Eugénie Dostie-Goulet

Social networks and the development of political interest

The recent decline in voter turnout, a trend largely attributed to lack of youth participation, has focused the attention of many scholars on the study of young people and politics. While great strides have been made in understanding youth disengagement, one dimension of the field that remains understudied is the development of political interest. This research begins to address this gap by evaluating one specific influence, the social network. Using a panel of 499 Quebec teenagers surveyed annually for three years, this study considers how political interest is affected by political discussion among a teenagers parents, friends and teachers. As one might expect, analysis of the data confirmed that parents who often discuss politics have children who are more interested in politics and who are more likely to develop political interest. The effect of other agents of socialization, however, should not be underestimated. Friends were often found to be on par with parents concerning their influence on change in political interest, and results concerning teachers suggest that some classes, history in this case, can play an important civic role.

Voting Strategically in Canada and Britain

The objective of this paper is to ascertain the level of strategic voting in Canada and Britain through a simple “direct” approach. We wish to show that the level of strategic voting is remarkably constant over time and across space; it varies little from one election to the next in Canada and the level of strategic voting is about the same in Britain and Canada. We show that though the overall degree of strategic voting is low in each of the elections examined, it represents a substantial fraction of those for whom strategic voting is a meaningful option. We define strategic voting as a vote for a party or candidate that is not the preferred one, motivated by the intention to affect the outcome of the election ( Blais et al. 2001 ). This entails that in order to determine whether a vote is strategic or not, we need to know the person’s vote choice, her preferences, and her perceptions of the likely outcome of the election ( Blais and Bodet 2007 ). There are two basic approaches to the measurement of strategic voting: direct and indirect ( Blais et al. 2005 ). The direct method consists in specifying the conditions that need to be satisfied in order for us to conclude that a vote is strategic. The indirect (or parametric) method consists in constructing a model of vote choice and in estimating, on the basis of simulations, how many individuals would have voted differently if perceptions of the likely outcome of the election had had no effect on their decision. In this paper, we make use of the direct approach. We first apply this method to Canadian elections. Since 1988, Canadian Election Studies have included questions about voters’ perceptions of the various parties’ chances of winning in their constituency, questions that are required to ascertain strategic voting in single-member plurality systems. We then turn to the 2005 British Election Study, which incorporated questions about perceived chances of winning.