François Pétry

Measuring How Political Parties Keep Their Promises: A Positive Perspective from Political Science

This chapter addresses three questions about the relationship between political discourse and action: Do political parties keep their promises once elected? What are the methodologies used by scholars to demonstrate that political parties keep (or do not keep) their campaign promises? Are these methodologies valid and reliable? We answer these questions based on a review of 18 journal articles and book chapters published in English and French over the past forty years that report quantitative measures of election promise fulfillment in North America and Europe. We find that parties fulfill 67% of their promises on average, with wide variation across time, countries, and regimes. Most studies have major methodological weaknesses (no operational definition, no mention of relevant documentation, flawed research design) although the more recent ones tend to show higher levels of methodological sophistication and a modicum of scientific transparency.

Electoral and Partisan Cycles in the Canadian Provinces

This study tests explanations of the growth of Canadian provincial governments that draw from the political budget cycle approach. The approach assumes that governments jointly respond to electoral and partisan goals. When the next election is not expected soon, the government uses its discretionary power to pursue its ideological target. When the next election is near, politicians in government, fearing electoral defeat, deviate from their normal behaviour and engage in a re-election effort by undertaking an expansionary policy. This study suggests that provincial governments behave in the opportunistic fashion described by the model. Moreover, there is no sign that this opportunistic behaviour has been affected by government cutbacks in the 1990s.

Explaining the Evolution of Government Size in the Canadian Provinces

Using time-series and time-series cross-section data from the 10 Canadian provinces, the authors test several competing explanations of government growth. Multivariate analyses reveal that the results are sensitive to how government size is measured. The authors find strong empirical support for the intergovernmental grants, the bureau voting, and the electoral budget cycle explanations irrespective of the measure of government size used. The party control explanation, the fiscal supply explanation, and part of Wagners law give superior results when they are evaluated using real (adjusted) measures of government size than when they are evaluated using nominal (unadjusted) measures. The authors find virtually no support for the personal income part of Wagners law.

Measuring Government Growth in the Canadian Provinces: Decomposing Real Growth and Deflator Effects

In this paper, we argue that, when measuring government growth, we should distinguish among three growth phenomena: growth resulting from the broader scope of government activity, referred to as real growth; growth that results from higher costs of providing government goods and services, referred to as deflator effect; and growth in the simple ratio of government expenditure to gross domestic product (GDP), nominal growth, which is due to the combined impact of real growth and deflator effect. Using data on provincial government spending, we show that, over the 1971-95 period, there has been no real growth in three provinces and that there has been a substantial deflator effect on provincial government growth in all ten provinces.

Follow the Pollsters: Inaccuracies in Media Coverage of the Horse-race during the 2008 Canadian Election

There has been a marked increase in the use of media-sponsored polls during recent Canadian federal election campaigns. More than 200 national surveys on voter intentions were issued by major polling organizations during the 37-day federal election campaign of 2008 ~including daily tracking polls!. By comparison, Johnston and colleagues ~1992: 121! mention 22 national polls on voter intentions reported by the media during the 51-day federal election campaign of 1988. The recent proliferation of media-sponsored election polls has contributed to exacerbate

Learning Outcomes of Game-Theoretic Computer Simulation: An Evaluation

This article reports an experimental use of Conflict and Cooperation (C&C) in a large undergraduate class and evaluates the effect of using the program on student learning as compared with the next best conventional teaching method. Keywords: prisoners dilemma, computer simulation, game theory, collective goods, cooperation.

L'analyse automatisée du ton médiatique : construction et utilisation de la version française du Lexicoder Sentiment Dictionary

This article introduces a new dictionary for the automated analysis of the tone of French media. We named it the French Lexicoder Sentiment Dictionary ( LSDFr ) in reference to the English lexicon developed by Young and Soroka (2012), the Lexicoder Sentiment Dictionary ( LSD ), from which the LSDFr was built. We compare the LSDFr to the only other French sentiment lexicon, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count ( LIWC ). First, we detail the construction of the dictionary. We then test the internal validity of the LSDFr comparing it with a corpus of manually coded texts. Finally, we test the external validity of LSDFr by measuring how the media tone, calculated using our dictionary, predicts voting intentions in the last four Quebec elections. Our goal is to enable other researchers to conduct media analyses with a comparable corpus of texts in French.

The Regulation of Poll Reporting in Canada

La Loi électorale du Canada, adoptée en 2000, régit la façon dont les médias doivent divulguer les données techniques concernant les méthodes utilisées pour réaliser des sondages en période électorale. Mais la couverture médiatique des sondages faits hors des périodes électorales, qui n’est pas soumise à ces règles, ne fait l’objet que d’une autorégulation. Dans cet article, nous analysons la couverture faite par trois journaux (La Presse, le Globe and Mail et le Calgary Herald) de ces deux types de sondages. Nos résultats montrent que la façon dont les médias divulguent les données techniques relatives aux sondages est loin de correspondre aux normes reconnues dans l’industrie. Toutefois, ces informations sont au moins aussi complètes dans le cas des sondages non électoraux que dans celui des sondages électoraux. Par ailleurs, on observe que, dans les articles de fond qui traitent de sondages réalisés pour les journaux qui les publient, on retrouve significativement plus de données techniques que dans les courts articles où il est simplement fait mention de sondages non réalisés pour le compte des journaux qui les publient. Nous concluons donc que les normes et les règles qui s’appliquent à la divulgation des méthodes utilisées dans les sondages influencent peu la façon habituelle dont les médias traitent des sondages.

Comment analyser les données chronologiques pour plan partitionné en sciences sociales

How to Analyze Time-Series Cross-Section Data in the Social Sciences. In this paper we present, step by step, a SAS statistical program for the analysis of Time-Series Cross-Section (TSCS) data which gives robust and unbiased regression estimates. Several statistical packages (SHAZAM. SAS. SPSS) offer procedures for the analysis of TSCS data based entirely, or in part, on a particular application of the Generalized Least Squares (GLS) method developed by Parks and Kmenta. In a series of recent articles. Beck and Katz have shown that the GLS estimation method often underestimates substantially the standard error of regression parameters in TSCS models. They suggest a new method for generating adequate correction of the error process in TSCS models. This method consists of using Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) parameter estimates first. and then replacing OLS standards errors (which are biased) with unbiased Panel-Corrected Standard Errors (PCSEs) obtained after correcting both temporal autocorrelation and spatial correlation structures. The paper provides a SAS application of the method suggested by Beck and Katz. The SAS program can be downloaded through our web site.

Time and the Fulfillment of Election Pledges

In this article, we highlight the importance of accounting for time in the study of pledge fulfillment, effectively adding a significant element to the ongoing academic discussions of the factors that influence the fulfillment of party promises. Unlike previous analyses in which pledge fulfillment is assumed to be a uniform process occurring over time, we analyze party pledge fulfillment using a discrete time approach: doing so highlights yet unobserved dynamics. More precisely, we find that if the government does not enact pledges within the first half of its mandate, the probability of these pledges ever being fulfilled drops drastically. The discrete time modeling approach also allows us to investigate the relationships existing between the budget balance and pledge fulfillment more thoroughly. Our research also extends the study of pledge fulfillment to a new case, the province of Quebec, for the period of 1994–2014 encompassing six governments. Finally, we also conduct similar analyses on Canadian pledge fulfillment data spanning seven successive governments from 1993 to 2015. This study analyzes a total of 1431 manually coded election pledges.