Contrats internationaux

Ideology and Institutions in the Diffusion of Disinformation in the Digital Era (DeCodingDisInfo)

What shapes whether people receive, believe, and share disinformation? The rise of ‘fake news’ has become an area of deep concern worldwide, raising questions about the role of information in democratic societies. Observers often point to the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, based on falsehoods about election results, as a critical turning point in how disinformation has dire consequences. Despite a dramatic increase in disinformation research, a crucial and remaining puzzle is that a large number of people believe fake news claims while only a small number of people (often below 1%) consume fake news in their daily news diet (Allen et al. 2020; Fletcher and Nielsen 2018; Grinberg et al. 2019; Tsfati et al. 2020). How and why do people report that they trust unverified information if they are not actually consuming this news directly? To understand this empirical disconnect in the diffusion of disinformation in the digital era (3Ds), this mixed-methods research, DeCodingDisInfo advances the state of the art that selects on the dependent variable of digitally visible fake news and top-down levers of distribution. Current scholarship skews toward top-down powerful players: platforms (like Twitter), politicians (like Trump), or policies (like the GDPR). The audience for disinformation, however, is usually viewed as passive individuals without institutional affiliation. This extant research ignores the broader array of everyday bottom-up active media practices and mechanisms of sharing—or not sharing. Instead, DeCodingDisInfo, an interdisciplinary and mixed-methods project, will uncover how information – both fake news and otherwise – circulates in the digital media environment and in offline spaces. Taking a deeply contextualized and community-based approach, our team will harness the power of a two-country comparison and examine how ideology and institutions shape information flows. This will result in publicly available tools to better decode and deconstruct fake news.

Financement : McCourt Institute (Project Liberty). Responsable scientifique : Jen Schradie. Durée du projet : 01/01/2023 - 31/12/2025.

Social and Economic Consequences of Widowhood during Retirement: A Comparative Study on Pensions and Survivor Benefits

Widowhood is a critical life course event that entails not only profound grief, but also severe social and economic consequences. For instance, spousal loss can significantly reduce household income, while expenses remain unchanged. 1-3 Such a rapid drop in purchasing power, together with other psychological and social challenges, puts widows and widowers at a high risk of poverty and exclusion. Moreover, these risks are strongly gendered. Women are more likely to outlive their husbands, but their pensions tend to be lower because of gender differences in lifetime earnings.

As populations age, the number of marriages ending with the death of a spouse is dramatically rising along with the potential number of years a widow or widower can expect to live.* In the Netherlands, almost 61,000 spousal deaths were recorder in 2019, roughly 6,000 more than a decade earlier and twice the number of divorces." During the Covid-19 pandemic, the incidence of widowhood increased to unexpectedly high numbers. Despite widowhood events increasing in frequency, many countries have retrenched or even abolished survivor benefit schemes targeted at securing the wellbeing of widows and widowers. For example, survivor benefits in the Netherlands were scaled back considerably in the mid-1990s, while the new pension agreement states that total expenditure on survivor pensions will not rise.

The challenges surrounding widowhood are becoming increasingly urgent, and many pension systems require more sustainable and equitable solutions for survivor benefit schemes. Nevertheless, social scientific research is limited and fragmented in this regard. At the individual level, research is needed to understand the individual consequences of spousal death for older survivors' social and economic wellbeing as well as the socioeconomic disparities involved in this process. At the structural level, it is necessary to learn how to design pension systems that prevent widowhood-related poverty and reduce economic inequalities while remaining sustainable for future generations. To address these goals, this project takes a comparative approach to study widowhood events across countries and pension contexts.

Financement : Network for Studies on Pensions, Aging and Retirement (Netspar). Responsable scientifique : Zachary Van Winkle. Durée du projet : 2023/2024.

Partenaires : Finnish Centre for Pensions et Tilburg University.