Research
Central to MDI’s mission is advancing scholarship to solve the grand challenge of democracy. Our research activities include:
This project explores journalism and community engagement across political divides. In Frederick County, Maryland, which vote analysis showed to be one of the most evenly divided areas in Maryland between Red and Blue, our team is carrying out a series of interviews with community leaders, teachers, students, and parents to understand how they both distribute and consume information.The project is linked to an undergraduate course in the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, where students will be involved in collecting information and writing articles for the Local News Network. Through this project, our team is seeking to understand the role that journalism plays in local democracy and community engagement in our current political landscape. The project builds on political attitudes around identity, community, and news that are illuminated in this study from NORC, co-designed by Merrill Professor of the Practice Tom Rosenstiel.
MDI team members: Sarah Oates, Jodi McFarland Friedman, Tom Rosenstiel (JOUR)
Our Democracy Scholars Network is an effort to both identify individual researchers at the University of Maryland contributing to democracy research and to strategize about how we might build and leverage a coordinated network of scholars across campus. In this initial stage, we are using both qualitative work and data analytics to identify scholars and tagging them using a thematic analysis to highlight key areas of their scholarship. We have focused on three key areas for MDI: civic literacy and democratic engagement, inclusive voting and trustworthy elections, and information resilience. In the next stage, we will be interviewing scholars, defining what it means to join the network, and hosting a meeting of the network in Spring 2026. Early evidence suggests there may be more than 100 democracy researchers on campus and there are likely valuable opportunities to coordinate, collaborate, and innovate together. We hope that the construction and activation on this network on a key Grand Challenge topic could serve as a template for making allied scholars more visible, connected, and active with each other at UMD.
MDI team members: Sarah Oates, Wei-Ping Li (JOUR)
The ability to evaluate sources– as opposed to just the content or surface features of online posts– is a critical skill in avoiding misinformation and disinformation and provides a foundation for later civic literacy skills. Our team is investigating how 8- to 10-year olds evaluate the trustworthiness and expertise of real Instagram posts about topics like oil drilling, vaping, and firework safety. In over 160 interviews, our team asked children to choose the more credible source between two Instagram posts where one source clearly had more markers of credibility. We found that children were more likely to select the more credible post when they reasoned about its source, rather than reasoning about its contents. Our project continues, with efforts to extend this work through digital civic literacy education and research focused on elementary school children.
MDI team members: Sarah McGrew, Lucas Butler, Doug Lombardi, Elizabeth Reynolds, Jenna Alton (EDUC)
MDI scholars are synthesizing the findings from the “Investigating Childhood Source Evaluation to Avoid Disinformation” Project and further exploring children's ability to reason about the trustworthiness and expertise of digital sources--key foundational skills for fostering digital literacy. This project also explores future research and programmatic opportunities to extend this work, investigating key cognitive and social mechanisms that support source evaluation and developing targets for intervention for building tools and strategies that parents and children can use to foster these skills.
MDI team members: Lucas Butler, Elizabeth Reynolds, Jenna Alton (EDUC)
This new project builds on the measures and insights generated by the above two projects (Investigating Childhood Source Evaluation to Avoid Disinformation and The Developmental Roots of Digital Civic Literacy), and brings them to bear on questions of how multilingual children navigate source evaluation in multiple languages. By bridging work in education and human development with insights and methods from government and political science research, this project will further develop the interdisciplinary connections between MDI team members, opening up new and exciting avenues for research.
MDI team members: Lucas Butler (EDUC) and Alex Flores (BSOS)
This BSOS-led research project will investigate how America's bilingual children and adolescents navigate misinformation in multilingual contexts. By focusing on the information ecosystems these communities engage with, we seek to uncover systematic pathways for addressing misinformation and building resilience. Unlike most misinformation studies, which concentrate on English-only environments, this project examines the unique challenges linguistic minorities face, particularly the barriers created by cross-linguistic information flows. This project aims to develop strategies for fostering deliberative thinking about information while avoiding undue distrust. Understanding how bilingual and multilingual individuals interact with sources of information, including discrepancies between English and non-English platforms, is essential to developing effective interventions.
MDI team member: Alex Flores (BSOS)
MDI team member Tom Rosenstiel, Eleanor Merrill Scholar on the Future of Journalism at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, was recently featured in an MD Today article discussing a multi-institutional study on American attitudes toward government and democracy. While this was not an MDI-funded project, Rosenstiel served as the lead author of the report, which challenges traditional narratives about partisan divides in the United States.
The study, conducted in collaboration with Louisiana State University’s Manship School of Communication and NORC at the University of Chicago, found that Americans across the political spectrum share deep-seated distrust in institutions and pessimism about the country’s future. Rosenstiel emphasizes the need for journalists to move beyond demographic stereotypes to better understand voter motivations.
MDI Team Members: Tom Rosenstiel
MDI faculty lead multiple community-based research networks. For example, The Vote 16 Research Network studies what happens when communities lower the voting age to 16
MDI Team Members: Paul Brown | Michael Hanmer | Sam Novey | Lena Morreale Scott
MDI’s newest research project will dramatically accelerate the creation of the first-in-nation research hub focused on registering, educating, and mobilizing high school students. By building on research that shows voting is habit forming, that high schools are some of the most effective and equitable spaces to reach future voters, and that disruptions after high school create barriers to registration and voting, this research project will convene stakeholders and local partners and will take a systematic approach to studying and engaging new voters. This MDI project is made possible by a gift from Marsha and Henry Laufer.
MDI Team members: Michael Hanmer | Sam Novey | Lena Morreale Scott
Building on earlier UMD-led research about collaborations between local election officials and sports teams, MDI faculty are currently exploring research about how professional athletes can encourage their fans to register and vote.
MDI Team members: Michael Hanmer | Sam Novey
In collaboration with The Washington Post, MDI faculty study attitudes about democracy, performance of elected officials, climate change, racial and social justice, and public health, as well as behaviors such as voting and safety measures taken during the pandemic.
MDI Team member: Michael Hanmer
MDI faculty, graduate students, and their colleagues in the Philip Merrill College of Journalism are researching ways to halt the growing demise of local news, which is essential to strengthening democracy. The college has launched the Local News Ecosystem project in Maryland with the goal of expanding the study nationwide. The groundbreaking study identifies local news outlets in Maryland, gathering detailed information on staffing, budget, needs, and more through a survey and content analysis. The results and methodology of what is planned to be a bi-annual study will be released at an MDI and Merrill College event in April 2024, gathering local, new providers and university researchers from around the country.
MDI Team Members: Tom Rosenstiel | Sarah Oates | Rafael Lorente
MDI faculty experts and doctoral students in the Philip Merrill College of Journalism research the intersection of media, democracy, and politics in countries including the United States, Russia, and India. MDI faculty use both traditional content analysis and computational methods to detect propaganda narratives in the media. Current research focuses both on detecting and deterring Russian propaganda in U.S. elections, as well as deploying novel methodologies to track disinformation that targets the ethnic minority press in the United States.
MDI Team Members: Sarah Oates
A significant project launching in 2024 at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism will analyze and develop AI tools to enhance journalism. This builds on work funded by the National Science Foundation in the college on developing AI tools to improve fact-checking and disinformation detection in news at the college’s Computational Journalism Lab.
MDI Faculty: Rafael Lorente
MDI faculty and graduate students are researching how Maryland’s local education agencies (school districts and special schools) vary in the ways they implement the state graduation requirement that all high school students complete 75 hours of service-learning, a “proven practice” that strengthens students’ knowledge, skills, and civic experiences.
MDI Team Members: Julie Miller | Lena Morreale Scott
MDI faculty and graduate students are leading the Digital Civic Inquiry Project, which is a collaboration with the DC Office of the State Superintendent of Education and the Close Up Foundation and will support eighth-grade teachers in adopting an innovative curricular approach, digital civic inquiry. Through digital civic inquiries, students engage in scaffolded research about civic issues like access to affordable housing or minimum wage increases. Students learn to locate and evaluate a range of digital sources, use credible sources to inform their developing opinions, discuss what they learn about the issue and potential policy solutions, and plan to take action to advocate for their preferred solutions.
This project is supported by an American History and Civics National Activities Grant from the U.S. Department of Education.
MDI Team Members: Sarah McGrew | Elizabeth Reynolds | Lena Morreale Scott
Deep and growing political polarizations threaten to thwart understanding of how science and civics education can promote a common good. MDI team members are addressing how people develop socially and learn about the climate crisis and sustainability and how to reason scientifically, civically, and critically when encountering conflicting sources and claims related to sustainable development. Click here to learn more about the research aspect of this project.
In addition to MDI funding, this project is supported--in part--by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. DRL-2201012.
MDI Team Members: Doug Lombardi | Sarah McGrew
Many elementary-aged students spend substantial time on digital devices both in and out of school. Yet, educational efforts to confront mis- and disinformation have yet to focus on this age group. MDI faculty and graduate students are developing materials, teacher trainings, and evaluation measures to test pedagogical approaches that align with early social and cognitive development to support students’ early capacity to detect misinformation.
MDI Team Members: Jenna Alton | Luke Butler | Sarah McGrew | Doug Lombardi | Elizabeth Reynolds
MDI co-leads the Constituency-Level Elections Archive (CLEA), a repository of detailed election results focusing on the constituency level for lower-chamber and upper-chamber legislative elections from around the world. This work preserves and consolidates valuable data in a comprehensive, reliable resource that is ready for analysis and publicly available at no cost. This public good is useful to a range of audiences for research, policy, practice, and education. Products by a broader community that rely on these data are captured in a bibliography. This data provides a natural history of a major segment of national elections.
MDI Team Member: David Backer