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Cet article réfléchit à la pertinence d’un séminaire doctoral en science politique sur les conditions de production du savoir en milieu universitaire et la préparation d’activités pratiques de recherche. Il s’appuie sur des échanges entre les professeures qui ont enseigné le séminaire et une étudiante du doctorat qui y a pris part, ainsi que sur les résultats d’un questionnaire auprès des étudiant·es qui ont suivi le séminaire entre 2016 et 2021. Ce séminaire a permis une démocratisation de l’accès aux codes de la discipline, une compréhension plus fine des rapports de pouvoir en milieu universitaire et un soutien émotionnel et intellectuel au début du parcours doctoral., This article reflects on the relevance of a doctoral seminar in political science on the conditions of knowledge production in academia and the preparation of practical research activities. It is based on exchanges between the professors who taught the seminar and a doctoral student who took part in it, as well as on the results of a questionnaire sent to students who took the class between 2016 and 2021. This seminar allowed a democratization of access to the norms of the discipline, a finer understanding of power relations in academia, and emotional and intellectual support in the early stages of the PhD.

The relationship between ethnic diversity and social solidarity has become increasingly tenuous with the advance of globalization. Immigrant access to the welfare state has been a salient issue throughout the West recently, most especially in Europe after the enlargement of the European Union eastwards in 2004 and the migration crisis of 2015 (Reeskens and van der Meer 2018). Migration and diversity have been attributed with stimulating welfare chauvinism, which has led to a burgeoning body of research into this line of political inquiry (Kitschelt 1997). Previous research has largely focused on the national identity of the majority population by measuring the nature of their identification with the nation. However, this focus is inadequate because it leaves out how the majority population perceives the relationship of immigrants to the nation. If immigrants are perceived by the majority as being less committed to the national community, they are likely to suffer from “membership penalties” (Banting et al. 2022; Harell et al. 2021). When immigrants are perceived as less deserving, then their claims-making can be seen as less legitimate than native-born citizens. Although immigrants are less likely today to be formally excluded from the nation as pathways to citizenship are available, they continue to be subject to a form of hierarchical inclusion between an ethno-national core and penalized outsider minority (Antonsich and Petrillo 2019), at least in some cases and by some native-born citizens. Membership penalties imposed by the majority are likely to surface over support for redistribution. This is because welfare state support relies on a sense of community membership, which typically has been tied to notions of nationhood (Marshall 1950). Recent research shows that people are more willing to redistribute benefits when they perceive others in society as equally committed to the national community (Harell et al. 2021). Despite a large experimental literature that shows that immigrants and racialized minorities are less likely to be seen as deserving of welfare (Ford and Koostra 2017; Harell, Soroka and Iyengar, 2016) little work looks at how cues of membership influence attitudes toward redistribution. The aim of this project is to better understand how individual behavior by immigrants can influence perceptions of commitment to the national community, to test the extent they matter for support for redistribution compared to common indicators in the literature, such as economic situation and racial prejudice. To do so, we draw on a unique cross-national survey, with an embedded social media experiment that manipulates cues about commitment to the host society, the immigrant's racial background, and their employment status. This preregistration plan only focuses on the social media experiment embedded within the larger study.

This study explores whether appeals to human rights or Canadian values are effective in generating support for the extension of social protections to racialized and/or non-citizen residents in Canada. The project builds on previous research in the US (Voss et al. 2020) that examined whether framing hardships such as food insecurity and lack of access to health care as violations of civil rights, human rights, or American values affected public attitudes regarding rights or value violations or support for government action to address such hardships. The California-based experiment found that rights-based language had little effect on support for government action and that registered voters made clear distinctions regarding noncitizens’ deservingness for government assistance on the basis of their legal status. In this experiment, we similarly test whether human rights or national (“Canadian”) values frames have an impact on support for protections in Canada, and whether these differ on the basis of the individual’s racial or legal status in Canada. Principally, we analyze Canadians’ response to two rights-violation scenarios – food insecurity and police targeting – to assess if rights-based or value-based appeals affect Canadians’ support for co-citizens and noncitizens. Further, we manipulate the race and legal status of the individual profiled in the vignette to test whether such factors impact participants’ reactions to the frames. We anticipate that the frames will exert some effects on public attitudes regarding rights or values violations and support for government action, but that these effects will differ on the basis of race and legal status.

In this study we investigate the effect of threats to self-concept on individuals’ levels of prejudice, self-concept, and efficacy, as well as individuals’ levels of political ambition, political efficacy, and preference for political leadership

The goal of this study is to understand norms regarding democratic principles in Canadians. We are especially interested in whether priming Canadian norms affects people's own support for democratic principles.

We investigate whether learning about one’s relatively poor competitive performance compared to another gender induces prejudice toward that gendered outgroup. A sample of (n=1620) subjects will complete an experiment involving a competitive task. Participants are randomly assigned to receive negative feedback about their gendered group's poor performance. Following this, we assess their levels of sexism. We hypothesize that: 1) men who receive negative feedback about their performance relative to women will report higher sexism. We also introduce a non-binary measure of masculinity/femininity that helps explain how gender identity affects these outcomes.

This study builds on previous work that shows that perceived lack of control and racial prejudice can induce more negative attitudes toward refugees. Lack of control is particularly salient in immigration when flows are not easily regulated by the state and when the public perceives a large number of refugees, especially in comparison to the status quo. Furthermore, when refugees are perceived as being more culturally distant from the host society, we expect prejudice to dampen support for refugees. In this study, we test a new method for manipulating group size (to manipulate feelings of control) and racial cues using randomly assigned emojis (to manipulate cultural distance and group size). Compared to general information about the number of refugee claimants in Canada, we test three different size cues presented as proportions of the Canadians population (1 in 400, 10 in 4,000, 100 in 40,000), and three racial cue manipulations (no image, yellow default emojis, and brown tone emojis). We expect prior attitudes about diversity will moderate these effects.

This is an update for the second wave of the project pre-registered as "Democratic Norms in Canada" (June 28, 2022).

The notion that voters incorporate the economy in different ways into their voting calculus is well accepted in the electoral behavior literature (Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier 2019). Much ink has been spelled on various questions such as whether voters decide based on retrospective or prospective economic evaluations and sociotropic or egocentric considerations (e.g., Lacy and Christenson 2017). Yet, the number of studies assessing how peoples’ certainty in their economic assessment moderates the relationship between economic evaluations and voting is limited (for the exception, see Dettrey and Palmer 2013). Political science research in the 1990s and early 2000s concluded that, in accordance with insights from psychology, peoples’ uncertainty in their own beliefs and attitudes are crucial to understand when and how they affect peoples’ behavior (e.g., Alvarez and Brehm 2002; Zaller 1992). In a seminal piece, Alvarez and Franklin state: “Citizens face an inherently uncertain political world yet they are nonetheless frequently called upon to make consequential political choices” (1994, 671). Against this background, we ask: How does uncertainty about sociotropic economic assessments effect economic voting?

We study whether preferences over voting methods change due to priming worry about the safety of in-person voting, in the form of different information about the current pandemic situation (focusing on cases/hospitalization and vaccine availability) and by varying the timeline for the election itself.

Abundant research in social science supports the proposition that individuals are sensitive to comparative assessments and use benchmark for evaluation. However, little is known about whether citizens’ political attitudes involve benchmarking against the democratic situation of their neighboring country. The events of January 6, 2021 at the US Capitol Building, which marked the end phase of the Trump administration, provide us with an opportunity to investigate whether citizens’ political attitudes are affected by this type of highly salient event. We suggest that democratic backsliding in a neighboring country can serve as a reference point for citizens to evaluate their own country’s democratic performance. When citizens are aware that the democratic regime of the neighboring country is under threat, we expect they shall see the status quo of their domestic country’s democracy in a comparatively more favorable light. We test this expectation by embedding a factorial experiment in a cross-sectional survey collected in Canada’s 2021 Democracy Checkup gathered by the Consortium on Electoral Democracy, in which respondents are primed to consider a moment of democratic backsliding in the U.S.

Our project seeks to understand the power of “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) in current popular debate and primary election campaigns to mobilize and divide public opinion. The strength of “CRT” derives, we believe, not simply from a lack of knowledge about what CRT actually is. We suspect its political strength lies in the fact that CRT as a term is ambiguously related to racism. “CRT” as a phrase allows for the expression of what might for some people be otherwise unpalatable attitudes. Our logic is motivated in part by the suspicion that the phrase “critical race theory” is especially powerful in activating not only racial biases, but also partisan identity, independent of racial biases. Our interest is accordingly not so much on the direct impact of issue framing, but rather on the ways in which partisanship and racism are activated using “CRT” versus other alternative frames.