Mark A Pickup
Biographic Data
| ID | 4382978 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mark A Pickup |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mark A |
| FAMILY NAME | Pickup |
| SIGNATURE | PICKUP M A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Simon Fraser University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0539-1138 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 43 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 678 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 43 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Beliefs and Racial Identity Norms among Black Americans: An Examination of How Black Americans Understand Racism
How Do We Know What We Know? Learning from Monte Carlo Simulations
Monte Carlo simulations are commonly used to test the performance of estimators and models from rival methods, under a range of data-generating processes. This tool improves our understanding of the relative merits of rival methods in different contexts, such as varying sample sizes and violations of assumptions. When used, it is common to report the bias or the root mean squared error of the different methods. It is far less common to report the…
Crossing the Line: Evidence for the Categorization Theory of Spatial Voting
Bølstad and Dinas (2017) propose a model of spatial voting, based on social identity theory, that suggests supporting a candidate/policy on the other side of the ideological spectrum has a disutility that is not accounted for by common spatial models. Unfortunately, the data they use cannot speak directly to whether the disutility arises because individuals perceive their ideology as a social identity. We present the results of an experimental st…
Ambiguous Covid-19 Messaging Increases Unsafe Socializing Intentions
Before and during the vaccine roll out, governments reported surging COVID-19 cases due to unsafe socializing among younger individuals. Officials continue to search for effective ways to encourage safe socializing behaviour within this demographic. However, a key challenge is that public health advice is necessarily nuanced and complex, which can create ambiguity. Appropriate behaviour depends on specific circumstances and public messaging canno…
Countering the trump effect in Canada: Strengthening support for immigrants using national identity
Social norms are based on expectations of what others believe and do, and so they can shift in response to what trendsetters—highly visible media or political leaders—say or do. There is evidence that former President Trump as a trendsetter has weakened norms against expressing anti-immigrant attitudes in the US. As such, we ask: can trendsetters affect anti-immigrant norms across national borders? Can such spillovers be mitigated by countervaili…
Balance as a Pre-Estimation Test for Time Series Analysis
It is understood that ensuring equation balance is a necessary condition for a valid model of times series data. Yet, the definition of balance provided so far has been incomplete and there has not been a consistent understanding of exactly why balance is important or how it can be applied. The discussion to date has focused on the estimates produced by the general error correction model (GECM). In this paper, we go beyond the GECM and beyond mod…
Where is the EU–UK relationship heading? A conjoint survey experiment of Brexit trade-offs
The Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) is the start of a new relationship between the UK and the European Union (EU). As the consequences of Brexit unfold, there will be pressure to change the TCA, either in a “softer” or “harder” direction. To determine the potential medium-term direction of the EU–UK relationship, we conducted a conjoint survey experiment with a sample of British voters, where we asked them to choose between different hypoth…
How Norms Shape the Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics
How should ideology be understood, and should we be concerned if Americans lack it? Combining widely used survey questions with an incentivized coordination game, we separately measure individuals’ own policy preferences and their knowledge of what other ideological group members expect them to believe. This allows us to distinguish knowledge of ideological norms—what liberals and conservatives believe ought to go with what—from adherence to thos…
Populist media diets
Objective The changing media landscape highlights the need to understand the dynamic nature of Americans’ news consumption patterns. Research to date has focused on understanding how media diets vary across partisanship, while other, cross‐cutting cleavages remain underexplored. We focus on the relationship between populism and where Americans get their news and how they assess news media credibility. Methods Using an original, national survey of…
Equation balance in time series analysis: Lessons Learned and Lessons Needed
The papers in this symposium use Monte Carlo simulations to demonstrate the consequences of estimating time series models with variables that are of different orders of integration. In this summary, I do the following: very briefly outline what we learn from the papers; identify an apparent contradiction that might increase, rather than decrease, confusion around the concept of a balanced time series model; suggest a resolution; and identify a fe…
Transformed-likelihood estimators for dynamic panel models with a very small T
Conventional OLS fixed-effects and GLS random-effects estimators of dynamic models that control for individual-effects are known to be biased when applied to short panel data (T ≤ 10). GMM estimators are the most used alternative but are known to have drawbacks. Transformed-likelihood estimators are unused in political science. Of these, orthogonal reparameterization estimators are only tangentially referred to in any discipline. We introduce the…
Expressive Politics as (Costly) Norm Following
Social Media, Cognitive Reflection, and Conspiracy Beliefs
A growing number of Americans stay informed about current events through social media. But using social media as a source of news is associated with increased likelihood of being misinformed about important topics, such as COVID-19. The two most popular platforms—Facebook and YouTube—remain relatively understudied in comparison to Twitter, which tends to be used by elites, but less than a quarter of the American public. In this brief research rep…
How populism and conservative media fuel conspiracy beliefs about Covid-19 and what it means for Covid-19 behaviors
Research examining attitudes and behaviors of Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic has largely focused on partisanship as a lens through which many Americans see the coronavirus. Given the importance of partisan affiliation and the degree of partisan polarization in the American society, that is certainly an important driver of public opinion, and a necessary one to understand. But an overlooked set of predispositions might also shape COVID bel…
Brexit, Covid‐19, and attitudes toward immigration in Britain
OBJECTIVE: A key issue in Britain's referendum on European Union membership was the free movement of labor into Britain, with Brexit "Leavers" having more negative attitudes toward immigrants than "Remainers." Such anti-immigrant attitudes are driven by feelings of threat. The coronavirus pandemic presented a new threat in the context of ongoing Brexit negotiations. This paper examines how the COVID-19 pandemic affected anti-immigrant attitudes a…
Novel Coronavirus, Old Partisanship: Covid-19 Attitudes and Behaviours in the United States and Canada
The novel coronavirus reached the United States and Canada almost at the same time. The first reported American case was January 20, 2020, and in Canada it was January 15, 2020 (Canada, 2020; Holshue et al., 2020). Yet, the response to this crisis has been different in the two countries. In the US, President Donald Trump, prominent Republicans, and conservative media initially dismissed the dangers of COVID-19 (Stecula, 2020). The pandemic became…
For and Against Brexit: A Survey Experiment of the Impact of Campaign Effects on Public Attitudes toward EU Membership
What are the lessons of the 2016 referendum on UK membership of the European Union (EU) regarding the effects of message framing? This article reports findings from an innovative online survey experiment based on a two-wave panel design. The findings show that, despite the expectation that campaign effects are generally small for high-salience issues – such as Brexit – the potential for campaign effects was high for the pro-EU frames. This sugges…
Are they listening? Public opinion, interest groups and government responsiveness
What is the role of interest groups in the transmission of issues between the public and government policy? While government responsiveness to voters has received widespread scholarly attention, little is known about the role of interest groups in the transmission of public opinion to government. It is argued here that interest groups importantly influence government responsiveness to public opinion, but that the effect varies by type of interest…
The Influence of Cause and Sectional Group Lobbying on Government Responsiveness
Voters are increasingly concerned that special interests control the policy process. Yet, the literature on representation is more optimistic: elected officials face strong incentives to listen to voters—not just lobby groups—and this makes for more responsive policies. Building on recent work, we argue a more nuanced point: different types of groups have different effects on responsiveness. We show empirically that lobbying from “cause” groups—r…
Problem detection in legislative oversight: An analysis of legislative committee agendas in the UK and US
This paper outlines a dynamic problem-detection model of legislative oversight where legislative committees engage in information-gathering to identify emerging policy problems. It is argued that activities of legislative committees are responsive to indicators of problem status across a range of policy domains. This enables committees to react to problems before, or at least simultaneously to, citizens. Our analyses use a new dataset on the poli…
Rational Learners or Impervious Partisans? Economic News and Partisan Bias in Economic Perceptions
Decades of research have established the direct influence of partisanship on voter perception of a host of real-world conditions. Even so, numerous factors have been found to moderate this “partisan bias.” We examine one plausible moderator: the volume of perceptually relevant information that is available in the mass media. Both dissonance-theoretic and motivated-reasoning formulations of partisan bias in political perception suggest that the av…
A Research Note: The Differential Impact of Threats on Ethnic Prejudice Toward Three Minority Groups in Britain
In this research note we replicate, update and expand innovative research by Sniderman et al. conducted in the Netherlands in the late 1990s, and ask whether the relative primacy of cultural compared with economic and safety threats in explaining ethnic prejudice remains true under markedly different national, economic and political contexts. Using two national British surveys conducted in 2011 and 2016, we examine the impact of threat on hostili…
Stochastic Actor Oriented Models for Network Dynamics
Stochastic Actor Oriented Models for Network Dynamics are used for the statistical analysis of longitudinal network data collected as a panel. The probability model defines an unobserved stochastic process of tie changes, where social actors add new ties or drop existing ties in response to the current network structure; the panel observations are snapshots of the resulting changing network. The statistical analysis is based on computer simulatio…
Research Openness in Canadian Political Science: Toward an Inclusive and Differentiated Discussion
In this paper, we initiate a discussion within the Canadian political science community about research openness and its implications for our discipline. This discussion is important because the Tri-Agency has recently released guidelines on data management and because a number of political science journals, from several subfields, have signed the Journal Editors’ Transparency Statement requiring data access and research transparency (DA-RT). As n…
The Coevolution of Trade Agreement Networks and Democracy
The proliferation of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) and the wave of democratization are among the most significant developments in international relations during the past three decades. The correlation between these is well noted. The causal link between these phenomena, however, remains unclear. On one hand, democracies have been found to be more likely to join PTAs. On the other hand, trade agreements should foster democratization because…
Reversing the Causal Arrow: The Political Conditioning of Economic Perceptions in the 2000–2004 U.S. Presidential Election Cycle
Many economic voting models assume that individual voters’ reactions to incumbents are strongly conditioned by their perceptions of the performance of the macroeconomy. However, the direction of causality between economic perceptions and political preferences is unclear: economic perceptions can be a consequence of incumbent support rather than an influence on it. We develop the latter thesis by examining the dynamic relationship between retrospe…
Populist radical right parties mobilizing 'the people'? The role of populist radical right success in voter turnout
Novel Coronavirus, Old Partisanship: Covid-19 Attitudes and Behaviours in the United States and Canada
The novel coronavirus reached the United States and Canada almost at the same time. The first reported American case was January 20, 2020, and in Canada it was January 15, 2020 (Canada, 2020; Holshue et al., 2020). Yet, the response to this crisis has been different in the two countries. In the US, President Donald Trump, prominent Republicans, and conservative media initially dismissed the dangers of COVID-19 (Stecula, 2020). The pandemic became…
How populism and conservative media fuel conspiracy beliefs about Covid-19 and what it means for Covid-19 behaviors
Research examining attitudes and behaviors of Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic has largely focused on partisanship as a lens through which many Americans see the coronavirus. Given the importance of partisan affiliation and the degree of partisan polarization in the American society, that is certainly an important driver of public opinion, and a necessary one to understand. But an overlooked set of predispositions might also shape COVID bel…
When do Economic Perceptions Matter for Party Approval: Examining the Endogeneity of Economic Perceptions Before and During the Economic Downturn
A Hierarchy of Preferences: A Longitudinal Network Analysis Approach to PTA Formation
Bilateral trade agreements have proliferated rapidly within the last two decades, growing into a dense network of multiple ties between countries. The spread of preferential trade agreements (PTAs), however, is not uniform: some countries have signed a multitude of deals, while others remain much less involved. This article presents a longitudinal network analysis method to analyze the patterns of the formation of trade agreements, based on the m…
For and Against Brexit: A Survey Experiment of the Impact of Campaign Effects on Public Attitudes toward EU Membership
What are the lessons of the 2016 referendum on UK membership of the European Union (EU) regarding the effects of message framing? This article reports findings from an innovative online survey experiment based on a two-wave panel design. The findings show that, despite the expectation that campaign effects are generally small for high-salience issues – such as Brexit – the potential for campaign effects was high for the pro-EU frames. This sugges…
Are they listening? Public opinion, interest groups and government responsiveness
What is the role of interest groups in the transmission of issues between the public and government policy? While government responsiveness to voters has received widespread scholarly attention, little is known about the role of interest groups in the transmission of public opinion to government. It is argued here that interest groups importantly influence government responsiveness to public opinion, but that the effect varies by type of interest…
Addressing the Endogeneity of Economic Evaluations in Models of Political Choice
Subjective measures used in models of political choice are typically open to criticism with respect to their endogeneity. Economic perceptions have been subject to particular criticism in this respect. We address these concerns through the application of estimation procedures introduced from econometrics and the introduction of a new measure of economic perceptions that acts as an instrumental variable. Together, these eliminate simultaneity bias…
How Norms Shape the Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics
How should ideology be understood, and should we be concerned if Americans lack it? Combining widely used survey questions with an incentivized coordination game, we separately measure individuals’ own policy preferences and their knowledge of what other ideological group members expect them to believe. This allows us to distinguish knowledge of ideological norms—what liberals and conservatives believe ought to go with what—from adherence to thos…
The Coevolution of Trade Agreement Networks and Democracy
The proliferation of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) and the wave of democratization are among the most significant developments in international relations during the past three decades. The correlation between these is well noted. The causal link between these phenomena, however, remains unclear. On one hand, democracies have been found to be more likely to join PTAs. On the other hand, trade agreements should foster democratization because…
From polls to votes to seats: Forecasting the 2010 British general election
The Influence of Cause and Sectional Group Lobbying on Government Responsiveness
Voters are increasingly concerned that special interests control the policy process. Yet, the literature on representation is more optimistic: elected officials face strong incentives to listen to voters—not just lobby groups—and this makes for more responsive policies. Building on recent work, we argue a more nuanced point: different types of groups have different effects on responsiveness. We show empirically that lobbying from “cause” groups—r…
Expressive Politics as (Costly) Norm Following
The conditionality of the trade-off between government responsiveness and effectiveness: The impact of minority status and polls in the Canadian House of Commons
Polls and the Vote in Britain
Little is known about the evolution of electoral sentiment over British election cycles. How does party support converge on the eventual election outcome? Do preferences evolve in a patterned and understandable way? What role does the official election campaign period play? In this article, we begin to address these issues. We outline an empirical analysis relating poll results over the course of the election cycle and the final vote for the thre…
Campaign trial heats as electoral information: Evidence from the 2004 and 2006 Canadian federal elections
Threat, prejudice and the impact of the riots in England
Social Capital and Civic Community in Alberta
We investigate the nature of civic community and social capital in Alberta. We find a civic community with high levels of interpersonal trust and civic participation, that values formal political equality and direct participation, yet expresses high levels of alienation from and low levels of confidence in its governments. While exogenous variables contribute to a strong civic community, only endogenous variables can account for the comparatively…
Balance as a Pre-Estimation Test for Time Series Analysis
It is understood that ensuring equation balance is a necessary condition for a valid model of times series data. Yet, the definition of balance provided so far has been incomplete and there has not been a consistent understanding of exactly why balance is important or how it can be applied. The discussion to date has focused on the estimates produced by the general error correction model (GECM). In this paper, we go beyond the GECM and beyond mod…
Where is the EU–UK relationship heading? A conjoint survey experiment of Brexit trade-offs
The Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) is the start of a new relationship between the UK and the European Union (EU). As the consequences of Brexit unfold, there will be pressure to change the TCA, either in a “softer” or “harder” direction. To determine the potential medium-term direction of the EU–UK relationship, we conducted a conjoint survey experiment with a sample of British voters, where we asked them to choose between different hypoth…
Better Know Your Dependent Variable: A Multination Analysis of Government Support Measures in Economic Popularity Models
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Social Media, Cognitive Reflection, and Conspiracy Beliefs
A growing number of Americans stay informed about current events through social media. But using social media as a source of news is associated with increased likelihood of being misinformed about important topics, such as COVID-19. The two most popular platforms—Facebook and YouTube—remain relatively understudied in comparison to Twitter, which tends to be used by elites, but less than a quarter of the American public. In this brief research rep…
Problem detection in legislative oversight: An analysis of legislative committee agendas in the UK and US
This paper outlines a dynamic problem-detection model of legislative oversight where legislative committees engage in information-gathering to identify emerging policy problems. It is argued that activities of legislative committees are responsive to indicators of problem status across a range of policy domains. This enables committees to react to problems before, or at least simultaneously to, citizens. Our analyses use a new dataset on the poli…
The Mediated Horserace: Campaign Polls and Poll Reporting
Although “horserace journalism” is thought to be central to contemporary election news coverage and has generated a great deal of criticism, there is no general model of the nature and dynamics of horserace journalism or “poll reporting.” This paper proposes and empirically evaluates such a model. The model builds on and extends John Zaller's “theory of media politics” to consider specifically what citizens demand from polls and what journalists …
Social Capital and Civic Community in Alberta
We investigate the nature of civic community and social capital in Alberta. We find a civic community with high levels of interpersonal trust and civic participation, that values formal political equality and direct participation, yet expresses high levels of alienation from and low levels of confidence in its governments. While exogenous variables contribute to a strong civic community, only endogenous variables can account for the comparatively…
Globalization, Politics and Provincial Government Spending in Canada
Using time series, cross-sectional econometric modelling, an analysis is made of competing political and economic determinants of Canadian provincial government fiscal policy during the 1980s and 1990s. It is determined that provincial government spending responses to trade liberalization are dependent upon the ideology of the government and conditioned by the degree of provincial unionization. When relatively high levels of unionization prevail,…
Campaign trial heats as electoral information: Evidence from the 2004 and 2006 Canadian federal elections
Measure twice, model once: Introduction to measurement methods for better longitudinal modelling
On filtering longitudinal public opinion data: Issues in identification and representation of true change
Better Know Your Dependent Variable: A Multination Analysis of Government Support Measures in Economic Popularity Models
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Reversing the Causal Arrow: The Political Conditioning of Economic Perceptions in the 2000–2004 U.S. Presidential Election Cycle
Many economic voting models assume that individual voters’ reactions to incumbents are strongly conditioned by their perceptions of the performance of the macroeconomy. However, the direction of causality between economic perceptions and political preferences is unclear: economic perceptions can be a consequence of incumbent support rather than an influence on it. We develop the latter thesis by examining the dynamic relationship between retrospe…
From polls to votes to seats: Forecasting the 2010 British general election
A Hierarchy of Preferences: A Longitudinal Network Analysis Approach to PTA Formation
Bilateral trade agreements have proliferated rapidly within the last two decades, growing into a dense network of multiple ties between countries. The spread of preferential trade agreements (PTAs), however, is not uniform: some countries have signed a multitude of deals, while others remain much less involved. This article presents a longitudinal network analysis method to analyze the patterns of the formation of trade agreements, based on the m…
The Mediated Horserace: Campaign Polls and Poll Reporting
Although “horserace journalism” is thought to be central to contemporary election news coverage and has generated a great deal of criticism, there is no general model of the nature and dynamics of horserace journalism or “poll reporting.” This paper proposes and empirically evaluates such a model. The model builds on and extends John Zaller's “theory of media politics” to consider specifically what citizens demand from polls and what journalists …
Addressing the Endogeneity of Economic Evaluations in Models of Political Choice
Subjective measures used in models of political choice are typically open to criticism with respect to their endogeneity. Economic perceptions have been subject to particular criticism in this respect. We address these concerns through the application of estimation procedures introduced from econometrics and the introduction of a new measure of economic perceptions that acts as an instrumental variable. Together, these eliminate simultaneity bias…
Polls and the Vote in Britain
Little is known about the evolution of electoral sentiment over British election cycles. How does party support converge on the eventual election outcome? Do preferences evolve in a patterned and understandable way? What role does the official election campaign period play? In this article, we begin to address these issues. We outline an empirical analysis relating poll results over the course of the election cycle and the final vote for the thre…
When do Economic Perceptions Matter for Party Approval: Examining the Endogeneity of Economic Perceptions Before and During the Economic Downturn
Symposium introduction: The electoral mechanisms of responsiveness
Populist radical right parties mobilizing 'the people'? The role of populist radical right success in voter turnout
The conditionality of the trade-off between government responsiveness and effectiveness: The impact of minority status and polls in the Canadian House of Commons
Threat, prejudice and the impact of the riots in England
The Coevolution of Trade Agreement Networks and Democracy
The proliferation of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) and the wave of democratization are among the most significant developments in international relations during the past three decades. The correlation between these is well noted. The causal link between these phenomena, however, remains unclear. On one hand, democracies have been found to be more likely to join PTAs. On the other hand, trade agreements should foster democratization because…
From polls to votes to seats: Forecasting the 2015 British general election
Stochastic Actor Oriented Models for Network Dynamics
Stochastic Actor Oriented Models for Network Dynamics are used for the statistical analysis of longitudinal network data collected as a panel. The probability model defines an unobserved stochastic process of tie changes, where social actors add new ties or drop existing ties in response to the current network structure; the panel observations are snapshots of the resulting changing network. The statistical analysis is based on computer simulatio…
Research Openness in Canadian Political Science: Toward an Inclusive and Differentiated Discussion
In this paper, we initiate a discussion within the Canadian political science community about research openness and its implications for our discipline. This discussion is important because the Tri-Agency has recently released guidelines on data management and because a number of political science journals, from several subfields, have signed the Journal Editors’ Transparency Statement requiring data access and research transparency (DA-RT). As n…
A Research Note: The Differential Impact of Threats on Ethnic Prejudice Toward Three Minority Groups in Britain
In this research note we replicate, update and expand innovative research by Sniderman et al. conducted in the Netherlands in the late 1990s, and ask whether the relative primacy of cultural compared with economic and safety threats in explaining ethnic prejudice remains true under markedly different national, economic and political contexts. Using two national British surveys conducted in 2011 and 2016, we examine the impact of threat on hostili…
Are they listening? Public opinion, interest groups and government responsiveness
What is the role of interest groups in the transmission of issues between the public and government policy? While government responsiveness to voters has received widespread scholarly attention, little is known about the role of interest groups in the transmission of public opinion to government. It is argued here that interest groups importantly influence government responsiveness to public opinion, but that the effect varies by type of interest…
The Influence of Cause and Sectional Group Lobbying on Government Responsiveness
Voters are increasingly concerned that special interests control the policy process. Yet, the literature on representation is more optimistic: elected officials face strong incentives to listen to voters—not just lobby groups—and this makes for more responsive policies. Building on recent work, we argue a more nuanced point: different types of groups have different effects on responsiveness. We show empirically that lobbying from “cause” groups—r…
Problem detection in legislative oversight: An analysis of legislative committee agendas in the UK and US
This paper outlines a dynamic problem-detection model of legislative oversight where legislative committees engage in information-gathering to identify emerging policy problems. It is argued that activities of legislative committees are responsive to indicators of problem status across a range of policy domains. This enables committees to react to problems before, or at least simultaneously to, citizens. Our analyses use a new dataset on the poli…
Political science (35 works) · Politics (27 works) · Law (26 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (25 works) · Law (25 works) · Economics (23 works) · Psychology (20 works) · Social Psychology (15 works) · Computer Science (14 works) · Sociology (14 works)