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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

Political Behaviour/Sociology



F10(b) - Workshop: Understanding Electoral Democracy, The 2019 Canadian Election in Perspective 2

Date: Jun 3 | Time: 10:30am to 12:00pm | Location:

Joint Session / Séance conjointe : Canadian Politics

Sponsor / Commanditaire : Consortium on Electoral Democracy (C-Dem), a SSHRC-funded research network across Canada.

Chair/Président/Présidente : Laura Stephenson (Western University)

Discussant/Commentateur/Commentatrice : Amanda Bittner (Memorial University of Newfoundland)

Social Norms, Identity and Intergroup Dynamics in Elections

Contact Networks: The Influence of Social Surroundings on Citizens' Forecasting Skills: Philippe Mongrain (Université de Montréal)
Abstract: Research has found citizen forecasting to be one of the most accurate approach to forecast election results. Most studies explain the quality of citizens’ forecasts by the ‘miracle of aggregation,’ which states that errors in individuals’ judgments tend to cancel out in the aggregate. However, research on individual-level factors explaining forecasting abilities has been somewhat scant. Until recently, the influence of a citizens’ social milieu on their perception of parties’ chances has been largely overlooked. As stated by Miller et al. (2012, 1024), “[t]his is a considerable oversight given the central role that social networks play in dispersing political information.” Surveys that include vote expectation items usually offer insufficient measures of respondents’ social interactions. As a consequence, a number of authors have been forced to rely on indirect measures of network characteristics, such as education or differences between national and subnational electoral results. As it stands, the state of survey research makes it somewhat difficult to fully assess the impact of individuals’ contact networks on their forecasting abilities. The proposed study aims to analyze the impact of citizens’ social interaction patterns and habits on their forecasting accuracy in the context of the 2019 Canadian federal election. In order to do this, a module composed of eight items was integrated in the 2019 Canadian Election Study online survey. This module (with the addition of other CES modules) contains different measures of citizens’ forecasting abilities both at the local and national levels and a battery of questions about respondents’ social interactions.


What They Don’t Know Doesn’t Hurt. Turnout Visibility and the Avoidance of Social Sanctions in the 2019 Canadian Federal Election: Maxime Coulombe (Université de Montréal)
Abstract: The key aspect of the ‘self’ and ‘neighbours’ treatments from Gerber and colleagues (2008) and similar studies (Panagopoulos 2010; Rogers et al., 2017) come from the subject’s turnout being publicized and therefore visible to others. As the subjects cannot hide their abstention, they have to choose between the cost of voting or the cost of shame and disapproval from abstention. We also know from observational studies that people do feel social pressure to vote from their social networks and that this pressure has a positive impact on turnout (Galandini and Fieldhouse 2019; Blais et al. 2019). But, how does turnout visibility interact with social pressure to vote in a context where some members of the social network might know or not whether one will vote or not? This study aims at answering this question and improving our knowledge of the frequency and effects of social pressure to vote in the Canadian context. Using data from a CES 2019 module, I will distinguish the effects of descriptive social pressure and expected disapproval from the partner, family, friends and neighbours, on the intention to vote. I will also measure the perceived visibility of one’s decision to vote and analyze whether the influence of social pressure is conditional to the turnout visibility. Finally, I will present a descriptive portrait of social pressure in Canada and report if and how the frequency and effects of social pressure changed since the 2008 federal election (Blais et al. 2019).


What Role Does Affective Proximity Play in Canadian Elections?: Sarah Lachance (University of British Columbia), Edana Beauvais (Harvard University)
Abstract: Voters' feelings toward social and political groups can impact their political behaviour. How does affective distance—voters' relatively warmer or colder feelings toward different groups—impact their vote choice? The goal of our present work is twofold. Our first task is descriptive: What does "affective space" look like in Canada? The Canadian Election Study has asked voters their feelings toward a host of different groups including ethnic groups, linguistic groups, unions, political parties, and regional or national groups (e.g., Canadians, Quebeckers, and Americans). Can Canadians be classified into meaningful clusters based on their feelings toward different groups? How do these clusters change across time? We use an unsupervised machine learning technique to reduce the dimensionality of affective space in Canada. Specifically, we use Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to convert Canadian voters' feeling thermometer ratings into a smaller set of uncorrelated variables. We uncover a number of meaningful clusters, including clusters mapping onto the values of nationalism (Québec vs English-Canadian nationalism) and postmodernism. Our second task is inferential: How does affective proximity impact vote choice in different elections? To answer this question, we will regress vote choice on the two components—nationalism and postmodernism—and a host of control variables to estimate the effect of affective distances on vote choice in 10 different elections from 1988 to 2019. Our work makes a theoretical contribution to the Canadian political behaviour literature by investigating the role of affective proximity across multiple federal elections as well as a methodological contribution by using unsupervised machine learning techniques.


Voting as a Social Act: Social Identity, Social Norms and Turnout in the 2019 Federal Election: Laura French Bourgeois (Université du Québec à Montréal), Allison Harell (Université du Québec à Montréal), Laura Stephenson (Western University)
Abstract: Despite the fact that voting is a product of both individual and social factors, past research studying voter turnout has mostly focused on individual factors such as political identification, personal values and one’s own sense of civic duty. Yet, a rich literature in social psychology suggests that the social factors conveyed by the groups to which we belong, such as social norms, collective values and attitudes have a great impact on behavior. Nonetheless, in political science we know little about how voters perceive these social factors and what their impact on turnout are. Drawing on social psychological research, we use data from the 2019 Canadian Electoral Study (online panel, N=34 000) to identify how different social factors interact together to influence voter engagement. In particular, we explore intensity of group identification, social norm adherence and social network effects. While exploratory, we expect that greater identification with co-partisans and co-ethnics will lead to greater participation, particularly when strong identifiers perceive that co-partisans and co-ethnics share a strong sense of duty. We examine the relationship between identity, norms, and voting while controlling for the characteristics of the social networks in which they are embedded. The results of this research will expand our understanding of civic duty beyond a personal sense of duty, to rethink norms as characteristics of social groups, not just individuals.




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