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Discriminatory attitudes towards racial minorities are prevalent throughout society. However, there is mixed evidence of electoral discrimination for racial minority candidates beyond the American context. This paper investigates the effect of racial attitudes on the electoral performance of Canada's New Democratic Party (NDP), by examining the case of Jagmeet Singh, the country's first major federal party leader of color. Relying on three surveys from the Canadian Election Study (2015–2021) and controlling for demographics, ideology, and partisanship, we find voters with more negative attitudes toward racial minorities were significantly: (1) less likely to vote for the NDP under Singh's leadership; (2) more likely to abandon than join the party in his first federal election; and (3) more likely to view Singh negatively than his predecessor. The findings suggest that some racial minority candidates likely face significant electoral penalties, which may contribute to the consistent underrepresentation of racial minorities throughout democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has created yet another dimension of performance on which governments can be judged during elections. This article focuses on how the pandemic and its management factored into vote choices in provincial elections in Canada. Did pandemic considerations overwhelm other factors, or was it a tangential consideration? We address this question with data from a series of two-wave election surveys that were conducted by the Consortium on Electoral Democracy (C-Dem) using online samples of citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women politicians have long faced a gendered media environment, where their novelty, potential (in)competence, family, and appearance have been over-emphasized in comparison to men. Much of this literature has focused on politicians running for office and women who hold legislative office. Little research investigates gendered news media presentations of women as heads of government. While the literature predicts that women heads of government should experience gendered differences in news coverage, there is also good reason to expect that news about government operations should not vary based on the gender of the government leader. Using their first year of online news coverage (N = 11,675), we build a series of dictionaries and use automated content analysis to assess how frequently heads of government's uniqueness, gender, family, appearance, sexual orientation, character, and competence are presented. We also assess the tone of news about each head of government. Results show that gendered coverage exists for women heads of government in potentially surprising ways. Fewer new stories are written about them, on average, than men. Women's coverage features more feminine and masculine gendered identifiers, as well as more coverage about their clothing. We find little evidence for increased personalization, and women's character and competence are presented more positively than men's. Though blunt, this analysis shows that news about heads of government remains gendered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a unique survey experiment in the 2011 Canadian Election Study data set, this paper examines the ways in which racial cues influence attitudes towards redistributive policy. While work in the USA points to a strong racialization of welfare attitudes, little research explores the ways in which racial cues may structure attitudes about welfare elsewhere. In the Canadian context, Aboriginal peoples have faced both historic persecution and continue to face severe discrimination. They also experience much higher levels of poverty than other groups in Canada. Our results examine the effect that (hypothetical) Aboriginal recipients have on public support for social assistance. Results suggest that respondents' support for redistribution is lower when recipients are Aboriginal rather than white. As we have seen in the USA, then, support for welfare is related to racialized perceptions about those who benefit from social assistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional models of voter turnout lead us to expect men to vote in greater numbers than women. Yet in advanced industrialized democracies, women tend to participate in elections as much, or more, than men do. This study addresses this puzzle by drawing on the social capital literature to help explain the paradox of voter turnout for women. Women are in fact “rich” in various forms of social capital, especially more informal networks of reciprocity which are often viewed as apolitical and not measured in resource models of voter turnout. Drawing on the Canadian National Survey of Giving, Volunteering, and Participating (NSGVP), the findings show that informal social capital helps explain why women turn out to vote at similar levels as men, despite having fewer traditional resources at their disposal. Hence, this study provides evidence that women's path to participation is different than men's. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]