Peter John Loewen

How does ideological diversity within electoral districts shape voter turnout? We argue that participation is highest at moderate levels of ideological heterogeneity: limited disagreement can make political differences more salient and consequential, while extensive disagreement can generate ambiguity and discourage participation. Using data from 31,246 respondents during the 2015 Canadian federal election and positions on 37 policy issues, we examine this relationship at both the individual and district levels. We find a significant inverted-U relationship between individuals’ ideological distance from their district mean and their likelihood of voting, net of electoral competitiveness and campaign mobilization. District-level turnout exhibits a substantively similar, though statistically less clear, pattern. A cross-level interaction further shows that the individual-level relationship varies with district ideological heterogeneity. These findings demonstrate that turnout is shaped not simply by individual preferences or electoral competition, but by the ideological context in which voters are embedded.

1. In contemporary democracies, ethical disagreements serve as tests of electoral accountability, revealing how citizens evaluate whether political leaders conform to the shared ethical views of th...

Artificial intelligence is poised to reconfigure the economy and politics. Although new technologies often produce net economic gains, their costs and benefits are unequally distributed, making them susceptible to politicization. We argue that whether and how AI becomes mobilized for partisan gain will depend on the public’s causal beliefs about the winners and losers of AI. We capture these causal beliefs using a novel survey instrument fielded with 6,056 Americans and Canadians. Through latent class analysis, we show that a significant portion of the public theorizes AI to be a threat—harming consumers and replacing rather than complementing workers’ skills. These causal theories are already aligned with political preferences, predicting support for policies that delay job loss over those that help workers adapt, and polarizing voters along existing partisan lines. We conclude that fissures in the public’s attitudes toward AI already exist and can be easily channeled toward politics.

We explore how honesty-humility and the other HEXACO personality traits relate to citizens’ nascent ambition and their recruitment to run for office. We extend previous work on virtue-related personality traits and political recruitment in two important ways: we go beyond North America and conduct a five-country cross-national study with nationally representative samples. More importantly, going beyond individual-level differences in nascent ambition, we also address how honesty-humility predicts the likelihood of being asked to and actually running for office. Based on data from Canada, Denmark, Israel, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, we demonstrate that citizens with lower levels of honesty-humility are more likely to have considered running, to deem themselves qualified to run, to have been asked to run, and to actually have run for a political office. From a ‘virtue ethics’ perspective, this is highly concerning: low honesty-humility predisposes individuals to engage in unethical behavior and decision-making. We discuss implications for the quality of political representation.

The potential for artificial intelligence to disrupt life and work has prompted debates on its regulation. This paper examines the gender gap in attitudes toward AI, focusing on how differences in risk-taking influence support for AI adoption and regulation. Using survey data from 3,000 respondents in Canada and the United States, we find that women are more skeptical of AI’s economic benefits and more likely to emphasize its risks, such as job displacement. This gap appears to be linked to women’s higher general risk aversion and greater exposure to AI-related risks. Experimental evidence shows that as AI’s benefits become more uncertain, women’s support for its adoption drops more sharply than men’s, while their support for government intervention increases. Given AI’s potential to exacerbate gender inequalities, policies that overlook women’s perspectives risk perpetuating workplace and societal disparities.

Survey researchers increasingly recognize the need to update their gender questions to recognize the existence of transgender and nonbinary people. In this research note, we evaluate changes to the Canadian Election Study (CES) gender questions from 2019 to 2021. Our analyses suggest researchers should add “nonbinary” as a close-ended option and an open-ended response option to gender identity questions. They also suggest that researchers should not include “transgender” in a separate, mutually exclusive response option alongside men and women in gender identity questions but instead identify transgender men and women through a follow-up question. These recommendations can help guide the design of future surveys.

Which matters more for voters, the political party or the policy positions of electoral candidates? We contribute to this long standing debate by analyzing the relative importance of policy content and party cues in the multi-party Canadian context. Using the Canadian case allows us to disentangle the effects of policy and party on voter decision-making, which are closely intertwined in the more polarized and extensively studied U.S. case. First, we employ a conjoint survey experiment to test whether the effect of an electoral candidate’s policy position on their evaluation by voters depends on the implicit party cues that are embedded in the policy. We find that while Canadians often associate policies with specific parties, they do not seem to use these implicit party cues in their evaluation of the candidates, focusing on policy congruence instead. Second, we test whether explicit party cues reduce the weight of policy information in candidate evaluations and find that they do not. Overall, our findings suggest that party cues are not as useful for voters in multi-party systems with low polarization, and that voters rely on policy information to make decisions in these contexts.

While political scientists regularly engage in spirited theoretical debates about elections and voting behavior, few have noticed that elected politicians also have theories of elections and voting. Here, we investigate politicians’ positions on eight central theoretical debates in the area of elections and voting behavior and compare politicians’ theories to those held by ordinary citizens. Using data from face-to-face interviews with nearly one thousand politicians in 11 countries, together with corresponding surveys of more than twelve thousand citizens, we show that politicians overwhelmingly hold thin, minimalist, “democratic realist” theories of voting, while citizens’ theories are more optimistic and policy oriented. Politicians’ theoretical tendencies—along with their theoretical misalignment from citizens—are remarkably consistent across countries. These theories are likely to have important consequences for how politicians campaign, communicate with the public, think about public policy, and represent their constituents.

The “gender gap” in voting is one of the most well-documented findings in survey research across democracies. However, gender gap research has traditionally assumed that everyone is either a man or a woman, which does not account for the growing number of people who identify as nonbinary. How do nonbinary people differ from men and women in their party identification and voting behavior? We answer this question using data from the 2021 Canadian Election Study online panel, which has a large enough subsample of nonbinary respondents to identify gaps in party identification and voting behavior. Nonbinary people are much less likely to identify with and vote for the Liberal Party or Conservative Party and much more likely to identify with and vote for the social democratic New Democratic Party (NDP) than both men and women. Many of these gaps persist even when restricting the analysis to LGBTQ respondents, adjusting for demographic variables that predict nonbinary identity, and adjusting for issue attitudes. Nonbinary people’s distinctiveness from men and women suggests that researchers need to add nonbinary response options to gender questions and, wherever possible, incorporate nonbinary people into analyses of gender and politics.