An ideological trade-off: Electoral consequences of consistent and responsive party strategies Jasmien Luypaert – PhD Candidate at Gent University Political parties face a difficult balancing act when making electoral calculations. They must weigh the benefits of offering policy positions in line with their ideological heritage and traditionally bind their party base, against the need to […] Read more

Between decentralization and asymmetry: Explaining preferences about the division of power in Canada Philippe Chassé (Université de Montréal et Sciences Po Paris), Olivier Jacques (Université de Montréal) et Colin Scott (Université Concordia) In most federations, the division of power between central and subnational governments represents an important cleavage structuring voting and party systems. Subnational units […] Read more

Crowdsourcing or Educated Guessing? Election Forecasting, Sophistication, and Aggregation Philippe Mongrain, Nadjim Fréchet, Brian Thompson Collart, and Yannick Dufresne Many studies, primarily of American, British, and Canadian elections, have shown citizens’ forecasts to be an efficient prediction tool. Not only are citizens quite astute at guessing which candidate or party will prevail at the national […] Read more

On the same page? Black voters in Canada and the United Kingdom: A comparative study with African-Americans  Nadjim Fréchet – PhD Candidate at Université de Montréal American political science literature shows that African-Americans form one of the most consistent voting blocs in Western democracies. If elite mobilization and a common historical background can explain African-Americans’ […] Read more

Is Social Media Affectively Polarizing Us? An Experiment Comparing Facebook and Instagram Users Juliette Leblanc – Master’s student at Université de Montréal Do social media raise levels of affective polarization by increasing animosity towards opposing partisans? Research show that affective polarization is influenced by the growing levels of elite ideological polarization and most importantly, the […] Read more

Party Prediction for Twitter Kellin Pelrine, Anne Imouza, Gabrielle Desrosiers-Brisebois, Sacha Lévy, Jacob-Junqi Tian, Zachary Yang, Aarash Feizi, Cécile Amadoro, André Blais, Jean-François Godbout and Reihaneh Rabbany A large number of studies on social media are based on predictive models for inferring political affiliation of users. The methods designed for this party prediction rely on […] Read more

Who is under pressure? A descriptive study of social pressure to vote Maxime Coulombe – PhD Candidate at Université de Montréal Randomized field experiments such as Gerber et al.’s (2008) Get-Out-the-Vote study provide causal estimates of the mobilizing effects of social pressure to vote. While offering important contributions, these studies leave open questions regarding how […] Read more

‘Credible’ or ‘Capricious’? The Reputational Cost of Party Policy Change in Multi-Party Settings Maurits Meijers – Assistant Professor at Radboud Universiteit Political parties regularly change their policy positions on a wide range of issues. Yet, it is unclear how policy change affects parties’ reputations in multi-party systems. On the one hand, voters can accept political parties’ […] Read more

Cultural Sources of Gender Gaps: Confucian Meritocracy Reduces Gender Inequalities in Electoral Participation Baowen Liang – PhD Candidate at Université de Montréal East Asian women’s political participation has not increased at the same pace as economic development. One frequently mobilized cause for this discrepancy is the region’s Confucian culture, with its strong focus on hierarchy, […] Read more

Inclusive Redistribution and Perceptions of Membership: A Cross-National Comparison Allison Harell – Professor at UQAM Immigrants tend to be seen as less deserving of welfare benefits than native-born citizens, but little consensus exists to explain this finding or how to build greater public support for more inclusive policies. New work on citizens perceptions of the […] Read more