‘It can feel like there’s no way out’ — political scientists face pushback on their work

Like many in the United States, Kate Starbird saw a surge in misinformation in the build-up to the 2016 US presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Everyone was talking about ‘fake news’ — fabricated stories that were widely shared on social media and designed to sway the election.

But unlike most people, Starbird was equipped to investigate the problem. As a computer scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, Starbird had studied the spread of misinformation during crises such as hurricanes and civil wars.

What she saw was not just rumours taking root, but deliberate lies; disinformation that was, she says, “sinking into the structure of the Internet”. When the 2020 race rolled around — this time pitting Trump against Joe Biden — Starbird was poised to track the viral spread of hundreds of fake stories on social-media platform Twitter (now X) in the lead-up to election day. More than 300 fabricated narratives, she found¹, were designed to sow doubt about the legitimacy of the election.

Misinformation might sway elections — but not in the way that you think

Not long after publicizing the work, she and her colleagues became the target of what she calls a “multi-pronged” strategy to discredit it. She has since been a defendant in several high-profile lawsuits, was subpoenaed to appear at congressional hearings and has defended accusations that she colluded with the government to censor free speech in the United States. She has also been deluged with public-information requests, sued for not responding to those requests promptly enough, and bombarded with disingenuous questions from hostile media outlets.

Researchers such as Starbird, who study how elections are run and what factors influence their outcomes, are often lightning rods for an increasingly divided and dissatisfied public. Political polarization has intensified in recent years in countries including the United States, Turkey, India, Poland and Brazil.

Close to half of the world’s population lives in countries holding elections in 2024. Two of the biggest contests are in India, where results were declared earlier this month, and in the United States, which is due to vote in November. In both countries there are suggestions that democratic processes — including free and fair elections — are eroding. Nature spoke to scientists from around the world whose work has flung them into both the public and political limelight, sometimes with drastic consequences for their personal and professional lives. Many have found that the situation can quickly become untenable, particularly in places where support for researchers is lacking. “Institutional support is paramount,” says Starbird.

Drawing maps, drawing heat

In the United States, one lightning-rod electoral issue is redistricting, the once-in-a-decade process in which electoral maps are redrawn after the national census to ensure that each district has a similar number of people. Redistricting determines the boundaries of a community that will vote for a legislator, and it has a long history of political manipulation. “Redistricting in the United States is odd,” says Sam Wang, a neuroscientist who also runs a research group that studies elections and electoral maps at Princeton University in New Jersey. One of the system’s oddities, says Wang, is that elected officials control how electoral maps are drawn, often giving one party the power to build bias into the maps through a process known as gerrymandering.

When he first came to understand this quirk of the US system in 2012, Wang says, “my mind was kind of blown”. Legislators are rewarded for drawing maps that benefit their own party, and US federal law allows it, for the most part, although some states now have processes and independent redistricting bodies to mitigate gerrymandering. Wang founded the Princeton Gerrymandering Project to develop simple mathematical tests that courts could use to determine whether redistricting maps were fair or not. He outlined three tests in an influential paper² in 2016, and wrote several briefs for the US Supreme Court, which was hearing cases challenging electoral maps around the same time.

In 2022, Wang served as a technical expert during redistricting in New Jersey. When the commission he was advising selected a map favoured by the Democratic party, Wang was publicly accused of bias and of manipulating data to influence the decision.

He was also accused of mistreating his co-workers and of being under investigation by his university for sexual harassment, a claim that Princeton quickly refuted. Wang says that the attention didn’t surprise him — he’d previously ruffled feathers with articles he’d written on topics such as brain training and autism. But the attacks on his character for the professional work he was doing was new. “Politics gets personal,” says Wang. “It’s not a domain where the evidence takes centre stage, and I found that to be a novel experience,” he says.

Princeton University investigated the data manipulation and bullying claims, and concluded, in August 2022, that the allegations were without merit. A further investigation by the New Jersey State Commission of Investigation (SCI), which took another year to complete, also concluded that Wang had not manipulated data. But during those investigations, Wang was unable to defend himself publicly. Princeton put out statements “setting the record straight” as the SCI investigation proceeded, says Wang, for which he is grateful. Despite the challenges, Wang wouldn’t dream of abandoning his work on elections to focus solely on neuroscience. “I love all my children equally,” he says.

Unsafe harbour

Other countries are also seeing increased political interference in academia — and political bite back for academics working on politics. Hungary is one example. Its government has been headed since 2010 by Viktor Orbán, a self-proclaimed proponent of ‘illiberal democracy’, which eschews Western liberal values in favour of policies that promote national interests. In 2019, his government took control of the country’s research institutes, and concerns about loss of academic freedom led to an international outcry.

Misinformation poses a bigger threat to democracy than you might think

Zsolt Enyedi, a political scientist at the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest, is one person who has started feeling the heat. He is a principal investigator in a major, multinational consortium of academics, funded by the European Union, called Neo-authoritarianism in Europe and the liberal democratic response (AUTHLIB). The consortium launched in October 2022 to investigate how and why illiberalism emerges. Enyedi says that he had never been threatened or attacked for his research — until this year. In January, a series of articles across multiple media outlets called out Enyedi and attacked the EU for using public money to support research which, the articles said, was “biased against illiberal democracies and in favour of the agenda of George Soros”. Soros, the Hungary-born multibillionaire who founded the CEU, is known for his support of progressive and liberal political causes. One article suggests that the EU was helping the ‘Soros network’ to interfere with European elections using EU taxpayers’ money. “The claims were ridiculous, but the media attack had no practical consequences for me,” says Enyedi.

Turkey is another country that has been on an increasingly authoritarian path, and has taken a number of measures to curtail academic freedom over the past 15 years. The situation peaked after the country declared a state of emergency in July 2016 in the wake of an attempted coup. Thousands of academics who were suspected — often without grounds — of being complicit in the coup or in open disagreement with the government were arrested and lost their jobs.

But here, political scientists say that the problem is not that they feel pressure from the state or pro-government organizations while researching the political and electoral landscapes. “Our greatest problem is that we are ignored by both the media and the larger community,” says Ali Çarkoğlu at Koç University in Istanbul, who studies voting behaviour.

How five crucial elections in 2024 could shape climate action for decades

Political scientist Berk Esen at Sabanci University in Istanbul says that he also has not faced serious retribution or censorship attempts — even when he has been openly critical of the government’s democratic credentials. But he adds that he, like Çarkoğlu, works at a privately run university. Academics in state universities that are close to the government are under more pressure, Esen says. “There is a lot of self-censorship because of the culture of fear after the coup attempt,” he says.

Some researchers elsewhere have not had the opportunity to continue their work. “My job in India no longer exists,” says Gilles Verniers, a political scientist who was forced to leave his position as head of an election research centre at the private Ashoka University in Sonipat, just north of New Delhi, in September 2023. Verniers had founded the Trivedi Centre for Political Data (TCPD) as a source of open-access data on Indian elections, including candidate demographics and real-time election results, in 2016.

“Initially, there was a lot of enthusiasm for the centre,” says Verniers, who now works at Amherst College in Massachusetts. This is because the centre also reported data on health, crime and poverty that he argues had become harder to obtain through government agencies in the past decade. For example, in 2021, the Indian national census, which takes place every ten years, was postponed for the first time since 1881. Annual reports on household expenditure — important for measuring poverty — have also been delayed. Verniers’ work³ became the centre of a political storm in 2020 when he revealed that the representation of minority ethnic and religious groups in government leadership roles was not as high as the government suggested. He says that the furore, which included public allegations that he misrepresented the data, led donors to get nervous, and eventually caused Ashoka University to absorb his centre into a new one, making him redundant in the process.

In a statement to Nature, Ashoka University said that Verniers did not pass the stringent tenure process at the university, and that the TCPD’s integration into the new centre — which provides “a repository of open access public data across interdisciplinary fields, which include social, climate, computer, biosciences, among other fields” — “has no connection with any funding or other external factors”.

Verniers says that the closure of the TCPD is just one example of a worrying trend in India to curtail academic freedom. In January, the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) in New Delhi, a not-for-profit think tank at which Verniers also holds an appointment, lost its licence to obtain funding from abroad. The decision — widely viewed as political — has blocked funding to the CPR, endangering its future.

Nitasha Kaul, a political scientist at the University of Westminster in London, says that voices that are critical of the government have been silenced. Initially, she says, the main target was the media. But the government is now homing in on academics.

Trump versus Biden: what the rematch could mean for three key science issues

Kaul has written about the rise of authoritarianism in India and human-rights issues in the Kashmir region. She says that she was barred from entering the country — with no official explanation — when invited to speak at a conference, despite having the necessary paperwork. When she wrote about the situation on X, what followed was a “very coordinated and horrible, violent and misogynist, trolling” campaign against her, she says.

Elsewhere, the threat of political pressure has changed the nature of research, says James Gomez, who in 2015 founded the Asia Centre, an independent research institute in Bangkok. He says that working outside a university can be advantageous. “You can’t do free, unfettered research about these matters — not just elections, but democracy and human rights — without having challenges from within the structure of a university,” he says. The result, says Gomez, is that a lot of election scientists throughout Asia “practise a lot of self-censorship”. They either stop writing about contentious topics, or they write in a “euphemistic way”, he says. For example, Malaysian political scientists might write about Korea or Japan, rather than writing about situations in their own country.

Thicker skin

Starbird says that being the subject of a targeted campaign is like being caught in a spiderweb. “It can feel like there’s no way out of it,” she says. “The more you move, the more it wraps around you.” Support from her institution, the University of Washington, has been crucial to weathering the storm, she says. Now, instead of sifting through thousands of e-mails and documents to fulfil freedom of information requests, she hands her computer over to someone else to complete the request. “That’s taken a lot of the stress off,” she says.

Starbird is using her personal experience in her research to understand why it’s so hard for the targets of online trolling campaigns to fend off attacks. Initially, Starbird followed advice to not respond to online attacks or articles containing falsehoods. But she says that approach didn’t work. “This idea that you can just let it fester, because it hasn’t hit one of these mainstream media outlets yet — it’s just not how things work any more,” she says. That doesn’t mean responding to all media requests, especially the ill-intentioned ones, she says, but it does mean triaging requests and negative coverage of her group’s work and taking the time to craft detailed rebuttals so that other journalists can be armed with the truth.

“At a certain point, you accept that you’re not going to have full control of how you’re portrayed,” says Starbird. “It feels a little uncomfortable, but it’s just how the world works,” she says. “My skin’s a lot thicker than it used to be.”