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    Canadian Political Science Association
    2020 Annual Conference Programme

    Confronting Political Divides
    Hosted at Western University
    Tuesday, June 2 to Thursday, June 4, 2020
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    Presidential Address:
    Barbara Arneil, CPSA President

    Origins:
    Colonies and Statistics

    Location:
    Tuesday, June 2, 2020 | 05:00pm to 06:00pm
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    KEYNOTE SPEAKER:
    Ayelet Shachar
    The Shifting Border:
    Legal Cartographies of Migration
    and Mobility

    Location:
    June 04, 2020 | 01:30 to 03:00 pm
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    Keynote Speaker: Marc Hetherington
    Why Modern Elections
    Feel Like a Matter of
    Life and Death

    Location:
    Wednesday, June 3, 2020 | 03:45pm to 05:15pm
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    Plenary Panel
    Indigenous Politics and
    the Problem of Canadian
    Political Science

    Location: Arts & Humanities Building - AHB 1R40
    Tuesday, June 2, 2020 | 10:30am to 12:00pm

Comparative Politics



B12 - Elections and Electoral Institutions

Date: Jun 3 | Time: 02:00pm to 03:30pm | Location:

Contamination Effects in Mixed Electoral Systems: Temporal and Sub-National Variance: Abelardo Gómez Díaz (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
Abstract: In electoral studies, ‘contamination’ refers to the interaction between the two arenas that co-habit a mixed electoral system: the single-seat district (SSD) arena and the proportional representation (PR) arena. This interaction tends to cause a centrifugal force that raises the number of parties in the SSD arena above what Duverger’s Law and the M+1 rule suggest. However, the literature offers no definitive methodology to measure such an increase; it tends to assume that contamination remains constant over time; and that it remains constant across a given territory. For this reason, this study presents a new, presumably better methodology to actually measure contamination, framed around Rubin’s model of causal inference. It performs the first large-N longitudinal analysis of contamination and confirms the impact of voter learning processes on the observed variations. And finally, it performs the first multi-level analysis of contamination and confirms that it varies across a territory to the extent that national parties can compete with equal strength in sociologically dissimilar sub-national units.


Does Democracy Work Better Among Smaller Populations?: Jonah Goldberg (University of Toronto), Md Mujahedul Islam (University of Toronto), Peter Loewen (University of Toronto)
Abstract: Does democracy work better in smaller populations? Questions about the ideal size of a democratic polity have existed since democracy’s inception. James Madison proposed a basic trade-off between efficacy and local accountability. More recently, Alesina (2003) and Dahl and Tufte (1973) have reflected on the desirable size of a democratic polity. According to Alesina, there is a basic trade-off between the benefits of size and the costs of heterogeneity of preferences. We test the logic put forward by Madison and Alesina by exploring their theoretical trade-off at a local district level. We take advantage of the fact that Canada has remarkably large variation in the population of electoral districts. We provide two sets of tests, both of which use data from the Local Parliament Project, a study conducted during the 2015 election campaign over a vary large sample (>36,000 respondents). We first explore whether ideological heterogeneity is greater in more populated districts. We find that it is not. We second ask whether residents of less populated electoral districts are better represented. In particular, we ask whether they are more likely to be represented by a Condorcet winner, by a politician they like, and by a legislator that votes consistent with their district’s wishes. In all of our measures of the quality of democratic representation, we find no evidence that voters in smaller electoral districts are likely to be better represented. This has important democratic implications: voters and lawmakers do not necessarily have to be overwhelmingly concerned with population proportionality.


Elections and Support for Democracy: Elizabeth Zechmeister (Vanderbilt University), Oscar Castorena (Vanderbilt University)
Abstract: Elections are instrumental to the practice of democracy. We argue that, as well, elections are instrumental to commitment to democracy. Elections bring diverse communities together in shared rituals that are integral to most people’s conceptions of democracy. Further, campaigns typically promise better times. Yet, of course, not all elections are evaluated in positive terms. Some are marred by fraud and some are loudly contested. Any link between the holding of elections and democratic attitudes is bound to be conditional on the quality of the election. We assess these hypotheses with a global database that merges multiple comparative surveys and information from the Electoral Integrity Project. Our key independent variable is time since the last national election, which we theorize negatively predicts support for and satisfaction with democracy: elections ought to buoy allegiance to democracy, an increase that will taper off as time moves on. We test two key conditioning factors: at the individual level, support for an opposition candidate and, at the national level, the integrity of the election. The paper connects to several streams of scholarship, including work on how elections increase partisanship, on losers’ consent, and on the connection between level of democracy and public support for democracy. Our results speak to the potential for the holding of (certain) elections to serve as a recommitment mechanism, temporarily boosting public commitment to democracy.


Redistricting Institutions in Context: Effects of Independent Commissions in Canada and the United States: Peter Miller (Brennan Center for Justice), Benjamin Forest (McGill University)
Abstract: Can non-partisan institutions de-politicize election practices? The drawing of electoral districts is far more controversial in the United States than in Canada. Canada, which has used independent commissions since the adoption of the Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act of 1964, largely insulates the process from partisan influence. In contrast, the United States has no similar federal legislation; the act of redistricting is delegated to state governments, of which Arizona and California have implemented independent commissions and four others have adopted other forms of commissions for congressional redistricting. Nonetheless, judicial decisions based in Constitutional doctrine starting with Baker v. Carr (1962), Wesberry v. Sanders (1964), and Reynolds v. Sims (1964), have removed certain criteria (e.g., population equality) from partisan influence. We use data from post-war federal elections in both countries and a series of indicators developed in the American context (i.e, the swing ratio, efficiency gap, and comparing the mean and median vote) to assess the degree to which these approaches have exacerbated or mollified partisan advantage in the redistricting process. Furthermore, we examine the trend of population equality among districts in each country to assess the effects of the respective institutional changes.




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