here are respectively social media and creative arts, while the approaches will be based on their ways of mobilising and organising. We conclude by making some recommendations for donors, government, citizens and other stakeholders.
