La littérature sur les tempêtes médiatiques n'a jamais évalué leurs effets sur l'opinion publique de manière systématique. Cet article vise à combler ce vide en mobilisant des données de sondage pour évaluer l’évolution de l'opinion publique en regard de la crise des réfugiés, une tempête médiatique survenue durant la campagne fédérale canadienne de 2015. Les résultats montrent que la période de tempête médiatique a influencé les attitudes citoyennes à l’égard de certains cadres liés à la question et que l'effet a persisté jusqu’à la fin de la campagne. Ils révèlent par ailleurs que certaines opinions politiques en viennent à constituer des éléments déterminants de l'intention de vote et du choix de vote final. Ces éléments de preuve montrent que les citoyens sont réceptifs aux tempêtes médiatiques et constituent un exemple concret de la manière dont la logique de marché médiatique devient parfois prépondérante dans les rapports de force qui caractérisent la sphère publique.

Partisan and affective polarization should have observable consequences in Canada, such as bias in political information search and processing. This article presents the results of three studies that test for partisan and ideological bias using the Digital Democracy Project's study of the 2019 Canadian election. Study 1 uses a conjoint experiment where respondents choose from pairs of hypothetical news stories where the slant of the source and headline are both randomized. Study 2 tests for partisan-motivated responsiveness to elite cues with a policy vignette that manipulates the presence of party elite cues and a motivational prime. Study 3 requires respondents to solve a randomly assigned numeracy task that is either political or nonpolitical in nature. Results suggest that Canadians (1) select politically congenial information, though not sources of such information, (2) follow elite cues when partisan motivation is primed and (3) evaluate evidence in ways that are biased by their ideological beliefs.

Few studies have focused on the Canadian context to examine the political impacts of personality. Even though the Canadian Election Study (CES) has measured the Big Five personality traits since 2011, very few studies have taken advantage of this data to assess personality's political role among the Canadian electorate. Using CES data from the three latest elections (2011, 2015 and 2019), we first explore how reliable the measurement of personality is. Except for agreeableness in 2015, the correlations across the personality items are similar to what is typically found in the literature. We next examine how personality affects ideology and partisan identity in the Canadian context. We show that a two-dimensional measurement of ideology refines our understanding of the impacts of personality on ideology. The findings also suggest that personality plays an essential role in forming ideology in Canada but has a limited impact on partisanship.

How accessible are polling locations in Canada? This article explores, for the first time in the Canadian context, the distance that voters may travel to get to their polling stations. It assembles a new set of data from the province of Ontario, mapping the distance between polling locations and a representative point in the polling division, using a variety of measures, including walking, driving and public transit times. It estimates the relationship between these distances and travel times and socio-demographic characteristics of each polling division, finding noteworthy relationships between these distances and the percentage of minority populations (both immigrant and Indigenous) in the polling division. This article also presents a potential negative, but nonlinear, relationship between distances and travel times and turnout, contributing to our understanding of how voters’ rational calculus of voting may be related to the locations of polling stations.

Focus group research is a useful methodology within and beyond the field of political science, as a source of core or supplementary data. The focus group literature is rich and full of guidance, but advice on using digital tools in certain stages of focus group research is relatively scarce. Aiming to fill those gaps, this article draws on experience with two projects in order to outline how researchers can harness technologies for focus group recruitment and data analysis. While traditional recruitment and data analysis techniques are useful, we identify advantages of technology-assisted approaches, particularly for focus group research with marginalized communities. Geared to both new and existing focus group users, the article identifies fruitful ways to harness a wider range of technologies for conducting focus group research while maintaining consistency with established principles and practices.

This article, grounded within the argument that liberal citizenship and recognition-based approaches to decolonization are inappropriate responses to Indigenous calls to decolonize, proposes an alternative approach premised on re-evaluating non-Indigenous understandings of invitation, belonging and rights within the Canadian settler state. I suggest that non-Indigenous peoples consider themselves “foreigners” in need of invitation onto Indigenous lands and that, as colonial denizens, non-Indigenous Canadians take up an ethos that encourages them to re-evaluate their lives and relations with Indigenous peoples, Indigenous lands and the settler state. Such re-evaluations would encourage settlers to question the sovereignty of the state and their daily relations, as well as encourage them to place responsibilities to others above inwardly focused rights. I contend that identifying and acting upon such an ethos can provide a way through which non-Indigenous peoples can appropriately and seriously meet Indigenous peoples’ calls for change.

This article addresses the historical justice dilemma: although critical memory is indispensable for accountability, efforts to use it are often hampered by the unjust relations and systems that caused the wrongs to which historical justice is compelled to respond in the first place. Contemporary authors tackle this problem by focusing on collective responsibility for structural injustice. This article takes a different tack. Studying closely the 2009–2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) report, it argues that the structural turn may come at the expense of a focus on agency and may thus provide unwitting anonymity for wrongdoers while crimping our thinking about leadership and responsibility. Although this article strongly criticizes the TRC report, it tries to work constructively with it, developing an analysis that compensates for the report's unwitting invisibilization of perpetrators. Distilling portraits and analyses of wrongdoer agency that are latent in the TRC's postwar history volume, this article shows how we can develop the report as a resource of what I call retributive social accountability.

Cet article fait l'analyse des discours homonationalistes dans un contexte qui a été peu exploré à ce jour, soit celui d'une nation minoritaire (le Québec) à l'intérieur d'un État multinational (le Canada). Dans la mesure où le nationalisme se construit souvent en opposition avec un « Autre », nous tentons de cerner qui est cet « Autre » dans l'homonationalisme québécois. En particulier, nous explorons si cet « Autre » peut également prendre la forme de la nation majoritaire par l'entremise d'une analyse d'articles publiés entre 1990 et 2017 dans différents journaux québécois (La Presse, Le Devoir et le Journal de Montréal). Nos résultats démontrent que si c'est le « Canada anglais » qui était plus susceptible dans la première moitié des années 2000 d’être « l'Autre » du nationalisme sexuel québécois, depuis la fin des années 2000, ce sont davantage les musulman/es (ici et ailleurs) et les immigrant/es qui font l'objet d'une altérisation dans les discours homonationalistes au Québec.

War comes with terrible costs both in terms of money and lives. Do voters punish incumbents for these costs? Much of the existing literature on the effects of war deaths on public opinion toward incumbents and their war efforts suggests that the answer is yes. We test this proposition on data from a non-US case: Canada's war in Afghanistan. We estimate models of the effect of local war deaths on incumbent support using individual-level panel data from the 2006, 2008 and 2011 Canadian Election Studies and aggregate district-level data from the 2008 and 2011 general elections. In none of our models do we find support for the conclusion that war deaths decrease support for candidates of the governing party. Instead, we find evidence at both the individual and district levels that support for Conservative party candidates is higher in districts that experienced war deaths.

Contact tracing applications have been deployed at a fast pace around the world to stop the spread of COVID-19 and may be key to containing future pandemics. This study aims to explain public opinion toward cell phone contact tracing using a survey experiment. We build upon a theory in evolutionary psychology—disease avoidance—to predict how media coverage of the pandemic affects public support for containment measures. We report three key findings. First, exposure to a news item that shows people ignoring social distancing rules causes an increase in support for cell phone contact tracing. Second, pre-treatment covariates such as anxiety and a belief that other people are not following the rules rank among the strongest predictors of support for COVID-19 apps. And third, while a majority of respondents approve of the reliance on cell phone contact tracing, concerns for rights and freedoms remain a salient preoccupation.

Although Canada's first documented case of COVID-19 appeared in mid-January 2020, it was not until March that messaging about the need to contain the virus heightened. In this research note, we document the use of the media's construction of risk through framing in the early stages of the pandemic. We analyze three dimensions of the health risk narratives related to COVID-19 that dominated Canadians’ concerns about the virus. To capture these narratives, we examine print and online news coverage from two nationally distributed media sources. We assess these frames alongside epidemiological data and find there is a clear link between media coverage, epidemiological data and risk frames in the early stages of the pandemic. It appears that the media relied on health expertise and political sources to guide their coverage and was responsive to the public health data presented to Canadians.

We perform a survey experiment on the issue of immigration. People are presented with a situation where public opinion is at odds with the election promise. In our control group, no information is given about public opinion. In the treatment groups, respondents are told that 55 per cent or 80 per cent of the people are against the project. When respondents are informed about the election promise but are not told about public opinion, 64 per cent say that the party should fulfill its promise. That percentage drops to 51 per cent when people are informed that a slight majority (55 per cent) are opposed to the project and to 42 per cent when they are told that a strong majority (80 per cent) are opposed. Citizens thus believe that politicians should pay attention not only to the majority view but also to the size of that majority.

Who runs and is elected is one of the most fundamental questions in political science as it pertains to the issue of descriptive representation. Despite the importance of this issue, until recently there were no longitudinal datasets on candidates in Canadian elections. This article presents two novel datasets including information on all candidates who ran in Canadian federal and Ontario provincial elections from 1867 to 2019. I present how these data were collected and how they can be used to gain new insights. I expect these data will be a valuable resource to Canadian political scientists for both research and teaching purposes.

The picture superiority effect suggests that a single photograph can communicate a significant amount of political information to voters. Accordingly, politicians must make strategic choices in their self-presentation, particularly when considering how to respond to gender-based stereotypes. Strategic stereotype theory suggests that politicians will either emphasize or rescind gender-based stereotypes depending on whether they believe them to be advantageous to their political image. While the literature on gendered self-presentation is largely confined to television advertising, there is a growing literature focused on the online environment. In this research note, we develop a methodological framework to assess gender-based stereotypes in a purely visual environment. We test the framework using photographs from the Twitter feeds of the main party leaders in the 2018 Ontario election. The note concludes by reflecting on the methodological challenges of examining gender in visual political content online.