Research in Political Behaviour

My academic research career has been focussed on Political Behaviour. That is, mostly the study of the actions and choices of citizens in democracies. I've studied vote choice, referendum choice, media effects on voters, the formation of attitudes, judgments of governments under federalism, the effect of election polls on voters, survey design and survey modes, the effect of the number of parties on voters, and the factors influencing citizens' satisfaction with democracy.



Statistics and Statistical Software Skills

I have used and taught statistics, data analysis, and statistical software since 1995. I am best with Stata but have used R, S-plus, SPSS, Shazam, and more. My statistical and analytic skills are mostly in the realm of econometrics but I have dabbled in Bayesian methods and MCMC estimation.



Experiments on Party Systems

I was a co-investigator on the Making Electoral Democracy Work project. Our UBC work involved experiments where subjects saw articles describing an election campaign in another province. The experimental conditions were different numbers of parties and parties with different degrees of policy extremity. We produced several research papers.



Co-Principal Investigator, Canada Election Study 2011-2015

I was one of four PI's on the CES to study the 2011 and 2015 Canadian Federal Elections. The work involved planning a multi-mode survey in both elections, balancing continuity with past studies and innovation. My specialization was the online survey mode and comparison of survey modes.