Science at risk? Considering the importance of academic freedom for STEM research production across 17 OECD countries.

Since 2011, a declining trend in academic freedom globally has paralleled a rising tide of neo-nationalism. We use fixed effects models to examine data from the Varieties of Democracy (V-DEM) academic freedom index and bibliometric data for 17 OECD countries across nearly three decades (1981-2007) that precede the recent decline in academic freedom. We find substantial, statistically significant, positive relationships between cross-nationally comparable and longitudinal measures of academic freedom and volume of STEM publications. Additionally, academic freedom positively influenced the quality of STEM publications as measured by journal rankings. Our findings were relatively consistent across various measures of academic freedom and model specifications. We discuss implications for safeguarding academic freedom, applying neo-institutional theory, and identifying directions for future research.

Education and Public Support for COVID-19 Mitigation Measures.

Governments around the world have adopted many mitigation strategies to stop the spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Public support for these strategies varies widely. In this visualization the authors examine whether college education might play a role in support for various COVID-19 mitigation strategies. To do so, they leverage original data from surveys conducted across six countries. The authors find that the association between education and support for COVID-19 restrictions varies considerably in direction, both by restriction type and by country. Given this finding, in many contexts, the educational status of the intended audience should be considered in how public health messaging campaigns are developed and targeted.

An attitude network analysis of post-national citizenship identities.

How are evaluative reactions pertaining post-national citizenship identities interrelated and what are the potential mechanisms how post-national identities evolve? Previous efforts to operationalize and measure post-national citizenship identities leave it open how people's stances on different issues are related and suffer from a variety of theoretical and methodological shortcomings regarding the nature of political attitudes and ideologies. A recently proposed approach conceptualizes ideologies as networks of causally connected evaluative reactions to individual issues. Individual evaluative reactions form the nodes in a network model, and these nodes can influence each other via linked edges, thereby giving rise to a dynamic thoughts system of networked political and identity-related views. To examine this system at large, we apply network analysis to data from the European Values Study. Specifically, we investigate 33 evaluative reactions regarding national and supra-national identity, diversity, global empathy, global environmentalism, immigration, and supra-national politics. The results reveal a strongly connected network of citizenship identity-related attitudes. A community analysis reveals larger clusters of strongly related evaluative reactions, which are connected via bridges and hub nodes. Centrality analysis identifies evaluative reactions that are strategically positioned in the network, and network simulations indicate that persuasion attempts targeted at such nodes have greater potential to influence the larger citizenship identity than changes of more peripheral attitude nodes. We lastly show that socio-demographic characteristics are not only associated with the overall level of post-national citizenship, but also with the network structure, suggesting that these structural differences can affect the network function as people develop national or post-national citizenship identities, or respond to external events. These results provide new insights into the structure of post-national identities and the mechanism how post-national identities might evolve. We end with a discussion of future opportunities to study networked attitudes in the context of civic and citizenship education.

Searching for the Golden Model of Education: Cross-National Analysis of Math Achievement.

We utilized four waves of TIMSS data in addition to the information we have collected on countries' educational systems to examine whether different degrees of standardization, differentiation, proportion of students in private schools and governmental spending on education influence students' math achievement, its variation and socioeconomic status (SES) gaps in math achievement. Findings: A higher level of standardization of educational systems was associated with higher average math achievement. Greater expenditure on education (as % of total government expenditure) was associated with a lower level of dispersion of math achievement and smaller SES gaps in math achievement. Wealthier countries exhibited higher average math achievement and a narrower variation. Higher income inequality (measured by Gini index) was associated with a lower average math achievement and larger SES gaps. Further, we found that higher level of standardization alleviates the negative effects of differentiation in the systems with more rigid tracking.