Chaire de recherche du Canada en démocratie électorale

Social norms and electoral participation: doing what is right or doing like everyone else Maxime Coulombe (Université de Montréal) People tend to behave differently, often more in accordance with social norms, when they feel observed or when they know their behavior is monitored or disclosed to others. In political science, Get-Out-To-Voteexperiments have shown how people […] Read more

Can Part ID be a Proxy? The Measure of Party Ideology with Party Identification Nadjim Frechet (Université de Montréal)Maxime Blanchard (McGill University) Many research questions in electoral studies focus directly or indirectly on political parties’ position on specific issues. Unfortunately, parties do not answer surveys. Accordingly, it is much more complex to determine their position […] Read more

Partisan Semantic Overlaps: Floor-speeches and Ideological Position Benjamin Guinaudeau (University of Konstanz) Estimating the ideological position of Members of Parliaments (MPs) remains a challenge for political scientists. Different approaches have been developed including surveys, roll-call votes and floor speeches. Inspired by the measure of polarization proposed in Peterson and Spirling (2018), we present a new […] Read more

Message Distortion as a Campaign Strategy: Does Rival Party Distortion of Focal Party Position Affect Voters? Zeynep Somer-Topcu (University of Texas at Austin) Margit Tavits (Washington University in St. Louis) Do voters understand party positions? A growing literature is interested in answering this question but has limited its focus on parties’ own policy messages. In real […] Read more

Evolution of Party Polarization and Voter Polarization in European Democracies Semih Cakir (Université de Montréal) Traditionally, party competition in established democracies in Europe is mainly structured around the economic cleavage. However, scholars increasingly argue that political conflicts that motivate party competition and mobilize voters have been under transformation. There is growing evidence that party competition […] Read more