The 1974 Federal Election Campaign Act Amendments: The Shortcomings of Good Intentions

Abstract We examine citizens' evaluations of majoritarian and proportional electoral outcomes through an innovative experimental design. We ask respondents to react to six possible electoral outcomes during the 2019 Canadian federal election campaign. There are two treatments: the performance of the party and the proportionality of electoral outcomes. There are three performance conditions: the preferred party's vote share corresponds to vote intentions as reported in the polls at the time of the survey (the reference), or it gets 6 percentage points more (fewer) votes. There are two electoral outcome conditions: disproportional and proportional. We find that proportional outcomes are slightly preferred and that these preferences are partly conditional on partisan considerations. In the end, however, people focus on the ultimate outcome, that is, who is likely to form the government. People are happy when their party has a plurality of seats and is therefore likely to form the government, and relatively unhappy otherwise. We end with a discussion of the merits and limits of our research design.

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Selective Attention and the Information Environment: Citizens’ Perceptions of Political Problems in the 2015 Swiss Federal Election Campaign

Swiss Political Science Review ◽

10.1111/spsr.12325 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 24 (4) ◽

pp. 464-486 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Bruno Wüest

Keyword(s):

Selective Attention ◽

Information Environment ◽

Election Campaign ◽

Federal Election

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Young Canadians in the 2008 Federal Election Campaign: Using Facebook to Probe Perceptions of Citizenship and Participation

Canadian Journal of Political Science ◽

10.1017/s0008423911000783 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 44 (4) ◽

pp. 859-881 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Nicole Goodman ◽

Heather Bastedo ◽

Lawrence LeDuc ◽

Jon H. Pammett

Keyword(s):

Voter Turnout ◽

Election Campaign ◽

Federal Election ◽

Young Voters ◽

Qualitative Approaches ◽

Social Media Site ◽

Collecte De Données ◽

Productive Research ◽

Cette Attitude ◽

Western Democracies

Abstract.The gradual withdrawal of young voters from the active electorate is one of the strongest and most important factors in accounting for declining voter turnout in Canada and other western democracies. Because qualitative approaches may be better able to probe the reasons underlying these changing values and attitudes than traditional mass surveys, we used the popular social media site Facebook during the 2008 federal election campaign to collect data on young people's perceptions of electoral politics in the context of their civic obligations. This medium proved to be a valuable and productive research tool. Based on this project, we argue that non-voting tends to be seen as a more socially acceptable behaviour to young voters than is typically found in the thinking of older cohorts, and that this may be connected to changing concepts of the obligations of citizenship.Résumé.Le désengagement graduel des jeunes électeurs est un des facteurs les plus importants pour expliquer le déclin de la participation électorale au Canada et dans les démocraties occidentales. Afin de mieux comprendre les causes de ce changement de valeurs et d'attitudes, nous avons utilisé le média socialFacebookafin de collecter des données qualitatives sur la perception des jeunes électeurs durant l'élection fédérale de 2008. Cette approche nous apparaît mieux adapter que l'approche traditionnelle caractérisée par l'utilisation de sondages d'opinion. Au terme de l'analyse, la collecte de données viaFacebooks'est avérée être une stratégie de recherche productive. En nous basant sur ces données, nous concluons que l'abstention électorale est un comportement plus socialement acceptable pour les jeunes électeurs que pour les électeurs plus âgés. Cette attitude pourrait être liée un changement conceptuel quant aux obligations associées à la citoyenneté.

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Googling Politics: Parties, Sources, and Issue Ownerships on Google in the 2017 German Federal Election Campaign

Social Science Computer Review ◽

10.1177/0894439319881634 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 089443931988163 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Julian Unkel ◽

Mario Haim

Keyword(s):

News Media ◽

Election Campaign ◽

Issue Ownership ◽

Federal Election ◽

Agent Based ◽

Political Actors ◽

Search Results ◽

Multimethod Approach ◽

Democratic Election ◽

Google Search

Democratic election campaigns require informed citizens. Yet, while the Internet allows for broader information through greater media choices, algorithmic filters, such as search engines, threaten to unobtrusively shape individual information repertoires. The purpose of this article is to analyze what search results people encounter when they employ various information orientations, and how these results reflect people’s attributions of issue ownership. A multimethod approach was applied during the 2017 German Federal Election campaign. First, human search behavior depicting various information orientations was simulated using agent-based testing to derive real search results from Google Search, which were then manually coded to identify information sources and ascribe issue ownerships. Second, a survey asked participants about which issues they attribute to which party. We find that search results originated mainly from established news outlets and reflected existing power relations between political parties. However, issue-ownership attributions of the survey participants were reflected poorly in the search results. In total, the results indicate that the fear of algorithmic constraints in the context of online search might be overrated. Instead, our findings (1) suggest that political actors still fail to claim their core issues among political search results, (2) highlight that news media (and thus existing media biases) feature heavily among search results, and (3) call for more media literacy among search engine users.

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