Political science

CNN reporter Hadas Gold meets with Prof. Adam Berinsky and Prof. Chara Podimata to learn more about their new tool that tracks how popular AI chatbots source their information and respond to questions related to the midterm elections. “Even if people do not necessarily say that they trust AI, they like what AI gives them, which is a single answer,” says Berinsky. “What worries me is that the average voter, someone who might know a little about politics, but doesn’t know the details, is going to get this definitive answer [from an AI chatbot] that might be based on a different stew of information.”

Prof. Daron Acemoglu joins Bloomberg’s “Mishal Husain Show” to discuss his latest book, “What Happened to Liberal Democracy: Remaking a Politics of Shared Prosperity,” as it relates to democracy in the age of AI and social media. “The thing that gives me hope is that humans are very adaptable,” says Acemoglu. “People, even in this polarized world, have a deep sense of fairness, around [which] we can come together. There are so many shared moral values between the different sides of the aisle in the U.K., [and] the U.S. Polarization, bad leadership [and] social media have obscured them.” 

In a conversation with Slate’s Shirin Ali, Prof. Charles Stewart III, director of MIT’s Election Data and Science Lab, discusses a framework to help voters “see important red flags in the hours immediately following Election Day,” detailed in his new paper “The Day After: Threats and Guardrails in the 2026 Election.” “After Election Day, that’s where we’re thinking about getting the final count in,” says Stewart. “We shift into the formal process of canvassing the vote, certifying it, and making sure that we’ve named the winners.”  

An analysis by Prof. Charles Stewart III, director of MIT’s Election Data and Science Lab, found that requests for mail-in ballots were down in Georgia, Maine, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin earlier this month, reports Patrick Marley, Leslie Shapiro and Laura Meckler for The Washington Post. “Those five states can be more fully analyzed than others because they provide data showing how voting patterns compare with the same stage of the election cycle in 2022,” note Marley, Shapiro and Meckler. “In data collected four weeks before Election Day, requests were down most sharply in Georgia — by 50 percent compared with the same point in 2022.” 

Live on GBH’s “The Curiosity Desk,” hosted by Edgar B. Herwick III, Prof. Adam Berinsky joins Boston Globe reporter Aaron Pressman and Kate Gage from the Cooperative Lab Project for a conversation about the impact of AI on the 2026 midterm elections. Berinsky notes that in the runup to the midterms, voters “need to be careful about what they are paying attention to. I think we want to separate out what is new to AI and what is just communication in general,” says Berinsky. “In elections where margins are tens of thousands of votes in states that can determine the presidency, even really small effects matter.”  

Prof. Charles Stewart III, director of MIT’s Election Data and Science Lab, speaks to NPR’s “Morning Edition” about the surge in early voting among Americans in the midterm elections. The surge is reflecting “the enthusiasm of voters, but also, I think it has to be understood that a lot of this activity is also generated by the campaigns, getting out and motivating their voters to get to the polls or to return their mail-in-ballots,” says Stewart. “The political science research suggests that people who are voting early would have voted on Election Day had that mode not been available to them.” 

The New Yorker’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus details how Morris Chang ’52, SM ’53 founded the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), “one of the most valuable tech companies globally” that “makes almost all of the world’s advanced [computer] chips.” “Chang proposed a semiconductor ‘foundry,’ which would do for pricey chips what its predecessors had done for cheap junk. At the time, however, the market didn’t exist,” writes Lewis-Kraus. “By the end of TSMC’s first decade, the company was bringing in a billion dollars in annual revenue.”  

Prof. Charles Stewart III, director of MIT’s Election Data and Science Lab, speaks with Craig LeMoult during GBH’s “Morning Edition” about the electoral environment in Massachusetts. “I am somebody who thinks that activists tend to overestimate the importance and the effects of voting reforms,” says Stewart. “But having said that, I think that Massachusetts needs something to shake it up from the current electoral environment that it has.” 

A recent study by MIT researchers found that AI chatbots easily generated misleading election-related answers, images and videos, writes Emily Condon for USA Today. “This, along with other findings from our study, suggests that in an ongoing election with little authoritative information for models to rely on, AI may not be as helpful in pushing back against unsubstantiated rumors and misinformation,” the researchers explain.  

MIT researchers are leading a new project documenting what major AI systems say about elections in an effort to understand how the technology influences the democratic process, writes Tiffany Hsu for The New York Times. “AI is becoming part of the way people encounter and make sense of political information, and yet we know relatively little about what that information environment actually looks like, how it differs for different user demographics, political identities and geographies,” says Prof. Chara Podimata  

Prof. Charles Stewart III speaks to NPR’s Bobby Allyn about concerns that election betting encourages those connected to campaigns or election administrators to manipulate votes. “If you are looking for a reason to be skeptical about election results, election officials trying to manipulate them for financial gain becomes another straw to grasp at,” says Stewart. "However, these people don't need prediction markets to concoct some conspiracy theory to explain away why their candidate lost.” 

Prof. Richard Samuels joins Adrian Ma, host of NPR’s “All Things Considered” program, to discuss Japan's efforts to form a new centralized intelligence agency. “The real threats to Japan today are the shifting balance of power in northeast Asia,” says Samuels. “This strategic environment in 2026 is not the same as the strategic environment during the Cold War and not during the post-Cold War. It's something quite new.” 

Prof. Charles Stewart III speaks with Newsweek reporter Jasmine Laws about the speed of ballot-counting in California. "California’s Legislature has decided to listen to election rights groups more than other states in an effort to make sure that every vote counts," said Stewart. 

Prof. Adam Berinsky speaks with Washington Post reporter Shira Ovide about American’s relationship with AI and social media. “Berinsky said the unfavorable opinions about AI aren’t that bad compared with Americans’ low confidence in many institutions, including big business, Congress and newspapers,” writes Ovide. 

Writing for Foreign Affairs, Prof. Caitlin Talmadge explores the state of the Strait of Hormuz amid the United States’ conflict with Iran. “In short, if Iran effectively mines the strait, all U.S. response options are suboptimal,” writes Talmadge. “The United States should therefore focus aggressively on preventing Iranian mine-laying in the first place and finding an off-ramp from the larger war. If it does not, Washington should expect that ongoing harassment of traffic in the strait will be but one of a number of responses that Iran has long prepared and will now deploy.”