Political Party or Policy Position? The Role of Policy Partisanship and Party Cues in Voter Decision-Making Thomas Galipeau – University of Toronto, Sarah Lachance, Thomas Bergeron, Natasha Goel, Mujahedul Islam, Blake Lee-Whiting, Beatrice Magistro, Semra Sevi, and Peter J. Loewen Whether political party or policy position matters more to vote choice is a long-standing debate in political science. […] Read more

Losers’ consent in a deliberative assembly André Blais – Université de Montréal, Jean-François Daoust – Université de Sherbrooke, Dassonneville, Ruth – Université de Montréal, and Patrick Fournier – Université de Montréal We examine losers’ reactions to the votes taken in a citizen deliberative assembly. A citizen assembly on issues related to local electoral democracy was organized […] Read more

“Citizens’ Perceptions of Parties’ Positions in a Multidimensional Space” Dassonneville, Ruth (Université de Montréal), Patrick Fournier (Université de Montréal), and Zeynep Somer-Topcu (University of Texas at Austin) Read more

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

Our Chair-holder, Ruth Dassonneville, received the 2022 Excellence in teaching award. For her magnificent guidance towards her undergrad students, she devoted herself into helping them become familiar with research in the political behaviour field. For her class on elections (POL 3015) she helped students collect their own data from a collective survey, and thought them […] Read more

Semra Sevi received the annual Impact Awards that recognize the highest achievements in SSHRC-funded research, knowledge mobilization and scholarship, notably for her PhD dissertation: What Voters Want: Identifying Voter Preferences for Candidates. She also collected and published the biggest dataset regarding Canadian historical candidate at the federal level, but also provincial level in Ontario. Her dataset […] 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