CCPP research investigates how citizens understand, experience, and act on democracy across democratic and authoritarian contexts worldwide. Our work explores how public opinion, communication, and identity shape democratic satisfaction, support for authoritarian alternatives, and tolerance for political violence.

From studies of freedom of expression and online censorship to experiments on how people trade off democratic principles for material or partisan gain, CCPP scholars examine the psychological and behavioral foundations of governance and citizenship in the modern information environment. Through the Comparative National Elections Project (CNEP), we also analyze political communication and democratic attitudes across countries including the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Ukraine, Serbia, Turkey, and Iran.

Recent Selected Publications 

• Mortenson, C.  & Nisbet, E.C. (forthcoming). Benefit-Seekers or principle-holders? Experimental evidence on Americans’ democratic trade-offs. Perspectives on Politics
• Yang, F., Mortenson, C. R., Nisbet, E.C., Diakopoulos, N., & Kay, M. (2024, May). In Dice We Trust: Uncertainty Displays for Maintaining Trust in Election Forecasts Over Time. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-24).
• Dal., A., Nisbet, E.C., and Kamenchuk, O. (2023). Signaling Silence: Affective and Cognitive Responses to Risks of Online Activism about Corruption in an Authoritarian Context. New Media & Society 25(3), 646-664
• Dal, A. and Nisbet, E.C. (2022). Walking through Firewalls: Circumventing Censorship of Social Media and Online Content in a Networked Authoritarian Context. Social Media & Society
• Dal, A. and Nisbet, E.C. (2022). To share or not to share? How emotional judgements drive online political expression in high-risk contests. Communication Research, 49(3) 353-375

NEWS AND UPDATES ON THIS TOPIC