The Institute for Democracy, Journalism & Citizenship (IDJC) conducts collaborative research projects that explore the intersections of media, democracy, and civic engagement.
View our research projects and work from affiliated faculty.
IDJC Projects
The Deciders Focus Groups project is a partnership between the Institute for Democracy, Journalism and Citizenship (IDJC), Engagious and Sago, in collaboration with NBC News.
The 2024 iteration of the project consisted of a series of monthly focus groups with key voting blocs in presidential election battleground states. Each focus group session covered a central issue with a demographic group that determined the outcome of the election.
The Syracuse University-Ipsos American Identity poll measures U.S. attitudes toward democracy, news and information and civic engagement. This national survey is conducted by Ipsos for IDJC. Each wave of the survey includes interviews with roughly 1,000 U.S. adults using KnowledgePanel®
The findings are available to the public and news organizations.
ElectionGraph was a yearlong research project by IDJC and a team from Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies that examined trends in the U.S. presidential race and other top 2024 contests.
The project sought to illuminate hidden trends and actors spreading and influencing inaccurate information targeting U.S. voters through social media. The project was made possible thanks to a research grant from Neo4j and use of the company’s graph database technology and experts.
Affiliated Faculty Projects
Jodi Upton, Knight Chair in Data and Explanatory Journalism, and Nausheen Husain, assistant professor in Magazine, News and Digital Journalism, along with a team of Newhouse students, worked on a series of investigative reports about police in New York state.
The investigation was supported with funding from the Data-Driven Reporting Project. That project is funded by the Google News Initiative in partnership with Northwestern University-Medill.