Despite considerable social scientific attention to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on urbanized areas, very little research has examined its impact on rural populations. Yet rural communities—which make up tens of millions of people from diverse backgrounds in the United States—are among the nation’s most vulnerable populations and may be less resilient to the effects of such a large-scale exogenous shock. We address this critical knowledge gap with data from a new survey designed to assess the impacts of the pandemic on health-related and economic dimensions of rural well-being in the North American West. Notably, we find that the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on rural populations have been severe, with significant negative impacts on unemployment, overall life satisfaction, mental health, and economic outlook. Further, we find that these impacts have been generally consistent across age, ethnicity, education, and sex. We discuss how these findings constitute the beginning of a much larger interdisciplinary COVID-19 research effort that integrates rural areas and pushes beyond the predominant focus on cities and nation-states.

Drawing on large-scale computational data and methods, this research demonstrates how polarization efforts are influenced by a patterned network of political and financial actors. These dynamics, which have been notoriously difficult to quantify, are illustrated here with a computational analysis of climate change politics in the United States. The comprehensive data include all individual and organizational actors in the climate change countermovement (164 organizations), as well as all written and verbal texts produced by this network between 1993-2013 (40,785 texts, more than 39 million words). Two main findings emerge. First, that organizations with corporate funding were more likely to have written and disseminated texts meant to polarize the climate change issue. Second, and more importantly, that corporate funding influences the actual thematic content of these polarization efforts, and the discursive prevalence of that thematic content over time. These findings provide new, and comprehensive, confirmation of dynamics long thought to be at the root of climate change politics and discourse. Beyond the specifics of climate change, this paper has important implications for understanding ideological polarization more generally, and the increasing role of private funding in determining why certain polarizing themes are created and amplified. Lastly, the paper suggests that future studies build on the novel approach taken here that integrates largescale textual analysis with social networks.funding | polarization | politics | computational social science | climate change I deological polarization presents increasingly important challenges for sustainability science and solutions for climate change. Much attention has been given to the outcomes of polarization by demonstrating its effect on individual choices about energy-efficient behavior (1), individual attitudes about climate change (2-6), and variation in individuals' trust in science as a whole, especially among Americans who self-identify as politically conservative (7). Climate change is not the first issue with scientific consensus to become so highly polarized (8, 9), but the magnitude of its ecological and human-health effects-and the socio-political roadblocks for mitigating emissions-have led to a wide body of attitudinal research documenting the current sociopolitical environment of polarization that exists.Despite this fruitful body of individual-level research, we have considerably less data and understanding about the underlying organizational and financial factors that made polarization possible in the first place. Qualitative and historical research has suggested that well-funded and well-organized "contrarian" campaigns are especially important for spreading skepticism or denial where scientific consensus exist-such as in the present case of global warming, or in historical contrarian efforts to create doubt about the link between smoking and cancer (8-15). The primary way that contrarian campaigns create skepticism and ideological polarizati...

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Two of the most consequential developments affecting US politics are (1) the growing influence of private philanthropy, and (2) the large-scale production and diffusion of misinformation. Despite their importance, the links between these two trends have not been scientifically examined. This study employs a sophisticated research design on a large collection of new data, utilizing natural language processing and approximate string matching to examine the relationship between the large-scale climate misinformation movement and US philanthropy. The study finds that over a twenty year period, networks of actors promulgating scientific misinformation about climate change were increasingly integrated into the institution of US philanthropy. The degree of integration is predicted by funding ties to prominent corporate donors. These findings reveal new knowledge about largescale efforts to distort public understanding of science and sow polarization. The study also contributes a unique computational approach to be applied at this increasingly important, yet methodologically fraught, area of research.

This study examines popular and scholarly perceptions that young American evangelicals are becoming more liberal than older evangelicals. Young evangelicals are more likely to have more liberal attitudes on same-sex marriage, premarital sex, cohabitating, and pornography, but not abortion. This analysis is situated within the theoretical context of emerging adulthood, and considers higher education, delayed marriage, and shifts in moral authority as potential mediating factors accounting for age differences. A new method for operationalizing evangelical as a religious identity is suggested and three different classification schemes are examined: religious tradition, self-identified evangelicals, and theologically conservative Protestants. The data come from the 2006 Panel Study of American Religion and Ethnicity.

Long-term impacts of land dispossession To date, we lack precise estimates of the extent to which Indigenous peoples in parts of North America were dispossessed of their lands and forced to migrate by colonial settlers, as well as how the lands that they were moved into compare to their original lands. Farrell et al . constructed a new dataset within the boundaries of the current-day United States and found that Indigenous land density and spread in has been reduced by nearly 99% (see the Perspective by Fixico). The lands to which they were forcibly migrated are more vulnerable to climate change and contain fewer resources. Research and policy implications of these findings are discussed. —TSR

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