PhD scholarships awarded to Alexandra Jabbour, Maxime Coulombe and Philippe Mongrain

The SSHRC and the FRQSC have announced the results of their 2019-2020 PhD scholarship competitions. There was some good news for students at the Chair: Alexandra Jabbour was awarded a scholarship of the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture. Maxime Coulombe was awarded a Joseph-Armand-Bombardier PhD scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and a scholarship of the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture. Philippe Mongrain received a doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

We took some time to celebrate online!

The scholarships were awarded for the following projects:

Alexandra Jabbour. The purpose of my doctoral dissertation is to rethink how voters perceive the economy and who they punish according to their perception of it. To study this, I use data on local elections which I combine with administrative datasets on subnational economic factors.  By putting the economy at the local level, I aim to provide evidence that the economic vote might be underestimated.

Maxime Coulombe. Title: Pression sociale et participation électorale: lorsque l’on vote pour plaire aux autres. My doctoral dissertation focuses on the mechanism linking social pressure and turnout. Using survey data from over 20 electoral studies and from semi-structured interviews, I aim to give a better understanding of the following questions: Who exerts social pressure to vote? Who receives it? Why do people exert pressure to vote? How does its mechanism work? What are its effects?

Philippe Mongrain. Title: Citizens as Election Forecasters. Research has found citizen forecasting to be one of the most, if not the most, accurate approach to forecast election results. This is somewhat surprising, since decades of research have shown that citizens usually have low levels of political knowledge. Up until now, models explaining citizens’ forecasting skills have either failed to offer significant explanations of citizens’ forecasting abilities or they have not been put to a rigorous empirical test. My dosctoral dissertation is guided by one overarching question: What can explain an individual’s ability to correctly forecast the outcome of an election?

This content has been updated on 7 May 2020 at 16 h 04 min.