Chaire de recherche du Canada en démocratie électorale

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

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