Political Judgments, Perceptions of Facts, and Partisan Effects. Electoral Studies 29 (1): 1-12.
André Blais, Elisabeth Gidengil, Patrick Fournier, Neil Nevitte, Joanna Everitt and Kim Jiyoon (2010)

We test two competing hypotheses about the impact of partisanship and information on people's political judgments and perceptions of facts using Canadians' reactions to a major scandal. Our findings with respect to subjective political judgments confirm the argument that partisan predispositions are crucial. But there is no evidence to support the argument that the polarizing effect of partisanship is most evident among the most informed. When it comes to perceptions of objective" facts

Testing Zaller's Reception and Acceptance Model in an Intense Election Campaign. (summary) Political Behavior 30: 259-276.
Agnieszka Dobrzynska and André Blais (2008)

The paper provides a test of Zaller's reception and acceptance model. The theory describes conditions under which a political message is received, and, if received, accepted or rejected. The study deals with the 1988 Canadian election that was fiercely fought over one central issue, the Free Trade Accord with the United States. We use the 1988 Canadian Election Study campaign rolling cross-section survey, and we test Zaller's propositions about who is most likely to receive and then accept party messages. Our findings provide little support for the model. We suggest that when an issue is hotly debated in an election campaign voters who receive party messages are able to connect these messages to their values and predispositions whatever their level of political awareness.

Party, Ideology, and Vote Intentions: Dynamics from the 2002 French Electoral Panel. Political Research Quarterly 59 (4): 503-515.
Éric Bélanger, Michael S. Lewis-Beck, Jean Chiche, and Vincent Tiberj (2006)

The debate over the relative importance of ideology versus party for vote choice in France is enduring. Resolution of the debate would have much value, for the light shed on sources of stability and change in multiparty electoral systems generally. The main reason the debate continues is that previous studies examining that question have been plagued by difficulties pertaining to variable measurement, model specification, election type, and research design. We address these problems and provide new evidence from the 2002 French Electoral Panel. Most notably, these data allow stronger causal inference because party identification and ideological identification are both measured in the first wave of the survey, that is, before the declaration of vote actually occurs. We estimate a multi-equation model of first-round legislative vote intention-as measured in the second wave of the panel-using two-stage least squares, ordered logit, as well as binomial and multinomial logit techniques. The results indicate that ideological identification systematically outweighs party identification in shaping the French voter's choice.

Election Campaigns as Information Campaigns: Who Learns What and Does It Matter? . (summary) Political Communication 25 : 229-248.
Richard Nadeau, Neil Nevitte, Elisabeth Gidengil and André Blais (2008)

During election campaigns political parties compete to inform voters about their leaders, the issues, and where they stand on these issues. In that sense, election campaigns can be viewed as a particular kind of information campaign. Democratic theory supposes that participatory democracies are better served by an informed electorate than an uninformed one. But do all voters make equal information gains during campaigns? Why do some people make more information gains than others? And does the acquisition of campaign information have any impact on vote intentions? Combining insights from political science research, communications theory, and social psychology, we develop specific hypotheses about these campaign information dynamics. These hypotheses are tested with data from the 1997 Canadian Election Study, which includes a rolling cross-national campaign component, a post-election component, and a media content analysis. The results show that some people do make more information gains than others; campaigns produce a knowledge gap. Moreover, the intensity of media signals on different issues has an important impact on who receives what information, and information gains have a significant impact on vote intentions.

When Citizens Decide: Lessons from Citizen Assemblies on Electoral Reform. Oxford University Press.
Patrick Fournier, Henk van der Kolk, R. Kenneth Carty, André Blais and Jonathan Rose (2010)

Three unprecedented large-scale democratic experiments have recently taken place. Citizen assemblies on electoral reform were conducted in British Columbia, the Netherlands, and Ontario. Groups of randomly selected ordinary citizens were asked to independently design the next electoral system. In each case, the participants spent almost an entire year learning about electoral systems, consulting the public, deliberating, debating, and ultimately deciding what specific institution should be adopted. When Citizens Decide uses these unique cases to examine claims about citizens' capacity for democratic deliberation and active engagement in policy-making. It offers empirical insight into numerous debates and provides answers to a series of key questions: 1) Are ordinary citizens able to decide about a complex issue? Are their decisions reasonable? 2) Who takes part in such proceedings? Are they dominated by people dissatisfied by the status quo? 3) Do some citizens play a more prominent role than others? Are decisions driven by the most vocal or most informed members? 4) Did the participants decide by themselves? Were they influenced by staff, political parties, interest groups, or the public hearings? 5) Does participation in a deliberative process foster citizenship? Did participants become more trusting, tolerant, open-minded, civic-minded, interested in politics, and active in politics? 6) How do the other political actors react? Can the electorate accept policy proposals made by a group of ordinary citizens?

Do Citizen Assemblies Make Reasoned Choices? . In Mark Warren and Hilary Pearse, eds., Designing Deliberative Democracy: The British Columbia Citizens' Assembly and Democratic Renewal, Cambridge University Press.
André Blais, R. Kenneth Carty and Patrick Fournier (2008)

Deliberation, Information and Trust: The BC Citizens' Assembly as Agenda Setter. In Mark Warren and Hilary Pearse, eds., Designing Deliberative Democracy: The British Columbia Citizens' Assembly and Democratic Renewal, Cambridge University Press.
Fred Cutler, Richard Johnston, R. Kenneth Carty, André Blais and Patrick Fournier (2008)

Forecasting Canadian Federal Elections. PS: Political Science and Politics 43: 691-699.
Éric Bélanger and Jean-François Godbout (2010)

In recent decades, the scientific forecasting of election outcomes has made great strides in a number of advanced industrial democracies. One country that has not received much attention to date is Canada. In this article, we present a vote function model to forecast Canadian federal elections. We explain our model's theoretical underpinnings and assess its statistical properties and forecasting capabilities against all federal elections held between 1953 and 2008. We then explore potential ways for improving the model's accuracy. We conclude by discussing the forecast of different hypothetical scenarios for an upcoming federal election.

Electoral Accountability in a Federal System: National and Provincial Economic Voting in Canada. Publius: The Journal of Federalism 35 (3): 407-424.
François Gélineau and Éric Bélanger (2005)

Are federal incumbents punished for national and/or provincial economic performance, and are provincial incumbents held accountable for the state of the provincial and/or national economy? Using a pooled cross-sectional time-series analysis of electoral results and macroeconomic data for 1953-2001, this article explores the extent to which provincial and federal incumbents in Canadian elections are affected more by national or provincial economic conditions. The results of the analysis suggest that federal incumbents would not gain many votes by claiming credit for the economic prosperity of any particular province when, on average, national economic conditions are deteriorating. The results further suggest that provincial incumbents are not held accountable for economic conditions in their provinces, but are rather punished for national economic deterioration when the incumbent federal party is of the same partisan family.

Economics, Party, and the Vote: Causality Issue and Panel Data. (summary) American Journal of Political Science 52 (1): 84-95.
Michael S. Lewis-Beck, Richard Nadeau and Angelo Elias (2008)

Conventional wisdom argues that national economic perceptions generally have an important impact on the vote choice in democracies. Recently, a revisionist view has arisen, contending that this link, regularly observed in election surveys, is mostly spurious. According to the argument, partisanship distorts economic perception, thereby substantially exaggerating the real vote connection. These causality issues have not been much investigated empirically, despite their critical importance. Utilizing primarily American, and secondarily British and Canadian, election panel surveys, we confront directly questions of the time dynamic and independent variable exogeneity. We find, after all, economics clearly matters for the vote. Indeed, once these causality concerns are properly taken into account, the impact of economic perceptions emerges as larger than previously thought. As well, the actual impact of partisanship is clearly reduced.

Patrimonial Economic Voting in French Legislative Elections. West European Politics 33 (6): 1261-1277.
Richard Nadeau, Martial Foucault and Michael Lewis-Beck (2010)

Patrimonial economic voting has been neglected in favour of classical economic voting studies. This assertion holds less, however, with French election investigations, where the neglect is relative rather than absolute. Whereas classical economic voting holds the economy to be a valence issue, patrimonial economic voting regards the economy as a positional issue. Voters who own more property, in particular high-risk assets, are held to be more right-wing in their political preferences. This patrimonial effect shows itself to be statistically and substantively strong in one of the few election data-sets with sufficient measures available - surveys on the National Assembly contests of 1978, 1988, 2002. The electoral effect exceeds that from the traditional èheavy variables' of class and income. Moreover, further work might show its impact comparable to that of classic sociotropic retrospective evaluations of the national economy. Certainly a case can be made for further study of patrimonial economic voting, as compared to classical economic voting.

Election Forecasting in the United Kingdom: A Two-Step Model. Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties 19 (3): 333-358.
Richard Nadeau, Michael Lewis-Beck and Éric Bélanger (2009)

Election forecasting in the United Kingdom has been experiencing a renaissance, as work travels from popularity function to vote function models. One strain of recent work stresses political economy explanations, while another stresses parsimonious prediction. Both approaches have their strengths, and are combined here in a two-step approach. First, a prediction equation is offered, based on a powerful empirical proxy variable for the election outcome itself. Second, an explanatory equation is offered, accounting theoretically for that proxy variable. This recursive system of equations is estimated, evaluated and found, by various diagnostics, to be extremely robust. Then, forecasts are rendered for multiple measures of UK election outcomes, in order to bring together the various measures that have appeared in the literature: government vote (and seats) share, opposition vote (and seats) share, government vote (and seats) lead. Finally, as a test, the model is applied to forecast the next UK general election under two scenarios. Using poll data from August 2007 and May 2009, we conclude that Gordon Brown missed a golden opportunity when he became leader of his party. While a snap election at that time would have led the sitting government to another victory, an election in the autumn of 2009 would result in the worst score for the Labour Party since 1992 and a return to the opposition benches.

Electoral Forecasting in France: A Multi-Equation Solution. International Journal of Forecasting 26 (1): 11-18.
Richard Nadeau, Michael Lewis-Beck and Éric Bélanger (2010)

In the field of election forecasting, France is a lead case. Recently, however, certain modelers stumbled badly in their efforts to forecast the 2007 presidential election. The difficulty appears due partly to the single-equation format that has constrained past work, and partly to a failure to fully appreciate how key standard independent variables should be measured in the French context. As a potential remedy, we offer a multi-equation model, where the first equation gives strict emphasis to prediction, the second equation to explanation. By various statistical tests, this recursive system of equations manages the forecasting of Fifth Republic presidential elections remarkably well.

Does Perceived Competence Matter? Political Parties and Economic Voting in Canadian Federal Elections. Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties 20 (1): 83-101.
Éric Bélanger and François Gélineau (2010)

In this article, we argue that the extent to which Canadian federal incumbents are punished for past economic deterioration is contingent upon the political party forming government. Examining the effect of national macroeconomic conditions on incumbent vote in Canadian federal elections over a 50-year period (1953-2000), the article proposes an aggregate-level model of economic voting that takes into account the partisan affiliation of the incumbent government. The results of the pooled cross-sectional time-series analysis indicate that Liberal incumbents are not as strongly affected by macroeconomic conditions as Conservative incumbents. Contrary to what prior scholarship has suggested, the observed difference does not appear to be caused by the parties' respective ideological priorities, but rather by the parties' reputation (or perceived competence) in handling economic problems.

French National Elections: Democratic Disequilibrium and the 2007 Forecasts. Canadian Journal of Political Science 43 (1): 107-122.
Éric Bélanger and Michael Lewis-Beck (2010)

The outcome of the 2007 elections in France raises a number of questions about the current state of democracy in that country. To put these elections into perspective, we examine the evolution of the French party system and electorate throughout the Fifth Republic. We look first at the pattern of party electoral movement over time. Then we evaluate the partisan cycle with respect to certain equilibrium conditions, namely stability, competition, and democratic rule. Based on these patterns, we arrive at a classification of French national elections using the Michigan school's theoretical framework. A key conclusion is that, in general, these Fifth Republic elections are in disequilibrium and often fail to express the majority partisan will. The 2007 results, which represent a return of the traditional right, are examined against the Iowa forecasting model, to see if they depart from these troubling conclusions.

Economic Voting and Political Sophistication in the United States: A Reassessment. Political Research Quarterly 60 (3): 541-554.
Jean-François Godbout, and Éric Bélanger (2007)

The authors propose a reexamination of the conditioning effect of political sophistication on economic voting in U.S .presidential elections. Replicating Gomez and Wilson's (2001) analysis with survey data from the past five American presidential elections (1988-2004), they show that low sophisticates strictly rely on sociotropic economic judgments in their intention to support the incumbent party's candidate. For their part, high sophisticates appear to use both sociotropic and pocketbook evaluations in their voting intention, but only in elections where the sitting incumbent is running for reelection (1992, 1996, and 2004). Most of these findings do not hold, however, once the postelectoral reported vote is used as the dependent variable. Indeed, the authors find that pocketbook evaluations do not have a significant impact on high sophisticates' reported vote choice, and they also find important variance in economic voting effects among low sophisticates. The results indicate that high sophisticates continue to use sociotropic evaluations in their voting decision, but only in incumbent elections. Overall, the analysis raises doubts about some of the previous studies' conclusions and underlines the importance of considering the moderating role of contextual factors such as incumbency and political campaigns in economic voting studies.

How Sophisticated Can a Voter Be to Make Causal Attributions? A Response to Gomez and Wilson's Comment. Political Research Quarterly 60 (3): 559-560.
Jean-François Godbout, and Éric Bélanger (2007)

The authors present a response to Gomez and Wilson's comments related to their article Economic Voting and Political Sophistication in the United States: A Reassessment

Forecasting the 2007 French Presidential Election: Ségolène Royal and the Iowa Model. French Politics 6 (2): 106-115.
Michael S. Lewis-Beck, Éric Bélanger and Christine Fauvelle-Aymar (2008)

Scientific election forecasting has become a thriving enterprise in the leading democracies, and France is no exception. Among the first French efforts was the so-called èIowa Model,' a political economy equation predicting the winner on the basis of national economic performance and government popularity. The Iowa Model was applied to the 2007 French presidential contest, and did not fare as well as expected. We explore diagnostics on the Iowa Model, in an attempt to see what went wrong, meanwhile comparing it to rival forecasting efforts. It appears that an important omitted variable may be a direct measure of the quality of the campaign itself.

A Political Economy Forecast for the 2005 British General Election. British Journal of Politics and International Relations 7 (2): 191-198.
Éric Bélanger Michael S. Lewis-Beck, and Richard Nadeau (2005)

Recently, we proposed an original statistical model for forecasting general elections in the United Kingdom, based on the observation of a few key indicators of the political and economic system. That vote function model was tested against the results of the 2001 general election. Here we evaluate the results of that test, and offer an appropriately revised model for the forecasting of the upcoming 2005 general election. According to our forecast, a Labour victory appears the most likely outcome.

Political Decentralization and Electoral Accountability: The Argentine Experience, 1983-2001. British Journal of Political Science 36 (1): 133-157.
François Gélineau and Karen L. Remmer (2005)

To what extent does public support for subnational officials fluctuate in response to local rather than national performance? Are the policy failures of subnational officials reliably punished by voters? Drawing upon both individual and aggregate level data, this article attempts to shed new light on these questions about the politics of decentralization by exploring electoral outcomes and public opinion at the subnational level in Argentina. Consistent with referendum voting models, this analysis suggests that the fate of candidates in both national and subnational elections is shaped by the performance of the incumbent presidential administration. Moreover, to the extent that subnational performance has an electoral impact, voters do not necessarily respond in ways that enhance electoral accountability. Voters not only blame and reward subnational officials for national performance, but also attribute responsibility for subnational performance to national authorities. The implications with respect to the impact of decentralized decision making on democratic accountability are decidedly mixed and anything but consistent with the argument that decentralization results in a closer match between citizen preferences and the allocation of public resources.

Presidents, Political Context, and Economic Accountability: Evidence from Latin America . (summary) Political Research Quarterly 60 (3): 415-428.
François Gélineau (2007)

Using individual-level data collected in Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela, this article argues that electoral accountability revolves around the centralized nature of presidential regimes in the region and the relatively low level of institutionalization of party systems, which, under certain circumstances, constrain the ability of voters to hold the incumbent party responsible for past economic performance. In addition to probing the broader applicability of the economic voting models developed with reference to well-established democracies, the analysis contributes to improving our understanding of the interaction between institutional design and electoral behaviour.

The Mechanical and Psychological Effects of Electoral Systems: A Quasi-Expiermental Study. Comparative Politics .
André Blais, Romain Lachat, Airon Hino and Pascal Doray-Demers (2011)

Having two votes for the same election or two simultaneous elections with different electoral systems provides a golden opportunity to ascertain the impact of the electoral system and to sort out the relative magnitude of mechanical and psychological effects on parties and voters. We propose a new methodology for estimating such effects and we apply that methodology to thirteen elections, nine in Switzerland and four in Japan. We find mechanical effects to dominate in half of the elections examined, most particularly in the more recent Swiss elections. We discuss the implications of these findings.

Comparing Strategic Voting Under FPTP and PR Systems. Comparative Political Studies 43 (1): 61-90.
Paul R. Abramson, John H. Aldrich, André Blais, Matthew Diamond, Abraham Diskin, Indridi H. Indridason, Daniel J. Lee and Renan Levine (2010)

Based on recent work that suggests that voters in proportional representation (PR) systems have incentives to cast strategic votes, we hypothesize that levels of strategic voting are similar in both first-past-the-post (FPTP) and PR systems. Comparing vote intentions in majoritarian elections in the United States, Mexico, Britain, and Israel to PR elections in Israel and the Netherlands, we find that a substantial proportion of the voters desert their most preferred candidate or party and that patterns of strategic voting across FPTP and PR bear striking similarities. In every election, smaller parties tend to lose votes to major parties. Since there tends to be more small parties in PR systems, tactical voting is actually more common under PR than under FPTP. The findings suggest that, whatever the electoral system, voters focus on the policy consequences of their behavior and which parties are likely to influence policy outcomes following the election.

Strategic, Sincere, and Heuristic Voting under Four Election Rules. Social Choice and Welfare 35: 435-472.
Karine Van der Straeten, Jean-François Laslier, Nicolas Sauger and André Blais (2010)

We report on laboratory experiments on voting. In a setting where subjects have single-peaked preferences, we find that the rational choice theory provides very good predictions of actual individual behavior in one-round and approval voting elections but fares poorly in explaining vote choice under two-round elections. We conclude that voters behave strategically as far as strategic computations are not too demanding, in which case they rely on simple heuristics (under two-round voting) or they just vote sincerely (under single transferable vote).

Strategic Vote Choice in One Round and Two Round Elections: An Experimental Study. Political Research Quarterly 20 (10): 1-9.
André Blais, Simon Labbé St-Vincent, Jean-François Laslier, Nicolas Sauger and Karine Van der Straeten (2010)

The authors test a model of strategic vote choice in which the decision to support or not to support a candidate depends on the benefit associated with the election of a given candidate and the candidate's perceived viability. They test the model with data collected in a series of experiments in which the participants voted in eight successive elections, four in one round and four in two rounds. Results show that the same model applies to both voting systems, although the impact of perceived viability is slightly weaker in two-round elections. The authors conclude that strategic considerations are almost as important in two-round as in one-round elections.

The French Electoral and Party System in Comparative Perspective. French Politics 8 (1): 79-82.
André Blais (2010)

Duverger's Law of Plurality Voting: The Logic of Party Competition in Canada, India, the U.K. and the U.S.. Springer.
Bernard Grofman, André Blais and Shaun Bowler (2009)

Maurice Duverger is arguably the most distinguished French political scientist of the last century, but his major impact has been largely in the English-speaking world. His book, Political Parties, first translated into English in 1954, has influenced both the party politics literature (which continues to make use of his typology of party organization) and the electoral systems literature. His chief contributions there deal with what have come to be called in his honor Duverger's Law and Duverger's Hypothesis. The first argues that countries with the plurality rule will tend to become two-party systems; the second argues that countries using proportional representation (PR) will tend to become multi-party systems. Duverger also identifies specific mechanisms that will produce these effects, conventionally referred to as "mechanical effects" and "psychological effects." However, while Duverger's Hypothesis concerning the link between PR and multipartism is now widely accepted, the empirical evidence that plurality voting results in two-party systems is remarkably weak-with the U.S. the most notable exception. The chapters in this volume consider national-level evidence about Duverger's law in the world's largest, longest-lived and most successful democracies of Britain, Canada, India and the United States. One set of chapters involves looking at the overall evidence for and against Duverger's Law in these countries; the other set deals with evidence about the mechanical and psychological effects predicted by Duverger. The result is an incisive analysis of electoral and party dynamics that will appeal to researchers, academics, students, policymakers, and policy watchers around the world.

A General Measure of District Competitiveness. Electoral Studies 28 (1): 94-100.
André Blais and Ignacio Lago (2009)

We propose a new general measure of district competitiveness that can be applied to both PR and SMP systems. We define competitiveness as the degree of uncertainty in the outcome of an election, and so the measure of competitiveness is the minimal number of additional votes required for any party to win one additional seat. We show that this corresponds to margin of victory in an SMP system and we illustrate how this can be computed in a PR system. We also argue that while it makes sense to take into account the total number of votes cast in the district it is also imperative to consider the number of seats contested. We compare district competitiveness in two SMP and two PR countries. The findings challenge the conventional wisdom that elections are more competitive and that local competitiveness is less variable under PR than under SMP. We finally show that the impact of competitiveness on turnout decreases with district magnitude.

Do Voters Vote for Government Coalitions? . (summary) Party Politics 12 (6): 691-705.
André Blais, John H. Aldrich, Indridi H. Indridason and Renan Levine (2006)

In many countries, elections produce coalition governments. Downs points out that in such cases the rational voter needs to determine what coalitions are possible, i.e. to ascertain their probability and to anticipate the policy compromises that they entail. Downs adds that this may be too complex a task and concludes that èmost voters do not vote as though elections were government-selection mechanisms' (Downs, 1957: 300). We test Downs' èpessimistic' conclusion in the case of the 2003 Israeli election, an election that was bound to produce a coalition government and in which the issue of what the possible coalitions were was at the forefront of the campaign. We show that voters' views about the coalitions that could be formed after the election had an independent effect on vote choice, over and above their views about the parties, the leaders and their ideological orientations. We estimate that for one voter out of ten, coalition preferences were a decisive consideration, that is, they induced the voter to support a party other than the most preferred one. For many others, they were a factor, though perhaps not the dominant one. Furthermore, the least informed were as prone to vote on the basis of coalition preferences as the most informed. Our evidence disconfirms Downs' pessimistic view that voters will decide not to care about the formation of government. When they are provided with sufficient information about the possible options, voters think ahead about the coalitions that may be formed after the election.

How Do Voters Form Expectations About the Parties' Chances of Winning the Election?. Social Science Quarterly 87 (3): 477-493.
André Blais and Marc André Bodet (2006)

This article examines the factors that form voters' perceptions of the parties' chances of winning at both the national and the local levels. Method. We make use of the 1988 Canadian Election Study and we employ a HLM model to estimate the effect of individual-level and contextual-level variables. Results. It is shown that voters' expectations are affected by a combination of èèobjective'' contextual information and personal preferences (projection effects). Conclusion. The basic contextual information that is utilized to ascertain local chances is the outcome of the previous election in the local constituency, whereas polls are crucial in the case of perceived national chances. We also find that the most politically aware are more strongly influenced by èèobjective'' indicators.

Measuring Expectations: Comparing Alternative Approaches. (summary) Electoral Studies 27: 337-343.
André Blais, Elisabeth Gidengil, Patrick Fournier, Neil Nevitte and Bruce M. Hicks (2008)

The paper compares three alternative approaches employed by the Canadian Election Study to measure voters' perceptions of parties' chances of winning in their local constituency. The first approach, used in 2000, consists of asking respondents to rate parties' chances on a 0 to 100 scale in a random sequence. The second, used in 2004, entails first asking whether each party had a chance of winning and then inviting people to rate the chances. In the third approach, adopted in 2006, respondents are first asked which two parties had the best chance of winning and, then, if any other party has a chance, before requesting that they rate the mentioned parties. By comparing èèobjective'' and èèperceived'' chances of winning, the paper concludes that the third approach provides a more valid measure of voters' expectations. The paper discusses the implications for the measurement of expectations in different types of electoral systems.

Direct or Indirect? Assessing Two Approaches to the Measurement of Strategic Voting. Electoral Studies 24: 163-176.
André Blais, Robert Young, and Martin Turcotte (2005)

This paper fits into a growing literature about the conceptualisation and measurement of strategic voting. Here we compare the results obtained by applying a èdirect' method of measurement based on respondents' reported preferences and behavior with those produced by an èindirect' method that relies on modeling the voting act in both the absence and presence of variables about the parties' chances of winning. Our data are derived from a three-party contest in an single-member plurality system, the 1999 election in the province of Ontario. We find that the two methods converge closely in predicting the aggregate amount of strategic voting, a surprisingly low 4-6%. The direct method, however, is more useful when it comes to identifying which particular individuals did and did not vote strategically.

The French Electoral System and Its Effects. Western European Politics 34: 342-356.
André Blais and Peter John Loewen (2009)

The most original feature of the French Fifth Republic is the use of a two-round system for both presidential and legislative elections. This article considers the effects of this electoral system and its development in the first 50 years of the Republic. It distinguishes between two types of effects: mechanical and psychological. It reviews the theoretical arguments for each and the available evidence. The authors first specify a series of vote- seat curves that characterise the mechanical effect, paying particular attention to the mediating effects of coalitions. They then examine the psychological effect through a series of tests on coalition formation. The article concludes by noting that much remains to be learned about the electoral system and its effects in the French Fifth Republic.

Making Candidates Count: The Logic of Electoral Alliances in Two-Round Legislative Elections. (summary) The Journal of Politics 69 (1): 193-205.
André Blais and Indridi H. Indridason (2007)

Electoral systems have been shown to influence strategic voting and the development of party systems but the focus has rarely been on the strategies that parties adopt to take advantage of the electoral system under which they compete. Electoral pacts form one such strategy. We present a theory about the formation of electoral pacts in majority run-off elections and pay special attention to the consequences of the presence of extremist parties. Analyzing the 2002 French legislative elections we find that the Socialists and the Greens were more likely to form an alliance (and to agree on a common candidate) in closely contested constituencies and where there was a potential of coordination failure on the right. Finally, we show that the agreement primarily benefited the larger party.

One-round vs. Two-round Elections: An Experimental Study. French Politics 5: 278-286.
André Blais, Jean-François Laslier, Annie Laurent, Nicolas Sauger and Karine Van der Straeten (2007)

The paper presents a series of experiments in which participants were invited to vote in four one-round elections and four two-round elections, with the same set of five candidates, among which three were viable and two were not. The experiments were designed to test the arguments put forward by Duverger and Cox about the propensity to vote sincerely or strategically in one-round and two-round elections. Our findings indicate little difference between the two systems. In both systems, there was a strong tendency to strategically desert the unviable candidates. The data thus support Cox over Duverger.

Does Proportional Representation Foster Closer Congruence Between Citizens and Policy Makers? . (summary) Comparative Political Studies 39 (10): 1243-1262.
André Blais and Marc André Bodet (2006)

To Keep or to Change First Past the Post: The Politics of Electoral Reform. Oxford University Press.
André Blais, ed. (2008)

Electoral Reform in Canada. In André Blais, ed., To Keep or to Change First Past the Post? The Politics of Electoral Reform, Oxford University Press, p. 112-139.
Louis Massicotte (2008)

Towards a Mixed-Member Proportional System for Québec? . Representation 43 (4): 251-270.
Louis Massicotte (2007)

In December 2004, the Quebec provincial government tabled a proposal aimed at introducing a mixed-member proportional system (MMP) for elections to the National Assembly, broadly patterned on the German, New Zealand and Scottish electoral systems (Shugart and Wattenberg 2001). This article summarises the historical background of electoral system reform in Quebec and the reasons for reform, analyses the proposal in detail, and explores the prospects for its ultimate adoption. The proposal can be found in a draft bill (Dupuis 2004), the contents of which were determined by the government on the basis of a working paper I prepared (Massicotte, 2004a).

Value Diversity and Support for Electoral Reform in Canada . (summary) PS: Political Science and Politics 39 (4).
Mebs Kanji and Anotine Bilodeau (2006)

This paper considers judgments based on electoral outcomes, questioning whether a decision on what is 'free and fair' can be related to what results from an electoral competition. It is noted that no one has seriously argued that elections should be deemed free and fair based on the extent to which a specific party has won, although it is possible that the electoral process may be more likely to be found acceptable when the 'ins' are defeated. Such a judgement would be a mistake. The thorny issue of socio-demographic and political party outcomes has produced no consensus, and it is important to remember that electorates remain free to produce outcomes with which we, in our wisdom, might disagree.

Network Diversity and Vote Choice: Women's Social Ties and Left Voting in Canada. (summary) Politics and Gender (3): 151-177.
Elisabeth Gidengil, Allison Harell and Bonnie Erickson (2007)

Building on Mark Granovetter's concept of weak ties, we argue that diverse social networks can enhance the propensity of women to vote for a party of the Left. Using data from the 2000 Canadian Election Study, we test two hypotheses: First, the wider the range of women known, the more likely women are to vote for the Left, and second, the wider the range of higher-status women known, the more likely married women are to vote for the Left. We argue that socially communicated cues may be particularly consequential for women because they tend to know less about the parties and their platforms than men do. Accordingly, casual acquaintances can be an important source of new information for women. Women with more diverse ties to other women, we argue, are more likely to encounter women who are voting for the party of the Left and to recognize their shared interest in voting similarly. Our second hypothesis builds on Susan Carroll's argument that women require sufficient autonomy to express their gender-related interests in their choice of party. We argue that married women's political autonomy can be enhanced if their social networks include a range of women who do enjoy such autonomy. Ties with higher-status women can be a source of psychological resources that facilitate voting for a party of the Left. We find support for both of these hypotheses.

Explaining the Gender Gap in Support for the New Right: The Case of Canada. Comparative Political Studies 38 (10): 1171-1195.
Elisabeth Gidengil, Matthew Hennigar, André Blais and Neil Nevitte (2005)

This article uses data from the 2000 Canadian Election Study to examine a variety of possible explanations for the gender gap in support for the new right. The authors find structural and situational explanations to be of little help in accounting for the gap. What matters are values and beliefs. The gender gap in support for Canada's new right party reflects differences in views about the appropriate role of the state, law and order, and traditional moral values. It also appears to reflect differences in the salience of politics in men's and women's lives. When all of these attitudinal factors are taken into account, the gender gap ceases to be significant. The implications of the findings are considered in light of comparative analyses of gender gaps in vote choice and support for radical right-wing populist political parties in Western Europe.

Beyond the Gender Gap. Canadian Journal of Political Science 40 (4): 1-17.
Elisabeth Gidengil (2007)

Accounting for the Electoral Success of the Liberal Party in Canada. Canadian Journal of Political Science 38 (4): 821-840.
André Blais (2005)

Je montre que le succès électoral du Parti libéral fédéral au Canada découle en bonne partie de l'appui des catholiques et des citoyens d'origine non européenne. Sans l'appui solide de ces deux groupes, le Parti libéral n'aurait pas remporté les succès électoraux remarquables qu'il a connus. Pourtant, nous n'avons toujours pas d'explication satisfaisante des raisons qui amènent les catholiques et les citoyens d'origine non européenne - voter pour le Parti libéral. Je soutiens que ces tendances sociologiques lourdes devraient nous inciter - remettre en question l'interprétation habituelle selon laquelle les succès libéraux sont attribuables aux positions centristes du parti.

Residential Segregation and the Electoral Participation of Immigrants in Australia . (summary) International Migration Review 43 (1): 142-167.
Antoine Bilodeau (2009)

This paper investigates whether immigrants in Australia residing in situations of residential segregation (federal constituencies with high concentrations of immigrants) participate more in electoral politics than other immigrants. The results indicate that immigrants participate more when living in federal constituencies with high concentrations of immigrants and also exhibit greater homogeneity in their partisan preferences. The analysis also indicates that the impact of residential segregation is primarily observed among immigrants from non-English-speaking countries. Immigrants from visible minority background, such as those from South East Asia as well as those from Southern and South Eastern Europe, tend to be more strongly affected by the ethnic composition of their constituencies than other immigrants such as those from the United Kingdom and Ireland.

The Development of Dual Loyalties: Immigrants' Integration to Regional Canadian Dynamics. Canadian Journal of Political Science 43 (3): 515-544.
Antoine Bilodeau, Stephen White and Neil Nevitte (2010)

The transformations in recent patterns of immigration have the potential to reshape the trajectory of Canada's regional political dynamics. Drawing on data from the 1993-2006 Canadian Election Studies, this analysis explores how immigrants adjust to the prevailing regional political norms in Quebec, Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia. Do newcomers adopt the political orientations feelings towards Canada and their province, confidence in provincial and federal governments, perceptions about how the province is treated by the federal government and support for the Liberal party that resemble those of their native-born provincial counterparts? The results suggest that immigrants, especially newer waves from non-traditional source countries, tend to develop orientations that are more federally oriented than the local populations in their province. This tendency is most pronounced in Quebec where both groups of immigrants from traditional and non-traditional source countries internalize political grievances and norms less efficiently than their counterparts in other provinces.

Facteurs d'appui - la souverainteté du Québec chez les jeunes: une comparaison entre francophones, anglophones et allophones. Politique et sociétés 27 (3): 13-40.
Éric Bélanger, and Andrea M.L. Perrella (2008)

L'étendue sans précédent des flux migratoires des dernières décennies parmi les démocraties occidentales n'est pas sans créer des ramous au sein des pays hôtes. La hausse de l'immigration transforme petit - petit le tissu social des sociétés, entrant parfois en conflit avec les mouvements nationalistes traditionnels. La présence accrue d'immigrants force, d'une certaine façon, une redéfinition des rapports culturels et politiques entre la majorité et les minorités.

Issue-Based Strategies in Election Campaigns: The Case of Health Care in the 2000 Canadian Federal Election. Political Communication 27 (4): 367-388.
Éric Bélanger, Richard Nadeau and François Pétry (2009)

This article contributes to the emerging literature on election campaign strategies by studying the strategy adopted by the Liberal government in the 2000 Canadian federal election. Two questions are addressed: Why did the Liberal government choose in that election to focus its campaign on health care in spite of its poor record with regard to this issue? And, even more surprisingly, how did the Liberals manage to win this election and get a parliamentary majority using such a seemingly counterintuitive strategy? This case study suggests that an incumbent with a bad record on an important issue not only can redirect voters' attention toward other topics but can also define the debate about that issue in a more advantageous way. These ideas are tested with qualitative and quantitative data from the 2000 Canadian election. Content analysis of party campaign material and media coverage demonstrates how the incumbent Liberals successfully framed the debate about the health care issue so as to undermine the credibility of the official opposition. Statistical analyses of individual vote choice show that the Liberal campaign strategy had a significant impact on the election outcome.

Issue Salience, Issue Ownership, and Issue-Based Vote Choice . (summary) Electoral Studies 27 (3): 477-491.
Éric Bélanger and Bonnie M. Meguid (2008)

According to the issue ownership theory of voting, voters identify the most credible party proponent of a particular issue and cast their ballots for that issue owner. Despite the centrality of this voter-level mechanism to ownership theories of party behaviour, it has seldom been examined in the literature. We explore this model and offer a refinement to its current understanding and operationalization. Returning to the roots of ownership theory, we argue that the effect of issue ownership on vote choice is conditioned by the perceived salience of the issue in question. Through individual-level analyses of vote choice in the 1997 and 2000 Canadian federal elections, we demonstrate that issue ownership affects the voting decisions of only those individuals who think that the issue is salient

Why do Parties Merge? The Case of the Conservative Party of Canada. Parliamentary Affairs 63 (1): 41-65.
Éric Bélanger and Jean-François Godbout (2010)

This article presents a case study of the recent merger between the Progressive-Conservative Party and the Reform/Canadian Alliance parties. The selection of this case serves to illustrate the current limits of existing party organisational change and party coalition theories when it comes to explaining party mergers. We propose an alternative theoretical framework that introduces some minor adjustments to the existing literature in order to account for the party merger phenomenon. In this framework, three factors are shown to be most likely to have led to a party merger in the Canadian context: votes-seats disproportionality, access to new resources (electoral and financial) and rebranding. We conclude with a discussion regarding these factors potential for explaining other cases of party mergers.

The International Two-Step Flow in Foreign News: Canadian and US Television News Coverage of Foreign Affairs. (summary) International Journal of Press and Politics 15 (4): 401-419.
Stephen Farnsworth, Stuart Soroka and Lori Young (2010)

Content analysis of U.S. and Canadian television news from 2004 to 2006 reveals considerable similarities in the volume of news coverage of President George W. Bush and the Iraq War on both sides of the border. Indeed, these data suggest the possibility of an international two-step news flow, where changes in the volume of coverage on NBC frequently were reflected in the news coverage on CBC and CTV during the following days. It is suggested here that this may be attributable to the limitations faced by international reporters, resulting in a two-step flow" that should be relevant not just for Canadian reporters in the United States

La couverture médiatique des accommodements raisonnables dans la presse écrite québécoise. Vérification de l'hypothèse du tsunami médiatique. Canadian Journal of Communication 35 (3).
Thierry Giasson, Collete Brin and Marie-Michèle Sauvageau (2010)

From March 2006 to May 2008, the province of Québec engaged in a contentious public debate on diversity and reasonable accommodation practices. This study examines the evolution of press coverage in eleven Québec dailies dedicated to the issue of reasonable accommodation over the intensive twelve-month period during which the concept entered the public agenda. We examine the media tsunami" hypothesis

Le Bon, la Brute et le Raciste. Analyse de la couverture médiatique de l'opinion publique pendant la "crise" des accommodements raisonnables au Québec. Canadian Journal of Political Science 43 (2): 379-406.
Thierry Giasson, Collete Brin and Marie-Michèle Sauvageau (2010)

De mars 2006 - décembre 2007, le Québec a été secoué par un débat sociétal sur la question de la gestion de la diversité culturelle. Cette 'crise' aurait été alimentée par un tsunami médiatique traitant de divers cas d'accommodements juridiques ou d'ajustements administratifs accordés dans les services publics - des citoyens québécois issus de l'immigration dans la grande région de Montréal ~Giasson et coll., 2008!. Par le biais d'une couverture étendue, les médias ont attiré l'attention de la population sur ces pratiques d'accommodement. L'article présente les données exploratoires d'une analyse de contenu de la couverture faite par onze journaux québécois du climat de l'opinion des Québécois en matière de diversité et d'immigration pendant la phase intensive de développement du débat. L'étude montre que dans leur analyse des sondages d'opinion et dans la présentation générale des tendances de l'opinion publique sur les accommodements raisonnables, les journaux ont mis l'accent sur l'évaluation du malaise des répondants envers l'immigration et la diversité religieuse plutôt que sur l'ouverture de la population québécoise envers la diversité et sur l'apport social de l'immigration, renforçant ainsi davantage l'impression populaire qu'une crise sociale majeure se déroulait et qu'il existait un fossé entre les Québécois 'de souche', les Québécois issus de l'immigration et les autres Canadiens.

Campaign News and Vote Intentions. Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties 19 (4): 359-376.
Stuart Soroka, Marc-André Bodet, Lori Young and Blake Andrew (2009)

This paper explores the relationship between campaign news and vote intentions, drawing on manual content analyses from the 2004 and 2006 Canadian federal elections. The content analysis is designed to capture, among other items, the ètone' of coverage for parties and leaders. Combining time series of ètone' and commercial polling results, econometric methods are then used to build a model of vote intentions. Media content appears to explain a good deal of the over-time variance in vote intentions. Results are discussed as they pertain to two versions of the media-opinion relationship: (1) media content captures and arranges in a readily quantifiable form the evolving mood of the campaign, or (2) media do not simply reflect, but affect vote intentions.

Beyond Sex and Saxophones: Interviewing Practices and Political Substance on Televised Talk Shows. Canadian Political Science Review 3 (2): 70-88.
Frédérick Bastien (2009)

The goal of this paper is to assess the contribution of infotainment and entertainment television talk shows by comparing political interviews on these TV shows with current affairs programs. Few political scientists have examined political interviews, in general, and political interviews on entertainment outlets, in particular. Moreover, these studies are often focused on the sorts of topic participants talk about in such programs. On the basis of literature developed by scholars in sociolinguistics and journalism, we expand the scope of our study to the assessment of questions asked by the interviewers and answers provided by the politicians. We perform a quantitative content analysis of political interviews to compare the behavior of these speakers on infotainment and entertainment programs with those on current affairs programs. Our results show that hosts on infotainment programs are no less rigorous than their counterparts on information programs, especially when the interview is centered on policy issues. We conclude that scholars interested in these questions should turn to studies in sociolinguistics and journalism to build a relevant analytical frame.

The Mass Media's Political Agenda-Setting Power: A Longitudinal Analysis of Media, Parliament, and Government in Belgium (1993 to 2000). . (summary) Comparative Political Studies 41 (6): 814-836.
Stefaan Walgrave, Stuart N. Soroka and Michiel Nuytemans (2008)

Do mass media determine or codetermine the political agenda? Available answers on this question are mixed and contradictory. Results vary in terms of the type of political agenda under scrutiny, the kind of media taken into account, and the type of issues covered. This article enhances knowledge of the media's political agenda-setting power by addressing each of these topics, drawing on extensive longitudinal measures of issue attentiveness in media, Parliament, and government in Belgium in the 1990s. Relying on time-series, cross-section analyses, the authors ascertain that although Belgium is characterized by a closed political system, the media do to some extent determine the agenda of Parliament and government. There is systematic variation in media effects, however. Newspapers exert more influence than does television, Parliament is somewhat more likely to follow media than government, and media effects are larger for certain issues (law and order, environment) than for others (foreign policy, economic issues).

Back to the future: press coverage of the 2008 Canadian election campaign strikes both familiar and unfamiliar notes. Policy Options/Options politiques..
Blake Andrew, Lori Young and Stuart Soroka (2008)

The Media Observatory at the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada produced another round of election news analysis for the 2008 federal election. Drawing on this body of data and using a fully automated content analytic procedure, this article assesses election news articles for prominence and tone of party and leader coverage, as well as policy content. The main conclusions are three-fold. First, this campaign was increasingly driven by the global and the Canadian economy. The environment, poised to control the agenda, was overshadowed by the financial crisis in the United States. Second, the Liberal Party - and particularly their new leader Stéphane Dion - was much less prominent in this campaign than in previous elections. Third, while the Conservative Party clearly received more coverage, it did not succeed in getting better coverage.

Good News and Bad News: Asymmetric Responses to Economic Information. (summary) The Journal of Politics 68 (2): 372-385.
Stuart Soroka (2006)

Systemic Effects of Televised Candidates' Debates. (summary) The International Journal of Press/Politics 13 (4): 451-464.
André Blais and Andrea M. L. Perrella (2008)

Almost an entire generation of election survey data was pooled together from the United States and Canada to assess the systemic effects of televised debates. Four questions were posed: (1) Is there a general tendency for evaluations of candidates to improve or deteriorate after a debate? (2) Do evaluations of one candidate negatively correlate with changes in evaluations of opponents? (3) Do debates disadvantage incumbents? (4) Do debates advantage less popular candidates? Using feeling thermometer" items to measure voter evaluations

Les politiciens ma-trisent-ils leur image ? Analyse des représentations visuelles souhaitées et projetées par les leaders politiques canadiens dans le débat télévisé francophone de l'élection fédérale de 2000. Communication 25 (1): 46-83.
Theirry Giasson (2006)

Quelle image veulent projeter les politiciens au cours d'un débat télévisé ? Arrivent-ils - maintenir cette image pendant tout le débat ? L'analyse répond - ces interrogations en étudiant le cas du débat de langue française diffusé pendant la campagne électorale canadienne de 2000. Les résultats présentés sont tirés d'entrevues menées auprès de conseillers politiques ayant participé - la préparation des leaders au débat et d'une analyse de contenu des composantes non verbales de l'image projetée par chaque leader au cours des échanges. L'analyse permet d'explorer la communication politique canadienne sous un nouvel angle en s'intéressant - la problématique de la gestion de l'image des politiciens en prévision de débats télévisés électoraux.

La préparation de la représentation visuelle des leaders politiques. Le cas du débat télévisé francophone de l'élection parlementaire fédérale canadienne de 2000. Questions de communication 9 (1): 357-381.
Theirry Giasson (2006)

Comment les leaders politiques préparent-ils leur image en prévision d'un débat télévisé? Quel rôle jouent leurs conseillers dans cet exercice stratégique? Quelle est l'importance de la communication non verbale dans la préparation de la performance télévisuelle du candidat. L'article répond - ces questions en étudiant le cas du débat télévisé francophone de l'élection fédérale canadienne en 2000. Deux préoccupations ancrent l'analyse. Premièrement, étudier le rôle des conseillers politiques et leur interaction avec les chefs de parties dans l'exercice de préparation au débat. Deuxièmement, porter une attention particulière - cette interaction dans l'ajustement des composantes de la représentation visuelle, de la communication non verbale des dirigeants politiques. Des entrevues menées auprès des principaux conseillers en communication des cinq leaders politiques ayant participé au débat de 2000 montrent que, au Canada, la préparation d'un débat, l'ajustement de l'image du candidat, ou l'élaboration stratégique de toute autre manifestation de communication politique se réalisent dans un contexte de collaboration et de discussion entre le chef du parti et les stratèges qui le conseillent.

Débats televises et evaluations des candidates: la representation visuelle des politiciens canadiens agit-elle dans la formation des preferences de l'électorat québécois? . Canadian Journal of Political Science 38 (4): 867-895.
Thierry Giasson, Richard Nadeau and Éric Bélanger (2005)

Nowcasting v. Polling: The 2010 UK Election Trials. Electoral Studies.
Michael Lewis-Beck, Richard Nadeau and Éric Bélanger (In press)

This paper first offers a final forecast for the May 2010 UK general election based on our two-step model" [Nadeau

Les sondages et la démocratie, deuxième édition revue et augmentée. Presses de l'Université Laval.
Vincent Lemieux and François Pétry (2010)

L'usage de plus en plus répandu des sondages favorise-t-il ou au contraire emp'che-t-il le bon fonctionnement de la démocratie ? La question est abordée de façon normative, en évaluant le rôle des sondages par rapport - ce qu'on serait en droit d'attendre dans une situation de démocratie idéale. Le livre traite aussi la question de façon empirique, en décrivant et en expliquant le rôle des sondages tel qu'on l'observe dans la pratique. La pratique et la théorie des sondages ont sensiblement évolué depuis la première édition de ce livre. C'est pourquoi une mise - jour a été jugée nécessaire, nous conduisant - réviser une partie du matériel, m'me si l'approche méthodologique et théorique reste fondamentalement la m'me. Les données de sondages utilisées pour illustrer nos arguments ont été mises - jour. Le plan du livre a été modifié pour donner plus d'importance - certains éléments - tels que la compétence politique des citoyens ou les sondages gouvernementaux - tout en conservant ceux qui se trouvaient déj- dans la première édition.

The Regulation of Poll Reporting in Canada. Canadian Public Policy 35 (1): 41-58.
Tania Gosselin and François Pétry (2009)

La Loi électorale du Canada, adoptée en 2000, régit la façon dont les médias doivent divulguer les données techniques concernant les méthodes utilisées pour réaliser des sondages en période électorale. Mais la couverture médiatique des sondages faits hors des périodes électorales, qui n'est pas soumise - ces règles, ne fait l'objet que d'une autorégulation. Dans cet article, nous analysons la couverture faite par trois journaux (La Presse, le Globe and Mail et le Calgary Herald) de ces deux types de sondages. Nos résultats montrent que la façon dont les médias divulguent les données techniques relatives aux sondages est loin de correspondre aux normes reconnues dans l'industrie. Toutefois, ces informations sont au moins aussi complètes dans le cas des sondages non électoraux que dans celui des sondages électoraux. Par ailleurs, on observe que, dans les articles de fond qui traitent de sondages réalisés pour les journaux qui les publient, on retrouve significativement plus de données techniques que dans les courts articles où il est simplement fait mention de sondages non réalisés pour le compte des journaux qui les publient. Nous concluons donc que les norms et les règles qui s'appliquent - la divulgation des méthodes utilisées dans les sondages influencent peu la façon habituelle dont les médias traitent des sondages.

Sondages et résultats électoraux : 2008 marque une première. Options politiques 30 (2): 79-83.
Claire Durand (2009)

L'élection du 8 décembre constitue une première pour deux raisons : le taux de participation a atteint un plancher record et l'appui au Parti québécois s'est avéré plus élevé que prévu. Dans cet article, Claire Durand examine l'écart entre les résultats des sondages et du scrutin, et tente d'en trouver les causes. Elle en profite pour analyser la relation entre participation et choix électoral, dont la thèse répandue voulant que les souverainistes votent moins. Il en ressort que l'écart entre les sondages et le vote s'explique par des changements de dernière minute et que ce sont plutôt les libéraux qui ont tendance - moins aller voter. L'auteure recommande de faire des sondages plus tard pendant les campagnes électorales et de prendre en compte la probabilité de participation au vote dans les estimations des intentions de vote.

The Prestige of Survey Research. Canadian Journal of Marketing Research 24: 22-31.
John Goyder and Claire Durand (2008)

Assessing the Usefulness of a New Measure of Interviewer Performance in Telephone Surveys. Public Opinion Quarterly 72 (4): 741-752.
Claire Durand (2008)

This research note compares the properties of a new measure of interviewer performance-the Net Contribution to Performance Index (NCPI) (Durand, 2005a)-with the most commonly used measure for telephone surveys, cooperation rate at first contact (Cooprt1), to assess their reliability, validity, and usefulness in various contexts. The two measures are compared in terms of their relationship with cooperation and response rates at the survey level, their relationship with mean interview length, their relationship with one another in different survey contexts and their ability to reliably trace variations in interviewer performance over time. The data come from 14 RDD polls conducted by three different pollsters and a governmental statistical institute on various topics with response rates (AAPOR-RR1) ranging from 21.3 to 52.7 percent. The NCPI has some advantages over Cooprt1, but more so for polls in which obtaining cooperation is difficult and high response rates are sought. Compared to Cooprt1, NCPI allows for the measurement of performance whatever the task performed; it has no missing values. It is not related to interview length. It is related to survey response rates and cooperation rates. It traces the daily evolution of each interviewer's performance where Cooprt1 seems to vary at random or be too stable. It appears to be a better and more useful measure of interviewer performance than Cooprt1. It seems important to continue research to assess whether using NCPI could lead to different conclusions when experiments aimed at improving interviewer performance are conducted.

La méthodologie des sondages électoraux de l'élection présidentielle de 2007, chroniques d'un problème récurrent. Bulletin of Sociological Methodology 97: 5-17.
Claire Durand (2008)

The 2002 presidential élection polls will be remembered for a long time because their error in predictions had dramatic consequences. What influence did those elections have on French opinion poli research and was it able to revise its methods? Was it able to improve its voting estimates? Research has shown that French polis are now more able to distinguish between voting for the left and the right than in 2002. However, French polls have not improved their capability to estimate intentions to vote for major candidates. The discrepancies between means for twelve polis published during the last week before voting vary from 1.8 points for Royal to 3.2 points for Sarkozy and 3.8 points for Le Pen. These results show that the estimation error for Le Pen is the same in 2007 as in 2002, but in the opposite direction. As in 2002, samples were biased concerning level of education - strong under-representation of the less educated - as well as for voting profile - strong non-declaration of voting for Le Pen. One can thus conclude that the problem of estimating the extreme right vote remains in its entirety and that polling institute methods have not changed greatly. Cooperation between the institutes and researchers should permit further explanations and possible solutions.

The Polls of the 2007 French Presidential Campaign: Were Lessons Learned from the 2002 Catastrophe? . International Journal of Public Opinion Research 20 (3): 275-298.
Claire Durand (2008)

After the ècatastrophe' of the 2002 French presidential election, when polls did not hint at the possibility that Jean-Marie LePen would qualify for the second round, one might ask whether pollsters learnt lessons from this experience. Using the polls published for the two rounds of the 2007 presidential election as well as complementary information available from the French Survey Commission, this article examines whether (i) the polls were more accurate in 2007 than in 2002 and (ii) whether there are indications that pollsters changed their methods following the 2002 election. Several indices of the accuracy of the polls are estimated. All lead to the conclusion that between 2002 and 2007 there was no improvement in the estimation of the main candidates' votes, and particularly of Le Pen's vote. Underestimated in 2002, Le Pen's vote was overestimated by the same margin in 2007, and the polls conducted between the two rounds showed a substantial underestimation of the Le Pen vote cast in the first-round election. However, on the positive side, contrary to 2002, the left versus right balance was almost perfectly estimated, and there was some variability among the pollsters' estimates, hinting that their estimates were more independent of each other than in 2002.

Les sondages québécois sont-ils distincts. Options politiques 29 (10): 95-98.
Claire Durand and Mélanie Deslauriers (2005)

Les sondeurs du Canada anglais et les sondeurs québécois font-ils une estimation systématiquement différente des intentions de vote pour le Bloc québécois? Les sondages québécois menés dans les circonscriptions ont-ils surestimé systématiquement le Bloc québécois et mal prédit les élus? Claire Durand et Mélanie Deslauriers montrent que, contrairement - l'impression générale, les sondages québécois ne se sont pas distingués significativement des sondages canadiens lors de la dernière campagne électorale. Par contre, la majorité des estimations faites par les firmes UniMarketing et GPS dans les circonscriptions se sont révélées en dehors de la marge d'erreur, et GPS a mal prédit l'élu dans deux cas sur trois, alors que les prédictions faites par CROP sont correctes pour sept de ses huit sondages.

What Did the Polls Tell Us? . Inroads (24):34-38.
Claire Duran and Mélanie Deslauriers (2008)

Who Selects the Party Leader? . Party Politics.
William Cross and André Blais (2011)

We study the degree of formal influence that rank-and-file members have on the selection of party leaders in the five English-speaking Westminster countries: Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. We find that in recent years there has been a general, though not universal, trend towards granting party members greater influence in the choice of their leader. We observe that the decision to broaden the selectorate has been made by most parties in the UK, Canada and Ireland, while parties in Australia and New Zealand have generally resisted reform. We set out a series of four hypotheses explaining the decisions made by parties in the first three countries. We show that this organizational reform is adopted by parties in opposition, in the aftermath of an electoral setback and by new parties. We also find a strong contagion effect within party systems. Finally, we offer an explanation for why the Australian and New Zealand cases have resulted in less change.

Political Leaders and Democratic Elections. Oxford University Press.
Kees Aarts, André Blais and Hermann Schmitt (2010)

Political Leaders and Democratic Elections unravels and evaluates the importance of political leaders in the vote decision. Outcomes of legislative elections are typically reported in terms of party support: how many votes and seats were obtained by each party? But in fact voters are faced with three choices which must be folded into one. They must decide which party they prefer, but in doing so they also choose among the policies advocated by these parties, and among the leaders who eventually have to enact them. This simple fact raises the question of the relative weight of these dimensions in vote choice, and particularly the relative importance of leaders. Surprisingly, the question has been largely neglected in the vast literature on voting behavior. The dominant traditions in voting behavior focus on political parties and party identification, and on political issues and ideology respectively. This volume systematically assesses the role of political leaders in the vote decision in nine democracies (Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the United States), over a period of up to 50 years, using election surveys. It assesses the changes in political communication (particularly the rise of televised politics) over the past decades. It explains how important political leaders are in different types of political systems. It shows that the electoral system and other political institutions do affect the share of leader evaluations in vote choice. And it shows, in contrast with popular wisdom, how unimportant characteristics of the leaders themselves, characteristics of their parties, and characteristics of their voters are for vote choice. Finally, the volume shows that voters tend to let themselves be guided by the leaders they like rather than being pushed away from those they dislike.

Leadership Traits in French National Election Studies: Measurement Issues. French Politics 8: 215-221.
Michael Lewis-Beck and Richard Nadeau (2010)

In French elections, leadership would seem to be important. However, it has received little systematic investigation in French national election studies (FNES), at least until recently. Here, we review the measurement of leader traits and image, in FNES of 1988, 1995, 2002 and 2007. The number of administered items, while increased, is still few. Moreover, they tend to be inconsistently measured, and irregularly applied from election to election, and wave to wave. We identify some items that hold conceptual promise, in terms of measuring Competence, Integrity and Empathy. Then, we go on to propose a 12-item traits battery for future FNES.

Do Voters Stereotype Female Party Leaders? Evidence from Canada and New Zealand. In Sylvia Bashesvkin, ed., Are Doors Opening Wider? Studies of Women's Political Engagement in Canada.
Elisabeth Gidengil, Joanna Everitt and Susan Banducci (2008)

Federalism and Public Responsiveness to Policy. Publius: The Journal of Federalism 41 (1): 31-52.
Christopher Wlezien and Stuart Soroka (2011)

Public responsiveness to government policy is a crucial component of representative democracy, but may be far weaker in federal regimes. This article explores the consequences of federalism for public responsiveness in one highly federalized policy domain: welfare spending in Canada. Results suggest that citizens'preferences for spending at the federal level are affected by changes in both federal and provincial spending, and to an equal degree; they suggest, in short, that federalism poses serious problems where public responsiveness is concerned. A concluding section considers the implications of these findings for the representation of public opinion in policy in federalized states.

Degrees of Democracy: Politics, Public Opinion and Policy. Cambridge University Press.
Stuart Soroka and Christopher Wlezien (2010)

This book develops and tests a "thermostatic" model of public opinion and policy, in which preferences for policy both drive and adjust to changes in policy. The representation of opinion in policy is central to democratic theory and everyday politics. So too is the extent to which public preferences are informed and responsive to changes in policy. The coexistence of both "public responsiveness" and "policy representation" is thus a defining characteristic of successful democratic governance, and the subject of this book. The authors examine both responsiveness and representation across a range of policy domains in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. The story that emerges is one in which representative democratic government functions surprisingly well, though there are important differences in the details. Variations in public responsiveness and policy representation responsiveness are found to reflect the "salience" of the different domains and governing institutions - specifically, presidentialism (versus parliamentarism) and federalism (versus unitary government).

Language and Ideology in Congress. British Journal of Political Science .
Daniel Diermeir, Jean-François Godbout, Bei Yu and Stefan Kaufmann (2011)

The paper analyzes legislative speech records in the U.S. Senate from the 101st-108th Congresses. We apply a widely-used text classification algorithm - Support Vector Machines (SVM) - to extract the terms that are most indicative of conservative and liberal positions from legislative speeches and to predict Senators' ideological positions in the 108th Congress. When predicting the conservative/liberal positions of Senators based on previous legislative speech, the SVM classifier achieved a 94% level of accuracy. Our results indicate that the same ideological differences that are associated with roll-call based ideological measures in Congress are also reflected in political speech. This suggests that previous findings of low dimensional issue space in Congress are not simply the results of institutional factors such as party leadership or agenda control. Rather, it implies that voting and debating are different but correlated expressions of underlying ideological belief systems.

Rep by Pop?: le projet de loi C-12 sur la redistribution électorale. Policy Options 31 (4): 57-60.
Louis Massicotte (2010)

Le 1er avril dernier, le ministre d'État - la Réforme démocratique a déposé un projet de loi (C-12) remaniant complètement les règles régissant la repartition des sièges entre les provinces - la Chambre des communes. Il s'agit d'une réforme promise peu avant l'élection de 2006. Elle en est - sa troisième mouture, après le dévoilement en mai 2007 d'une première version et l'annonce de sa modification sur un point capital fin 2008. Louis Massicotte examine ici les enjeux soulevés par la représentation électorale dans un context démographique changeant et les implications de la réforme proposée pour les provinces, le Québec en particulier.

A General Empirical Law of Public Budgets: A Comparative Analysis. American Journal of Political Science 53 (4): 855-873.
Bryan D. Jones, Frank R. Baumgartner, Christian Breunig, Christopher Wlezien, Stuart Soroka, Martial Foucault, Abel François, Christoffer Green-Pedersen, Chris Koski, Peter John, Peter B. Mortensen, Frédéric Varone and Stefaan Walgrave (2009)

We examine regularities and differences in public budgeting in comparative perspective. Budgets quantify collective political decisions made in response to incoming information, the preferences of decision makers, and the institutions that structure how decisions are made. We first establish that the distribution of budget changes in many Western democracies follows a non-Gaussian distribution, the power function. This implies that budgets are highly incremental, yet occasionally are punctuated by large changes. This pattern holds regardless of the type of political system-parliamentary or presidential- and for level of government. By studying the power function's exponents we find systematic differences for budgetary increases versus decreases (the former are more punctuated) in most systems, and for levels of government (local governments are less punctuated). Finally, we show that differences among countries in the coefficients of the general budget law correspond to differences in formal institutional structures. While the general form of the law is probably dictated by the fundamental operations of human and organizational information processing, differences in the magnitudes of the law's basic parameters are country- and institution-specific.

Constituency Influence in Parliament. Canadian Journal of Political Science 42 (3): 563- 591.
Stuart Soroka, Erin Penner and Kelly Blidook (2009)

Dyadic representation" has received considerable attention in the US

Le Parlement du Québec de 1867 - aujourd'hui. Presses de l'Université Laval.
Louis Massicotte (2009)

Écrit dans un style d'une grande clarté, cet ouvrage jette un éclairage nouveau sur l'évolution historique du Parlement québécois. Au XIXe siècle, les simples députés faisaient adopter un grand nombre de projets de loi d'intér't public, défiaient fréquemment la ligne de parti, et en conséquence le gouvernement était souvent mis en minorité - l'Assemblée. Ces comportements ont presque disparu aujourd'hui. Pourquoi ? Les nombreuses réformes parlementaires apportées depuis les années 1960 visaient - revaloriser les députés. Elles ont garanti l'acceptation par l'Assemblée des mesures gouvernementales, tout en permettant aux députés d'oeuvrer plus efficacement dans leurs circonscriptions. À travers une analyse de la procédure de l'Assemblée et des comportements des acteurs parlementaires, c'est toute l'évolution du rapport de forces entre ces derniers qui est posée.

Does Proportional Representation Foster Closer Congruence Between Citizens and Policy Makers? . Comparative Political Studies 39 (10): 1243-1262.
André Blais and Marc André Bodet (2006)

This article assesses the claim that proportional representation (PR) fosters a closer correspondence between the views of citizens and the positions of the government. The study uses the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems data set and compares respondents' self-placements on a Left-Right scale with placements of cabinet parties' locations in 31 election studies. The authors argue that PR has two contradictory consequences. On one hand, PR leads to more parties and more choice for voters; but these parties are less centrist, and this increases the overall distance between voters and parties. On the other hand, PR increases the likelihood of coalition governments; this pulls the government toward the center of the policy spectrum and reduces the distance between the government and voters. These two contradictory effects of PR wash out, and the net overall impact of PR on congruence is nil. The data support the authors' interpretation.

Opinion-Policy Dynamics: Public Preferences and Public Expenditure in the United Kingdom. British Journal of Political Science 35: 665-689.
Stuart Soroka and Christopher Wlezien (2005)

Work exploring the relationship between public opinion and public policy over time has largely been restricted to the United States. A wider application of this line of research can provide insights into how representation varies across political systems, however. This article takes a first step in this direction using a new body of data on public opinion and government spending in Britain. The results of analyses reveal that the British public appears to notice and respond (thermostatically) to changes in public spending in particular domains, perhaps even more so than in the United States. They also reveal that British policymakers represent these preferences in spending, though the magnitude and structure of this response is less pronounced and more general. The findings are suggestive about the structuring role of institutions.

On the Limits to Inequality in Representation . (summary) PS: Political Science and Politics.
Stuart Soroka and Christopher Wlezien (2008)

Is Welfare a Dirty Word? Canadian Public Opinion on Social Assistance. Policy Options.
Allison Harell, Stuart Soroka and Adam Mahon (2008)

How do Canadians feel about social assistance policy? Drawing on data from the Canadian Opinion Research Archive, the authors explore the structure of public opinion on welfare and other social assistance programs over the past two decades. They suggest that differences in program support are linked to issue framing" and the degree to which programs are based on cash transfers versus services. They also find there is a strong link between recent trends in public opinion and developments in Canadian social assistance policy."

BQ In the House: The Nature of Sovereigntist Representation in the Canadian Parliament . (summary) Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 14 (4): 487-522.
Lori Young and Éric Bélanger (2008)

We address the behavior of separatist parties participating in state legislatures in well-established democracies, taking the Bloc Québécois (BQ) as a case. Analysis of oral questions asked in the Canadian House of Commons reveals a broad set of issues addressed by the BQ; its aggregate priorities comprising many issues of federal concern. It is shown that the BQ's attention to issues of separation in Question Period mainly follows, rather than leads, public support in Quebec for sovereignty. The party appears on the whole limited in its ability to mobilize public support for sovereignty and to pursue its separatist agenda more rigorously.

Legislative Priorities and Public Opinion: Representation of Partisan Agendas in the Canadian House of Commons". (summary) Journal of European Public Policy 13(7): 1006-1020.
Erin Penner, Kelly Blidook, and Stuart Soroka (2006)

Oral questions are a central feature of the Canadian parliamentary system, and a valuable indication of legislators' issue attentiveness. Here, we consider parties' behaviour in Question Period, with a particular interest in opposition parties' representation of the public's (and publics') issue priorities. We do so using a content analytic database of oral questions covering three Parliaments from 1988 to 1999. We begin with some descriptive analyses of the distribution of oral questions across issues and parties, and then explore what drives parties' attention to issues. Combining the oral questions database with public opinion data, we examine the relationship between the issue priorities of both parties and partisans. In doing so, we examine two different foci of representation: a generalized national constituency, and each party's partisan constituency.

Winning, Losing and Satisfaction with Democracy. (summary) Political Studies 55: 425-441.
André Blais and François Gélineau (2007)

Previous research has shown that those who won an election are more satisfied with the way democracy works than those who lost. What is not clear, however, is whether it is the fact of winning (losing), per se, that generates (dis)satisfaction with democracy. The current study explores this winner/loser gap with the use of the 1997 Canadian federal election panel study. It makes a theoretical and methodological contribution to our understanding of the factors that foster satisfaction with democracy. At the theoretical level, we argue that voters gain different utility from winning at the constituency and national levels in a parliamentary system, and that their expectations about whether they will win or lose affect their degree of satisfaction with democracy. On the methodological front, our analysis includes a control group (non-voters) and incorporates a control for the level of satisfaction prior to the election. The results indicate that the effect of winning and losing on voters' satisfaction with democracy is significant even when controlling for ex ante satisfaction before the election takes place, and that the outcome of the election in the local constituency matters as much as the outcome of the national election. They fail to show, however, that expectations about the outcome of the election play a significant role in shaping satisfaction with democracy.

Value Diversity and Support for Electoral Reform in Canada . (summary) PS: Political Science and Politics 39 (4).
Mebs Kanji and Antoine Bilodeau (2006)

This paper considers judgments based on electoral outcomes, questioning whether a decision on what is 'free and fair' can be related to what results from an electoral competition. It is noted that no one has seriously argued that elections should be deemed free and fair based on the extent to which a specific party has won, although it is possible that the electoral process may be more likely to be found acceptable when the 'ins' are defeated. Such a judgment would be a mistake. The thorny issue of socio-demographic and political party outcomes has produced no consensus, and it is important to remember that electorates remain free to produce outcomes with which we, in our wisdom, might disagree.

Judging Elections by their Outcome? . Representation 41 (3): 180-188.
Louis Massicotte (2005)

This paper considers judgments based on electoral outcomes, questioning whether a decision on what is 'free and fair' can be related to what results from an electoral competition. It is noted that no one has seriously argued that elections should be deemed free and fair based on the extent to which a specific party has won, although it is possible that the electoral process may be more likely to be found acceptable when the 'ins' are defeated. Such a judgement would be a mistake. The thorny issue of socio-demographic and political party outcomes has produced no consensus, and it is important to remember that electorates remain free to produce outcomes with which we, in our wisdom, might disagree.

(In)Significant Elections? Federal By-Elections in Canada, 1963-2008. Canadian Journal of Political Science 43(1): 87-105.
Frédérick Bastien and Peter Loewen (2010)

Despite the development of electoral studies in Canada, by-elections have received little attention from researchers. We believe that these are important political events. This research note examines the 121 federal by-elections held between general elections from 1963 to 2008. Our analysis indicates that turnout in by-elections is driven by the larger societal determinants of turnout and not the characteristics of each race. We also find that the support of the government party in a by-election is affected by changes in national opinion towards the government, but only in the third-party system. We find that minor parties and independent candidates perform better in by-elections than in general elections. And we find no difference in the re-election rates of by-election winners and those who enter parliament through general elections.

Parties and Partisans: The Influence of Ideology and Brokerage on the Durability of Partisanship in Canada. In Cameron D. Anderson and Laura B. Stephenson, eds., Voting Behaviour in Canada, Vancouver, UBC Press, p. 107-136.
Éric Bélanger and Laura B. Stephenson (2010)

Third-Party Support in Canadian Elections: The Role of the Economy. In Cameron D. Anderson and Laura B. Stephenson, eds., Voting Behaviour in Canada, Vancouver, UBC Press, p. 107-136.
Éric Bélanger and Richard Nadeau (2010)

The Anatomy of a Liberal Defeat . (summary) Paper prepared for presentation at the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association, May 2009, Carleton University, Ottawa.
Elisabeth Gidengil, Patrick Fournier, Joanna Everitt, Neil Nevitte and André Blais (2009)

This paper uses data from the 2000, 2004, 2006 and 2008 Canadian Election Studies to analyze the causes of the Liberal party's historic defeat in the 2008 federal election. The analyses reveal the importance of long-term factors for understanding the change in the party's electoral fortunes since 2000. The paper ends with a consideration of the implications for the Liberals' future electoral prospects, as well the larger literature on voting behaviour in Canada.

Le comportement électoral des Québécois. Presses de l'Université de Montréal.
Éric Bélanger and Richard Nadeau (2009)

Malgré tous les événements qui ont récemment bousculé le panorama électoral québécois, il existe peu d'essais approfondis sur le sujet. Éric Bélanger et Richard Nadeau, deux spécialistes en la matière, viennent ici combler cette lacune en présentant l'enqu'te la plus fouillée - ce jour sur les électeurs québécois. Leur analyse fera indiscutablement sa marque, car on y brosse un portrait rigoureux du comportement électoral des Québécois. On s'interroge sur leur récent changement de comportement : incident de parcours ou transformation durable du paysage politique au Québec ? Ce livre s'intéresse aux mœurs électorales et se distingue par sa démarche analytique, appuyée par des statistiques révélatrices. Les auteurs offrent d'abord une étude historique des élections provinciales au Québec et incluent une analyse des scrutins de 2007 et de 2008 qui permettra de mieux comprendre la stratégie des partis en lice et l'évolution plus générale du système partisan.

Accounting for the Electoral Success of the Liberal Party in Canada. Canadian Journal of Political Science 38 (4): 821-840.
André Blais (2005)

Je montre que le succès électoral du Parti libéral fédéral au Canada découle en bonne partie de l'appui des catholiques et des citoyens d'origine non européenne. Sans l'appui solide de ces deux groupes, le Parti libéral n'aurait pas remporté les succès électoraux remarquables qu'il a connus. Pourtant, nous n'avons toujours pas d'explication satisfaisante des raisons qui amènent les catholiques et les citoyens d'origine non européenne - voter pour le Parti libéral. Je soutiens que ces tendances sociologiques lourdes devraient nous inciter - remettre en question l'interprétation habituelle selon laquelle les succès libéraux sont attribuables aux positions centristes du parti.

Back to the Future? Making Sense of the 2004 Canadian Election outside Quebec. Canadian Journal of Political Science 39: 1-25.
Elisabeth Gidengil, André Blais, Joanna Everitt, Patrick Fournier and Neil Nevitte (2006)

This paper uses data from the 2004 Canadian Election Study to analyze the factors that motivated a vote for each party and to identify the ones that mattered most to the outcome of the 2004 federal election outside Quebec. Particular attention is given to the impact of the sponsorship scandal, the sources of support for the new Conservative party and the factors that explain the NDP's improved performance. The findings are used to address some basic questions about the 2004 election and its larger implications.

Information, Visibility and Elections: Why Electoral Outcomes Differ When Voters are Better Informed. European Journal of Political Research 48 (2): 256-280.
André Blais, Elisabeth Gidengil, Patrick Fournier and Neil Nevitte (2009)

This article assesses the aggregate effect of information shortfall on the outcome of the last six Canadian elections. Building on Bartels' analysis, the authors find an informa- tion effect in three of the six elections examined, and in each case the information gap benefits the Liberal Party. That finding raises the question: why does information matter in some contexts but not in others? It is argued in this article that the information gap is related to lack of visibility. When and where all political parties have some degree of visibility, the less informed vote like the better informed, but when and where a party is hardly visible, the less informed are less likely to support that party. The less informed appear to consider a smaller set of options when they decide how to vote.

Challenge and Change: Voting and Elections in Canada. In John Courtney and David E. Smith, eds., Oxford Handbook of Canadian Politics, Oxford University Press.
Elisabeth Gidengil (2009)

The 2008 Provincial Election in Quebec. Canadian Political Science Review 3 (1): 93-99.
Éric Bélanger (2009)

In November of 2008, Quebec Premier Jean Charest decided to call a snap election. His obvious goal was to regain a majority of seats in the National Assembly by taking advantage of the Action Démocratique du Québec's steady decline in the polls and of the breaking financial crisis. The campaign's central theme was the management of the upcoming economic storm." Based on the overall outcome

The 2007 Provincial Election in Quebec . (summary) Canadian Political Science Review 2 (1): 72-77.
Éric Bélanger (2008)

The 2007 provincial election in Quebec may be considered a milestone in recent Quebec politics. For the first time since 1878, voters elected a minority government in the province (Jean Charest's Liberals), a third party (ADQ) replaced the Parti Québécois (PQ) as Official Opposition, and the PQ had its worst showing in 37 years. The pre-campaign was marked by the reasonable accommodations" debate

La montée des tiers partis au Québec - l'élection de 2007: conjoncture ou tendance? . IRPP Choices 14 (17): 1-36.
Éric Bélanger and Richard Nadeau (2008)

Forecasting the Vote for a Third Party: The British Liberals, 1974-2005. British Journal of Politics and International Relations.
Éric Bélanger, Richard Nadeau et Michael Lewis-Beck (2010)

While for multiparty systems the development of vote function forecast models for the incumbent party and the official opposition party is commonplace, only rarely do these models try to forecast the vote for a third party. Can third party vote shares be forecasted with reasonable accuracy? We explore this question within the context of British politics. Our model proposes that the British Liberal party vote is mostly driven by the extent to which the UK electorate approves or disapproves of the official opposition leader. Our results are consistent with the idea that once the decision has been made to punish the incumbent government, a voter must then decide whether to support the official opposition party or another smaller party.

Obama's Landslide Denied: A Racial Cost?. PS: Political Science and Politics 43: 479-483.
Michael Lewis-Beck and Charles Tien (2010)

Barack Obama was denied a landslide victory in the 2008 presidential election. In the face of economic and political woe without precedent in the post-World War II period, the expectation of an overwhelming win was not unreasonable. He did win, but with just a 52.9 percentage point share of the total popular vote. We argue a landslide was taken from Obama because of race prejudice. In our article, we first quantify the extent of the actual Obama margin. Then we make a case for why it should have been larger. After reviewing evidence of racial bias in voter attitudes and behavior, we conclude that, in a racially blind society, Obama would likely have achieved a landslide.

Obama and the Economy in 2008. PS: Political Science and Politics 42 (3): 479-483.
Michael Lewis-Beck and Richard Nadeau (2009)

We believe the economy was much on voters' minds in the 2008 presidential election. More formally, a traditional economic retrospective voting theory-electors disapprove of past economic conditions and vote against the government-should serve well as an explanation of Obama's victory (Fiorina 1981; Lewis-Beck 1988, 34).

Jusqu'où ira Obama? . Policy Options 29 (3): 25-27.
Richard Nadeau (2008)

Les courses - la présidence américaine réservent parfois des surprises. L'élection de Jimmy Carter en 1976 en est l'illustration. Mais la plupart du temps, ce sont les candidats mieux connus ou proches de l'establishment des partis qui finissent par l'emporter. La poussée de Barack Obama et la très chaude lutte qu'il mène - Hillary Clinton constituent de ce point de vue l'événement marquant de la lutte électorale en cours aux États-Unis. Loin de para-tre s'essouffler, la campagne du sénateur de l'Illinois semble au contraire gagner en intensité. Richard Nadeau se penche sur les causes de la montée de Barack Obama et tente d'évaluer ses chances de succès pour la suite des choses.

Party, Ideology, and Vote Intentions: Dynamics from the 2002 French Electoral Panel. Political Research Quarterly 59 (4): 503-515.
Éric Bélanger, Michael S. Lewis-Beck, Jean Chiche and Vincent Tiberj (2006)

The debate over the relative importance of ideology versus party for vote choice in France is enduring. Resolution of the debate would have much value, for the light shed on sources of stability and change in multiparty electoral systems generally. The main reason the debate continues is that previous studies examining that question have been plagued by difficulties pertaining to variable measurement, model specification, election type, and research design. We address these problems and provide new evidence from the 2002 French Electoral Panel. Most notably, these data allow stronger causal inference because party identification and ideological identification are both measured in the first wave of the survey, that is, before the declaration of vote actually occurs. We estimate a multi-equation model of first-round legislative vote intention-as measured in the second wave of the panel-using two-stage least squares, ordered logit, as well as binomial and multinomial logit techniques. The results indicate that ideological identification systematically outweighs party identification in shaping the French voter's choice.

Explaining the Rise of the LPF: Issues, Discontent, and the 2002 Dutch Election. Acta Politica 41 (1): 4-20.
Éric Bélanger and Kees Aarts (2006)

Scholarly accounts of the dramatic breakthrough of the List Pim Fortuyn (LPF) in the 2002 Dutch parliamentary election have emphasized two structural factors behind the success of that party. It has first been argued that the LPF brought a distinct issue profile to the electoral arena, which made it attractive for voters with similar policy views. The second hypothesis, that feelings of discontent with politics also fuelled support for the LPF, remains contested because of the possible endogeneity bias of cynicism attitudes. We re-examine these questions using survey data from the 1998 to 2002 panel of the Dutch Parliamentary Election Study. Our approach's novelty is to link respondents' 2002 vote choice to their issue priorities and cynical attitudes as measured in the 1998 wave of the panel. The findings suggest that policy preferences and, to a lesser extent, attitudes of political discontent both contributed to the LPF vote, thus providing support for both interpretations of the rise of this party. These results are consistent with most existing works on non-established party voting which show that new salient political issues and a lack of confidence towards government and politics are fertile ground for these party movements.

A Political Economy Forecast for the 2005 British General Election. British Journal of Politics and International Relations 7 (2): 191-198.
Éric Bélanger Michael S. Lewis-Beck, and Richard Nadeau (2005)

Recently, we proposed an original statistical model for forecasting general elections in the United Kingdom, based on the observation of a few key indicators of the political and economic system. That vote function model was tested against the results of the 2001 general election. Here we evaluate the results of that test, and offer an appropriately revised model for the forecasting of the upcoming 2005 general election. According to our forecast, a Labour victory appears the most likely outcome.

Political Decentralization and Electoral Accountability: The Argentine Experience, 1983-2001. British Journal of Political Science 36 (1): 133-157.
François Gélineau and Karen L. Remmer (2005)

To what extent does public support for subnational officials fluctuate in response to local rather than national performance? Are the policy failures of subnational officials reliably punished by voters? Drawing upon both individual and aggregate level data, this article attempts to shed new light on these questions about the politics of decentralization by exploring electoral outcomes and public opinion at the subnational level in Argentina. Consistent with referendum voting models, this analysis suggests that the fate of candidates in both national and subnational elections is shaped by the performance of the incumbent presidential administration. Moreover, to the extent that subnational performance has an electoral impact, voters do not necessarily respond in ways that enhance electoral accountability. Voters not only blame and reward subnational officials for national performance, but also attribute responsibility for subnational performance to national authorities. The implications with respect to the impact of decentralized decision making on democratic accountability are decidedly mixed and anything but consistent with the argument that decentralization results in a closer match between citizen preferences and the allocation of public resources.

Presidents, Political Context, and Economic Accountability: Evidence from Latin America . Political Research Quarterly 60 (3): 415-428.
François Gélineau (2007)

Using individual-level data collected in Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela, this article argues that electoral accountability revolves around the centralized nature of presidential regimes in the region and the relatively low level of institutionalization of party systems, which, under certain circumstances, constrain the ability of voters to hold the incumbent party responsible for past economic performance. In addition to probing the broader applicability of the economic voting models developed with reference to well-established democracies, the analysis contributes to improving our understanding of the interaction between institutional design and electoral behaviour.

Political Trust and the Vote in Multiparty Elections: The Canadian Case. European Journal of Political Research 44 (1): 121-146.
Éric Bélanger and Richard Nadeau (2005)

While the causes of declining political trust have been investigated extensively in the literature, much less empirical effort has been devoted to the study of its behavioural implications. This article focuses on the decline of trust in Canada during the period 1984 to 1993, and on its effect on Canadian voting behaviour. We build upon M.J. Hetherington's (èThe effect of political trust on the presidential vote, 1968-1996', American Political Science Review 93 (1999): 311-326) work to explore the impact of political trust on the vote and on abstention in a multiparty electoral context. Multinomial logit estimations are performed using individual-level survey data from three Canadian federal elections. While distrust is shown to significantly affect electoral participation, thus acting as an alienating factor, the results indicate that decreasing trust acts more as a motivation to support third-party alternatives. The study further demonstrates that, in a multiple party setting, èold-line' major parties electorally suffer from declining political trust, but some third parties benefit more from this phenomenon than others. Contrary to what was the case in the previous two elections, distrustful individuals in 1993 were more likely to vote for the Reform Party or the Bloc Québécois than support the New Democratic Party.