public-opinion

Carbon Tax At The Crossroads

A recent presentation at Wilfrid Laurier University for the Department of Political Science's Policy Dialogue

Public Spending Priorities in the 2018 and 2022 Ontario Elections

LISPOP commissioned a survey of voters during the 2022 election and we’ll be disseminating findings from it over the next few weeks. But as an opening, I wanted to take a look at public spending priorities in the 2022 eleciton compared to the 2018 election. To do so, I compared the spending priorities from LISPOP’s 2018 Ontario Provincial Election Survey with those from the 2022 survey. Respondents were ppresented with a series of issue areas and asked to state whether they preferred spending more, the same or less on that area.

Right Wing Populism and Municipal Governance: The Case of Toronto

Beyond Regions and Ideology: Using Cultural Theory to Explain Risk Perception in Canada

Cultural Theory (CT) has been widely used to explain variations in risk perception but has rarely been tested in Canada.This contribution represents the most thorough attempt to adapt Cultural Theory to the Canadian context. Results suggest that …

Opposition to carbon pricing and right-wing populism

We analyze a survey of Ontario voters to explain the victory of the right-wing populist Ontario Progressive Conservatives under Doug Ford. We test whether or not opposition to the previous government's carbon pricing plan was a significant reason for motivating support for the Progressive Conservatives. We find that it was a marginally significant factor.

Salience of Immigration and Personal Finances in Ontario

Colleagues and I at the Laurier Institute For The Study Of Public Opinion and Policy (LISPOP) conducted a survey of ONtario voters in the 2018 election. One of the things we were interested in was people’s feelings about their personal financial situation and about immigration and refugees. The reasoning was simple: it seemed in the campaign like the PCs were really trying to capitalize on people’s anger. In the literature on populism, two common schools of thought are that people are angry about their economic situation and about threats from immigration and refugee.

Right-wing populism in a metropolis

Elections such as the UK “Brexit” referendum, Donald Trump’s ascendancy to the presidency, and the growth of the Alternative for Germany party in Germany have led to concerns about the viability of liberal democratic institutions. Voters appear …

The Ambiguous Definitions of Open Government

We present the results of a 2014 survey of Canadian parliamentarians, journalists and bloggers in which respondents were asked to rank competing definitions of open government. Overall, respondents preferred to define open government in terms of …

The Ambiguous Definitions of Open Government

My colleague George Wootten and I have a new paper in the Canadian Journal of Political Science out in which we survey journalists, parliamentarians and bloggers in Canada in 2014 and asked them to rank different definitions of “open government”. We hypothesized that people would choose different definitions of open government that fit their institutional position. We presented our survey respondents definitions of open government that reflected concepts such as responsiveness, information, accountability and participation.

Public Perceptions of Hydraulic Fracturing (Fracking) in Canada

Public Perceptions of Hydraulic Fracturing (Fracking) in Canada: Corporate Ownership, Issue Familiarity, and Cultural Bias