Christopher Cochrane
Biographic Data
| ID | 4193573 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Christopher Cochrane |
| GIVEN NAMES | Christopher |
| FAMILY NAME | Cochrane |
| SIGNATURE | COCHRANE C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0110-5395 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 199 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Electoral District Boundary Effects in Canada
This article introduces the Markov Riding Position Sampler (MaRiPoSa) for simulating Canadian elections under alternative configurations of electoral district boundaries. Despite Canada’s strictly non-partisan system of boundary design, MaRiPoSa demonstrates that, for a single Canadian election, there are alternative, allowable and more equitable configurations of boundaries to return either Liberal or Conservative governments without changing th…
Preferences for platform regulation of online hate speech are shared internationally
The Automatic Analysis of Emotion in Political Speech Based on Transcripts
Automatic sentiment analysis is used extensively in political science. The digitization of legislative transcripts has increased the potential application of established tools for the automated analyses of emotion in text. Unlike in writing, however, expressing emotion in speech involves intonation, facial expressions, and body language. Drawing on a new dataset of annotated texts and videos from the Canadian House of Commons, this paper does thr…
Parliamentary Debates in Canada (1901–2015)
This article analyzes the effect of procedural rule change on the dynamics of parliamentary speeches in the Canadian House of Commons between 1901 and 2015. During this period, several new rules were introduced to reduce the opportunities for private members to speak during the debates so that the government could get its business done within an acceptable amount of time. Our analysis looks at the impact of these rule changes on the content and o…
Birds of a Feather? Loyalty and Partisanship in the Reformed Canadian Senate
Since 2015, the Canadian Senate has undergone a series of reforms designed to make it more independent, ideologically diverse, and active in the legislative process. We use loyalty scores and vote scaling algorithms to situate the voting behaviour of senators, focusing primarily on the 41st and 42nd Parliaments (2011–2019), the period just before and after the changes, respectively. We find that the reforms have led to a loosening of party discip…
Word Embeddings for the Analysis of Ideological Placement in Parliamentary Corpora
Word embeddings, the coefficients from neural network models predicting the use of words in context, have now become inescapable in applications involving natural language processing. Despite a few studies in political science, the potential of this methodology for the analysis of political texts has yet to be fully uncovered. This paper introduces models of word embeddings augmented with political metadata and trained on large-scale parliamentar…
Digitization of the Canadian Parliamentary Debates
This paper describes the digitization and enrichment of the Canadian House of Commons English Debates from 1901 to present. We start by laying out the general framework in which this project took place and then present the structure of the database and provide guidelines to prospective users. The paper concludes with the introduction ofwww.lipad.ca, an online platform designed as a hub for archiving Canadian political data, with the parliamentary…
The Effects of Islam, Religiosity, and Socialization on Muslim-Canadian Opinions about Same-Sex Marriage
Critics of Islam often frame anti-Islamic positions as a defense of tolerance against intolerance, and of equality against inequality. Islam, for this perspective, poses challenges for the ideological integration of Muslim immigrants in Western societies. This paper examines Canadian Muslims’ opinions about same-sex marriage. The analysis suggests that Canadian Muslims, as a group, do have distinctively negative opinions about same-sex marriage, …
The asymmetrical structure of left/right disagreement: Left-wing coherence and right-wing fragmentation in comparative party policy
The left/right semantic is used widely to describe the patterns of party competition in democratic countries. This article examines the patterns of party policy in Anglo-American and Western European countries on three dimensions of left/right disagreement: wealth redistribution, social morality and immigration. The central questions are whether, and why, parties with left-wing or right-wing positions on the economy systematically adopt left-wing…
Scapegoating: Unemployment, far-right parties and anti-immigrant sentiment
Regions, Regionalism and Regional Differences in Canada
This article contests the concepts of “region” and “regionalism” in Canadian political science. There is widespread agreement among observers of politics in Canada that the country is divided in politically consequential ways along regional lines. There is little agreement, however, about what causes these regional divisions or, indeed, about where the lines of regional division should be drawn. As a result, rival explanations for regional differ…
Left/Right Ideology and Canadian Politics
This article examines the influence of ideology in Canadian politics. The core theory is that political opinions are bound together into ideological clusters by underlying influences that affect simultaneously the opinions of individuals about more than one issue. The central hypothesis is that ideological disagreement between the left and the right is asymmetrical, that is, that leftists and rightists bundle in different ways their opinions abou…
Left/Right Ideology and Canadian Politics—Erratum
We regret that the originally published paper (Cochrane 2010) did not contain the author's proof corrections. We apologize for this oversight and reproduce the entire corrected paper here
Individualization in Europe and America: Connecting Religious and Moral Values
After reviewing the major variations in how individualization is interpreted and explained, this article turns to the World Values Survey (WVS) data to empirically investigate one central aspect of individualization, namely, the connection between religiosity and moral values. That analysis demonstrates, first, that rates of decline in levels of religiosity in most advanced industrial states have been quite modest. The rate of change in moral out…
Word Embeddings for the Analysis of Ideological Placement in Parliamentary Corpora
Word embeddings, the coefficients from neural network models predicting the use of words in context, have now become inescapable in applications involving natural language processing. Despite a few studies in political science, the potential of this methodology for the analysis of political texts has yet to be fully uncovered. This paper introduces models of word embeddings augmented with political metadata and trained on large-scale parliamentar…
Scapegoating: Unemployment, far-right parties and anti-immigrant sentiment
Regions, Regionalism and Regional Differences in Canada
This article contests the concepts of “region” and “regionalism” in Canadian political science. There is widespread agreement among observers of politics in Canada that the country is divided in politically consequential ways along regional lines. There is little agreement, however, about what causes these regional divisions or, indeed, about where the lines of regional division should be drawn. As a result, rival explanations for regional differ…
Left/Right Ideology and Canadian Politics
This article examines the influence of ideology in Canadian politics. The core theory is that political opinions are bound together into ideological clusters by underlying influences that affect simultaneously the opinions of individuals about more than one issue. The central hypothesis is that ideological disagreement between the left and the right is asymmetrical, that is, that leftists and rightists bundle in different ways their opinions abou…
The asymmetrical structure of left/right disagreement: Left-wing coherence and right-wing fragmentation in comparative party policy
The left/right semantic is used widely to describe the patterns of party competition in democratic countries. This article examines the patterns of party policy in Anglo-American and Western European countries on three dimensions of left/right disagreement: wealth redistribution, social morality and immigration. The central questions are whether, and why, parties with left-wing or right-wing positions on the economy systematically adopt left-wing…
Digitization of the Canadian Parliamentary Debates
This paper describes the digitization and enrichment of the Canadian House of Commons English Debates from 1901 to present. We start by laying out the general framework in which this project took place and then present the structure of the database and provide guidelines to prospective users. The paper concludes with the introduction ofwww.lipad.ca, an online platform designed as a hub for archiving Canadian political data, with the parliamentary…
The Automatic Analysis of Emotion in Political Speech Based on Transcripts
Automatic sentiment analysis is used extensively in political science. The digitization of legislative transcripts has increased the potential application of established tools for the automated analyses of emotion in text. Unlike in writing, however, expressing emotion in speech involves intonation, facial expressions, and body language. Drawing on a new dataset of annotated texts and videos from the Canadian House of Commons, this paper does thr…
Birds of a Feather? Loyalty and Partisanship in the Reformed Canadian Senate
Since 2015, the Canadian Senate has undergone a series of reforms designed to make it more independent, ideologically diverse, and active in the legislative process. We use loyalty scores and vote scaling algorithms to situate the voting behaviour of senators, focusing primarily on the 41st and 42nd Parliaments (2011–2019), the period just before and after the changes, respectively. We find that the reforms have led to a loosening of party discip…
The Effects of Islam, Religiosity, and Socialization on Muslim-Canadian Opinions about Same-Sex Marriage
Critics of Islam often frame anti-Islamic positions as a defense of tolerance against intolerance, and of equality against inequality. Islam, for this perspective, poses challenges for the ideological integration of Muslim immigrants in Western societies. This paper examines Canadian Muslims’ opinions about same-sex marriage. The analysis suggests that Canadian Muslims, as a group, do have distinctively negative opinions about same-sex marriage, …
Individualization in Europe and America: Connecting Religious and Moral Values
After reviewing the major variations in how individualization is interpreted and explained, this article turns to the World Values Survey (WVS) data to empirically investigate one central aspect of individualization, namely, the connection between religiosity and moral values. That analysis demonstrates, first, that rates of decline in levels of religiosity in most advanced industrial states have been quite modest. The rate of change in moral out…
Parliamentary Debates in Canada (1901–2015)
This article analyzes the effect of procedural rule change on the dynamics of parliamentary speeches in the Canadian House of Commons between 1901 and 2015. During this period, several new rules were introduced to reduce the opportunities for private members to speak during the debates so that the government could get its business done within an acceptable amount of time. Our analysis looks at the impact of these rule changes on the content and o…
Left/Right Ideology and Canadian Politics—Erratum
We regret that the originally published paper (Cochrane 2010) did not contain the author's proof corrections. We apologize for this oversight and reproduce the entire corrected paper here
Individualization in Europe and America: Connecting Religious and Moral Values
After reviewing the major variations in how individualization is interpreted and explained, this article turns to the World Values Survey (WVS) data to empirically investigate one central aspect of individualization, namely, the connection between religiosity and moral values. That analysis demonstrates, first, that rates of decline in levels of religiosity in most advanced industrial states have been quite modest. The rate of change in moral out…
Left/Right Ideology and Canadian Politics
This article examines the influence of ideology in Canadian politics. The core theory is that political opinions are bound together into ideological clusters by underlying influences that affect simultaneously the opinions of individuals about more than one issue. The central hypothesis is that ideological disagreement between the left and the right is asymmetrical, that is, that leftists and rightists bundle in different ways their opinions abou…
Left/Right Ideology and Canadian Politics—Erratum
We regret that the originally published paper (Cochrane 2010) did not contain the author's proof corrections. We apologize for this oversight and reproduce the entire corrected paper here
Scapegoating: Unemployment, far-right parties and anti-immigrant sentiment
Regions, Regionalism and Regional Differences in Canada
This article contests the concepts of “region” and “regionalism” in Canadian political science. There is widespread agreement among observers of politics in Canada that the country is divided in politically consequential ways along regional lines. There is little agreement, however, about what causes these regional divisions or, indeed, about where the lines of regional division should be drawn. As a result, rival explanations for regional differ…
The Effects of Islam, Religiosity, and Socialization on Muslim-Canadian Opinions about Same-Sex Marriage
Critics of Islam often frame anti-Islamic positions as a defense of tolerance against intolerance, and of equality against inequality. Islam, for this perspective, poses challenges for the ideological integration of Muslim immigrants in Western societies. This paper examines Canadian Muslims’ opinions about same-sex marriage. The analysis suggests that Canadian Muslims, as a group, do have distinctively negative opinions about same-sex marriage, …
The asymmetrical structure of left/right disagreement: Left-wing coherence and right-wing fragmentation in comparative party policy
The left/right semantic is used widely to describe the patterns of party competition in democratic countries. This article examines the patterns of party policy in Anglo-American and Western European countries on three dimensions of left/right disagreement: wealth redistribution, social morality and immigration. The central questions are whether, and why, parties with left-wing or right-wing positions on the economy systematically adopt left-wing…
Digitization of the Canadian Parliamentary Debates
This paper describes the digitization and enrichment of the Canadian House of Commons English Debates from 1901 to present. We start by laying out the general framework in which this project took place and then present the structure of the database and provide guidelines to prospective users. The paper concludes with the introduction ofwww.lipad.ca, an online platform designed as a hub for archiving Canadian political data, with the parliamentary…
Word Embeddings for the Analysis of Ideological Placement in Parliamentary Corpora
Word embeddings, the coefficients from neural network models predicting the use of words in context, have now become inescapable in applications involving natural language processing. Despite a few studies in political science, the potential of this methodology for the analysis of political texts has yet to be fully uncovered. This paper introduces models of word embeddings augmented with political metadata and trained on large-scale parliamentar…
Parliamentary Debates in Canada (1901–2015)
This article analyzes the effect of procedural rule change on the dynamics of parliamentary speeches in the Canadian House of Commons between 1901 and 2015. During this period, several new rules were introduced to reduce the opportunities for private members to speak during the debates so that the government could get its business done within an acceptable amount of time. Our analysis looks at the impact of these rule changes on the content and o…
Birds of a Feather? Loyalty and Partisanship in the Reformed Canadian Senate
Since 2015, the Canadian Senate has undergone a series of reforms designed to make it more independent, ideologically diverse, and active in the legislative process. We use loyalty scores and vote scaling algorithms to situate the voting behaviour of senators, focusing primarily on the 41st and 42nd Parliaments (2011–2019), the period just before and after the changes, respectively. We find that the reforms have led to a loosening of party discip…
The Automatic Analysis of Emotion in Political Speech Based on Transcripts
Automatic sentiment analysis is used extensively in political science. The digitization of legislative transcripts has increased the potential application of established tools for the automated analyses of emotion in text. Unlike in writing, however, expressing emotion in speech involves intonation, facial expressions, and body language. Drawing on a new dataset of annotated texts and videos from the Canadian House of Commons, this paper does thr…
Electoral District Boundary Effects in Canada
This article introduces the Markov Riding Position Sampler (MaRiPoSa) for simulating Canadian elections under alternative configurations of electoral district boundaries. Despite Canada’s strictly non-partisan system of boundary design, MaRiPoSa demonstrates that, for a single Canadian election, there are alternative, allowable and more equitable configurations of boundaries to return either Liberal or Conservative governments without changing th…
Preferences for platform regulation of online hate speech are shared internationally
Politics (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Political science (10 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (7 works) · Computational and Text Analysis Methods (4 works) · Ideology (4 works) · Computer Science (3 works) · Economics (3 works)