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

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

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

Party Prediction for Twitter Kellin Pelrine – Phd Student at McGill University Co-authors : 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 […] Read more

Housing Prices and Perceived Economic Standing: Evidence from Two Survey Experiments Alexandra Jabbour – Phd Student at Université de Montréal Housing is a good marker of economic standing since individuals usually sort into neighbourhoods based on their financial capacity. The aim of this study is to test whether individuals actually react to property prices and […] Read more

Cultural logic of negativity bias in generalized trust Baowen Liang – Phd Student at Université de Montréal Generalized trust designates the trust that people have in their fellow members of society in general. Previous work shows that there is a negativity bias in trust formation. Trust is relatively easy to destroy and difficult to create. […] Read more

Should I Stay or Should I Go? Testing the Influence of Ambivalence on Vote Switching in the Multi-Party Context Klara Dentler – PhD Student at University of Mannheim Survey studies on citizens’ attitudes and intentions are numerous and are followed with great interest in newspapers, reports and academic papers. The implicit assumption is that citizens […] Read more

On the episode from October 3rd, Ruth Dassonneville jumps in at the episode “Élection au Québec, comment voter?”. You can listen her intervention here : https://ici.radio-canada.ca/ohdio/premiere/emissions/midi-info/episodes/658348/rattrapage-du-lundi-3-octobre-2022/7 Read more

Thanks to research grants from MITACS and the Canada Research Chair in Electoral Democracy, Alexandra Jabbour completed a research stay in Denmark, at Aarhus University. The research stay took place from February to July 2022, under the supervision of Martin Vinaes Larsen and the co-supervision of Martin Bisgaard. Alexandra was able to advance her doctoral […] Read more