Browsing by Author "Stewart, David K."

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    Direct and Indirect Effects of Authoritarianism on Policy Preferences in Canada
    (2018-09-21) Santos, John Bernard; Thomas, Melanee Lynn; Stewart, David K.; Tuxhorn, Kim Lee
    Authoritarianism, as a value orientation that prioritizes conformity over autonomy, is a popular explanation for political preferences and behaviour but it is misunderstood as existing only on the right; as either an all-powerful or insignificant predictor of policy preferences; and as a predisposition that is activated by threat. Our understanding of it is further hampered by a lack of research outside of the United States. I address these problems by constructing a model where authoritarian values, moderated by perceived threat, exert a direct effect on policy preferences and indirect effects through prejudice, ideology, and partisanship. Testing this model on data from the Canadian Election Study, I find evidence that authoritarianism cuts across the political spectrum; is not activated by threat, but rather has greater effects in the absence of threat; and is partially mediated by prejudice and ideology. This shines a new light on some Canadian policy debates (especially the banning of religious facial coverings) and replicates previous American findings.
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    Playing in the Margins: Collaboration Between Local Party Organizations in the Canadian Party System
    (2016) Currie-Wood, Robin; Sayers, Anthony M.; Stewart, David K.; Thomas, Melanee
    Collaboration between local party organizations is a peculiar organizational trait for Canadian political parties. It is peculiar because local party organizations were once conceived to be solely concerned with electoral activities in their own district, while central parties helped local campaigns in strategically important ridings. Collaboration also goes against the prevailing theory that political parties will centralize operations under new party finance law. Despite this some local party organizations in the Conservative Party of Canada began helping campaigns in other ridings. The population of financial data are assessed for the Conservative, Liberal, and New Democratic Party between 2007 and 2011 in order to determine why parties at the constituency level mobilize their own resources in other constituencies. Playing in the Margins reveals that collaboration occurs in order to better utilize campaign effort made in competitive and uncompetitive ridings, and may even be a new component of intra-party contests.
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    Protestant Liberty: Religion and the Making of Canadian Liberalism, 1828-1878
    (2019-08-29) Forbes, James Murray; Marshall, David B.; Marshall, David B.; Spangler, Jewel L.; Colpitts, George; Campbell, Lyndsay M.; Stewart, David K.; Heaman, Elsbeth
    This study offers a new interpretation of the origins and nature of nineteenth-century liberalism by re-examining the role of religion in the politics of Upper Canada (Ontario). Whereas other recent studies have characterized this era’s liberal thought as neutral toward religion and universally transferable across cultures, this study argues that the early origins of Canadian liberalism were firmly rooted in the British tradition of Protestant Dissent and based on the premise of guarding against the encroachment of illiberal non-Protestant faiths. After the union of Upper Canada with the predominantly French-Catholic Lower Canada in 1840, this “Protestant liberty” perspective came into conflict with a more neutral alternative which sought to strip liberalism of its religious roots in order to appeal to Catholic voters and allies. Beginning with the reform victory in the 1828 election, this study traces the development of liberal thought in Upper Canada through the political turmoil and rebellions of the 1830s, the Union of the Canadas and its resultant mid-century sectional crises, and the separation of this union due to the reformers’ initiative in the Confederation talks of the 1860s. As a political strategy in the early national period of the 1870s, however, the Liberal Party explicitly sought a more decisive break from its Protestant heritage and instead began to favour the culturally neutral version of liberalism based on free markets and appeals to the workingman. This eventual marginalization and stigmatization of the “Protestant liberty” perspective signaled the beginning of a secular-materialist ethos for the liberal order in Canada.
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    Recognizing Campaign Effects on Social Media: A Computerized Text Analysis of the 2015 Canadian General Election on Facebook
    (2019-09-13) Czarnecki, Lucas; Sayers, Anthony M.; Tuxhorn, Kim Lee; Stewart, David K.; Lucas, Jack; Brodie, Ian
    Previous research demonstrates that traditional campaign strategies such as door-to-door canvassing and advertisement have minimal persuasive effects on voters’ political attitudes and vote choice while simultaneously demonstrating strong activation effects on voters’ existing preferences. From this literature, numerous theoretical perspectives on campaign contact have emerged. The most predominant is the minimal effects thesis, which posits that campaigns have minimal effect influencing voters’ political attitudes, vote choice, and consequently, election outcomes. In contrast, the activation effects thesis posits that campaigns are consequential to election outcomes because campaign contact activates voters’ existing political preferences and mobilizes the electorate to vote. This thesis proposes to reconcile the two theoretical perspectives by demonstrating that the same type of campaign contact may have both minimal persuasive effects on voters’ political preferences and strong activation effects on voters’ emotions. The thesis hypothesizes then that campaign contact evokes emotional responses that encourage rather than discourage voting. To this end, the thesis examines campaign effects online from a unique dataset queried from Facebook consisting of federal party leaders’ campaign messages (N = 1,711) and the responses to those messages from everyday Facebook users (n = 92,813) during the 2015 Canadian general election campaign. Computational social science methods are employed to directly measure campaign contact’s persuasive and activation effects on partisan and nonpartisan Facebook users. The results demonstrate that campaign contact online has a minimal persuasive effect on Facebook users’ self-expressed political preferences as well as strong activation effects on those preferences. Activation effects manifest as emotional responses that are most pronounced when individuals react to attitude-divergent rather than attitude-consistent campaign messaging. Exposure to attitude-divergent contact evokes Facebook users to experience discrete negative emotions such as anger, which previous research has shown to increase the electorate’s propensity to vote. The efficacy of negative emotions, however, may incentivize political parties to adopt strategies that demonize political opponents and which may, therefore, contribute to negative partisanship online.
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    To Trade, or not to Trade: Explaining Lobbying Behaviour in the Canadian Dairy Sector
    (2019-09-05) Goodwin, Brett Owen; Tuxhorn, Kim Lee; Lucas, Jack; Stewart, David K.; Brodie, Ian
    There is a the motivating question behind this thesis: I am interested in better understanding how international trade negotiations impact the decisions taken by domestic firms when lobbying the government in a small open economy. I want to focus on the role of lobbyists in the relationship between trade policy and firm preference for two reasons. First, data complied on lobbying behaviour indicates that certain sectors have exhibited unusual variations in lobbying patterns. Explaining this empirical question is the core object of the analysis below. A second motivation is to assess the extent to which domestic lobbyists are able to impact the outcome of free trade negotiations in a meaningful way. In addition to the theoretical contributions to the role of lobbying behaviour, the findings in this thesis with respect to intra-industry dynamics and lobbying behaviour will be of keen interest to policy-makers since this behaviour lends insight into the market structure and relative power of firms in the dairy sector.