Business as Usual: The Determinants of Vote Choice in the 2021 Canadian Federal Election Matthew Taylor – PhD Candidat at Université de Montréal Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the 2021 federal election was unique in the history of Canada’s federal campaigns. In spite of the health crisis however, the results of the election belied […] Read more

Buy-in for Buyouts: Attitudes Toward Compensation for Reforms Vincent Arel-Bundock – Associate Professor at Université de Montréal Political reforms are often held up by concentrated interest groups who lobby to block change that would benefit the majority. One under-examined policy response is to compensate the recalcitrant group in exchange for agreeing to the reform. We […] Read more

The electoral performance of the revolutionary parties Jean Lachapelle – Associate Professor at Université de Montréal This presentation analyzes the consequences of violent revolutions on electoral competition in an authoritarian context through a study of Algeria. I present unpublished data on clashes between armed groups and law enforcement during the Algerian War of Independence, constructed […] Read more

Affective polarization towards voters and parties Ruth Dassonneville – Associate Professor at Univeristé de Montréal and Romain Lachat – Associate Professor at Sciences Po Paris, CEVIPOF Political scientists’ interest in the topic of affective polarization is rapidly growing. While early research on the topic focused on the US context, increasingly, affective polarization – that is […] Read more

Accents as factors of differentiation in Quebec Marc-André Bodet – Laval’s University There is a rich literature on the impact of physical characteristics or religious symbols on the construction of a political “we” and “them”. Too few works in political science, however, focus on different accents and their consequences in societies marked by diversity. As […] Read more

Les jeunes sont-ils voués à être des candidats « poteaux » Philippe Chassé – Phd Student at Université de Montréal and Sciences Po Paris ; Camille Gélix, Sciences Po Paris In recent years, several studies (Stockemer and Sundström 2021; 2022) have highlighted the ‘gerontocratic’ nature of political institutions in Western democracies. Although they make up a large share of […] Read more

Multidimensional Group-level Latent Preferences Elissa Berwick – McGill University This paper presents a framework for estimating multidimensional, dynamic group-level latent preferences, even in contexts defined by sparse data. We demonstrate the ability of our group-level model to recover individual-level trends in both simulated data and published applications, and then leverage the model to compare the ideological […] Read more

Where You Grow Up Shapes Your Political Behavior: Evidence from Childhood Moves Vincent Pons – Havard Business School; Jacob Brown, Enrico Cantoni, Sahil Chinoy, and Martin Koenen Does the neighborhood where an individual grew up have a persistent effect on their political identity and voting behavior in adult life? To answer this question, we track […] Read more

Keep your Enemies Closer: Strategic Candidate Adjustments in U.S. and French Elections Caroline Le Pennec-Caldichoury – HEC, Montréal; Rafael Di Tella, Randy Kotti et Vincent Pons A key tenet of representative democracy is that politicians should adjust their discourse and policies to the voters who elect them. The Median Voter Theorem (MVT) predicts that, if […] Read more

Do Citizens Keep Voting (or Abstaining) by Habit?  Jean-François Daoust – Université de Sherbrooke et André Blais – Université de Montréal Why do some citizens vote while others abstain in elections? A very popular answer is that citizens vote (or abstain) out of “habit”. They vote or don’t vote because they repeat the behavior of […] Read more