Laurie Beaudonnet, Ruth Dassonneville, Frédéric Mérand, Luca Sollai Read more

Does changing an electoral system to a mixed system (really) affect voter turnout and the party system? John Högström (Associate professor,  Department of Social Sciences, Mid Sweden University) In this study we aim to add to the understanding of whether, and if so how, a change of electoral system affects factors such as voter turnout […] Read more

The Effectiveness of Group Appeals  Ruth Dassonneville (Associate Professor at Université de Montréal)  Citizens’ socio-demographic characteristics shape their political preferences, resulting in systematic differences in how social groups vote. These group-differences emerge when there are clear associations between social groups and specific parties. Recent work has shown that one way in which parties can create […] Read more

Much Ado About Debt? Charlotte Cavaille (Assistant professor at University of Michigan) For countries with cheap borrowing costs, putting deficit concerns aside is politically more attractive than crafting ambitious fiscal responses to rising public debt. Should we conclude that voters impose few constraints on deficit-friendly policymakers? In this paper, we identify and test for the […] Read more

Measuring Policy Preferences: Why It is Hard and Can We Do Anything About It? Charlotte Cavaille (Assistante Professeure à l’Université du Michigan) Political scientists rely extensively on subjective survey data to measure policy preferences. The limits of such measurement tools are known to all. They include 1) measurement error that correlates with individual characteristics, with […] Read more

The Correlates of Secessionist Party Support, 1945-2021 Alex B. Rivard (Postdoctoral Fellow, Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship) Where there exists a host of research examining secessionist party ideology (Massetti 2009; Massetti and Schakel 2015, 2016), on how parties manage the presence of a regional cleavage (Alonso et al. 2013; Basile 2013, 2016; Meguid 2005, […] Read more

Mixed modes of data collection and administration and new sources of samples in the US 2020 election. How did they fare? Claire Durand (Université de Montréal) Tim. P. Johnson (University of Chicago)Luis P. Pena Ibarra (Université de Montréal) This paper presents the results of an analysis of the performance of the polls of the campaign […] Read more

Visualizing the impacts of climate change using AI Erick Lachapelle (Université de Montréal) Thomas Bergeron (University of Toronto)Victor Schmidt (MILA)Alex Hernandez-Garcia (MILA) Yoshua Bengio (MILA) Existing research suggests that climate change is perceived as a spatially and temporally distant threat, prompting researchers to explore various forms of risk communication that better engages the general public. However, results […] Read more

Local Economies, Local Wealth, and Economic Perceptions Ben Ansell  (Nuffield College, University of Oxford)Asli Cansunar (Washington University) Recent research in political economy has demonstrated that local economic conditions have a striking impact on the evaluation of the incumbent, social policy preferences, and support for anti-establishment movements. Whether voters can correctly perceive their district’s economic reality […] Read more

Foraging for Policy: Ambiguity as a Heuristic Sarah Lachance (University of British Columbia) Notwithstanding democratic norms of transparency and accountability, electoral candidates often take ambiguous policy positions by making vague or contradictory statements. Yet, the dominant assumption in the literature on voter behaviour is that voters are risk-averse. This poses a puzzle: if voters are […] Read more