Peter John Loewen
Biographic Data
| ID | 942810 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Peter John Loewen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Peter John |
| FAMILY NAME | Loewen |
| SIGNATURE | LOEWEN P J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2690-4158 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 76 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1092 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 76 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 17 |
Causal Beliefs and the Potential for Political Backlash Against AI
Artificial intelligence is poised to reconfigure the economy and politics. Although new technologies often produce net economic gains, their costs and benefits are unequally distributed, making them susceptible to politicization. We argue that whether and how AI becomes mobilized for partisan gain will depend on the public’s causal beliefs about the winners and losers of AI. We categorize these causal beliefs into four types using a novel survey …
Preferences for platform regulation of online hate speech are shared internationally
How Do Politicians’ Own Opinions Affect Their Information Intake? A Survey Experiment among Belgian and Canadian Elected Representatives
A large and growing body of literature indicates that citizens are subject to selective exposure: they are more likely to consult information that aligns with their own opinions than information that contradicts their opinions. However, research in political psychology lacks evidence regarding selective exposure among elected politicians. This study fills this gap. A survey experiment about three policy issues (immigration, regulation of the econ…
Party or Policy? The Role of Policy Partisanship in Voter Decision-Making
Which matters more to voters, the political party or the policy positions of electoral candidates? We contribute to this longstanding debate by analyzing the relative importance of policy information and party cues in the multi-party Canadian context. The Canadian case allows us to disentangle the effects of policy and party on voter decision-making, which are closely intertwined in the more polarized and extensively studied U.S. case. First, we …
Measuring Transgender and Nonbinary Identities in Online Surveys: Evidence from Two National Election Studies
Survey researchers increasingly recognize the need to update their gender questions to recognize the existence of transgender and nonbinary people. In this research note, we evaluate changes to the Canadian Election Study (CES) gender questions from 2019 to 2021. Our analyses suggest researchers should add “nonbinary” as a close-ended option and an open-ended response option to gender identity questions. They also suggest that researchers should …
Too honest and humble to run for office? Citizens’ personality traits, nascent ambition, and recruitment
We explore how honesty-humility and the other HEXACO personality traits relate to citizens’ nascent ambition and their recruitment to run for office. We extend previous work on virtue-related personality traits and political recruitment in two important ways: we go beyond North America and conduct a five-country cross-national study with nationally representative samples. More importantly, going beyond individual-level differences in nascent ambi…
Too honest and humble to run for office? Citizens’ personality traits, nascent ambition, and recruitment – Addendum
Perceived technological threat and vote choice: Evidence from 15 European democracies
The political consequences of workplace technological adoption have become a focus of recent party politics research. This article contributes to this literature by directly examining how the perceived threat of technological change relates to support for populist and non-populist left and right parties. It does so in two ways: first, by examining subjective rather than objective automation exposure, and second by distinguishing between personal …
What personality traits do citizens want politicians to have? Observational and experimental evidence of citizens' preferences in three countries
Politicians' personality is believed to play a central role in their electoral success. It is unclear, however, how important different traits are to voters and how the impact of personality compares to that of other well‐studied individual characteristics of politicians, such as gender, age, and political experience. Drawing on evidence from three studies—an observational study (N = 4543), a survey experiment (N = 1031), and a preregistered conj…
Pathways to Substantive Representation: Policy Congruence and Policy Knowledge Among Canadian Local Politicians
From Gender Gap to Gender Gaps: Bringing Nonbinary People into Political Behavior Research
The “gender gap” in voting is one of the most well-documented findings in survey research across democracies. However, gender gap research has traditionally assumed that everyone is either a man or a woman, which does not account for the growing number of people who identify as nonbinary. How do nonbinary people differ from men and women in their party identification and voting behavior? We answer this question using data from the 2021 Canadian E…
Politicians are better at estimating public opinion when they think it is more salient
Politicians’ perceptions of public opinion matter for substantive representation, but previous work has concluded that they do not have very accurate perceptions of voters’ policy preferences. We add to the debate on the drivers of perceptual accuracy by exploring whether politicians have a more accurate understanding of public opinion when it matters either to voters or themselves, or when politicians think it matters more to voters. Drawing on …
Conscientiousness of representatives and agreement with their party positions
Party unity is an important feature in contemporary democracies. Ideological loyalty, disciplinary measures implemented by party leaders and homogeneity of preferences among elected representatives lead them to act in unison. This study focuses on the last mechanism and assesses under which conditions party representatives agree on policy positions. It argues that the personality trait of conscientiousness is linked to how a representative agrees…
Attitudes toward artificial intelligence (AI) and globalization: Common microfoundations and political implications
Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are reshaping labor markets and sparking political debates. Like economic globalization, AI developments promise benefits, including job creation and lower prices, but also costs such as job displacement, raising crucial questions about public perceptions. Will AI, like globalization, challenge existing paradigms and trigger a backlash? Leveraging a conjoint experiment with 6,000 respondents from the Unite…
Politicians' Theories of Voting Behavior
While political scientists regularly engage in spirited theoretical debates about elections and voting behavior, few have noticed that elected politicians also have theories of elections and voting. Here, we investigate politicians' positions on eight central theoretical debates in the area of elections and voting behavior and compare politicians' theories to those held by ordinary citizens. Using data from face-to-face interviews with nearly one…
Why do citizens support algorithmic government
As governments increasingly adopt algorithms and artificial intelligence (AAI), we still know comparatively little about citizens’ support for algorithmic government. In this paper, we analyze how many and what kind of reasons for government use of AAI citizens support. We use a sample of 17,000 respondents from 16 OECD countries and find that opinions on algorithmic government are divided. A narrow majority of people (55.6%) support a majority o…
Revisiting Elite Perceptions as Mediator of Elite Responsiveness to Public Opinion
Elites forming a perception of what the public wants is an important way in which democratic representation comes about, the assumption holds. Yet very few are the studies that examine the effect of elite perceptions on politician action. This study sets out to revisit the matter, measuring actual public priorities, elite perceptions of public priorities and a wide range of representative actions with regard to a few hundred concrete issues. We f…
Attitudes toward automation and the demand for policies addressing job loss: The Effects of Information About Trade-Offs
Does providing information about the costs and benefits of automation affect the perceived fairness of a firm's decision to automate or support for government policies addressing automation's labor market consequences? To answer these questions, we use data from vignette and conjoint experiments across four advanced economies (Australia, Canada, the UK, and the US). Our results show that despite people's relatively fixed policy preferences, their…
Who Can Assert Ownership Over Automation? Workplace Technological Change, Populist and Ethno-nationalist Rhetoric, and Candidate Support
Long‐term policymaking and politicians' beliefs about voters: Evidence from a 3‐year panel study of politicians
Politicians are required to make policy decisions that involve short‐term and long‐term tradeoffs, and existing theory largely expects election‐driven myopic thinking to dominate their reasoning when they do so. Direct evidence on this is surprisingly absent, leaving open questions on whether and when politicians do support future‐oriented policies, and what factors, beyond the shadow of elections, influence such choices. Responding to this gap, …
Are politicians democratic realists
Political scientists have long debated whether citizens meet the expectations of a ‘folk theory’ of democratic representation, in which voters correctly reward and punish politicians for their actions, make choices primarily on the basis of policy preferences and orient their decisions to the future rather than the past. But how do elected politicians themselves theorize voting behaviour? In this paper, we report results from an original survey o…
The gender gap in attitudes toward workplace technological change
We provide the first systematic analysis of how attitudes toward workplace automation and artificial intelligence (AI) vary by gender, using survey data from ten countries. Our analyses reveal a significant gender gap in the perceived fairness of automation and AI, similar in magnitude to that of job offshoring. Drawing on the literature on economic shocks, we examine four explanations based on gender differences in (a) economic self-interest, (b…
Inaccurate Politicians: Elected Representatives’ Estimations of Public Opinion in Four Countries
Knowledge of what voters prefer is central to several theories of democratic representation and accountability. Despite this, we know little in a comparative sense of how well politicians know citizens’ policy preferences. We present results from a study of 866 politicians in four countries. Politicians were asked to estimate the percentage of public support for various policy proposals. Comparing more than 10,000 estimations with actual levels o…
What Kind of Electoral Outcome do People Think is Good for Democracy
There is perennial debate in comparative politics about electoral institutions, but what characterizes this debate is the lack of consideration for citizens’ perspective. In this paper, we report the results of an original survey conducted on representative samples in 15 West European countries ( N = 15,414). We implemented an original instrument to elicit respondents’ views by asking them to rate “real but blind” electoral outcomes. With this su…
Projection in Politicians' Perceptions of Public Opinion
Research has shown that politicians' perceptions of public opinion are subject to social projection. When estimating the opinions of voters on a broad range of issues, politicians tend to assume that their own preferences are shared by voters. This article revisits this finding and adds to the literature in three ways. First, it makes a conceptual contribution by bringing together different approaches to the analysis of projection and its consequ…
The effect of Covid‐19 lockdowns on political support: Some good news for democracy
Major crises can act as critical junctures or reinforce the political status quo, depending on how citizens view the performance of central institutions. We use an interrupted time series to study the political effect of the enforcement of a strict confinement policy in response to the COVID‐19 pandemic. Specifically, we take advantage of a unique representative web‐based survey that was fielded in March and April 2020 in Western Europe to compar…
Nonrepresentative Representatives: An Experimental Study of the Decision Making of Elected Politicians
A considerable body of work in political science is built upon the assumption that politicians are more purposive, strategic decision makers than the citizens who elect them. At the same time, other work suggests that the personality profiles of office seekers and the environment they operate in systematically amplifies certain choice anomalies. These contrasting perspectives persist absent direct evidence on the reasoning characteristics of repr…
A Rare Moment of Cross-Partisan Consensus: Elite and Public Response to the Covid-19 Pandemic in Canada
The COVID-19 pandemic requires an effort to coordinate the actions of government and society in a way unmatched in recent history. Individual citizens need to voluntarily sacrifice economic and social activity for an indefinite period of time to protect others. At the same time, we know that public opinion tends to become polarized on highly salient issues, except when political elites are in consensus (Berinsky, 2009; Zaller, 1992). Avoiding eli…
Inaccurate Politicians: Elected Representatives’ Estimations of Public Opinion in Four Countries
Knowledge of what voters prefer is central to several theories of democratic representation and accountability. Despite this, we know little in a comparative sense of how well politicians know citizens’ policy preferences. We present results from a study of 866 politicians in four countries. Politicians were asked to estimate the percentage of public support for various policy proposals. Comparing more than 10,000 estimations with actual levels o…
A Natural Experiment in Proposal Power and Electoral Success
Does lawmaker behavior influence electoral outcomes? Observational studies cannot elucidate the effect of legislative proposals on electoral outcomes, since effects are confounded by unobserved differences in legislative and political skill. We take advantage of a unique natural experiment in the Canadian House of Commons that allows us to estimate how proposing legislation affects election outcomes. The right of noncabinet members to propose leg…
Does Compulsory Voting Lead to More Informed and Engaged Citizens? An Experimental Test
Does compulsory voting lead to more knowledgeable and engaged citizens? We report the results from a recent experiment measuring such “second-order effects” in a compulsory voting environment. We conducted the experiment during the 2007 Quebec provincial election among 121 students at a Montreal CEGEP. To receive payment, all the students were required to complete two surveys; half were also required to vote. By comparing knowledge and engagement…
Local Candidate Effects in Canadian Elections
What impact do local candidates have on elections in single member district plurality electoral systems? We provide new evidence using data from a large election study carried out during the 2015 Canadian federal election. We improve on the measurement of local candidate effects by asking over 20,000 survey respondents to rate the candidates in their constituencydirectly. We present three estimates. We find that when all voters are considered tog…
Projection in Politicians' Perceptions of Public Opinion
Research has shown that politicians' perceptions of public opinion are subject to social projection. When estimating the opinions of voters on a broad range of issues, politicians tend to assume that their own preferences are shared by voters. This article revisits this finding and adds to the literature in three ways. First, it makes a conceptual contribution by bringing together different approaches to the analysis of projection and its consequ…
The Heritability of Duty and Voter Turnout
Social Preferences and Political Participation
Models of political participation have begun to incorporate actors who possess "social preferences." However, these models have failed to take into account the potentially incongruent political goals of different social preference types. These goals are likely to play an important role in shaping political behavior. To examine the effect of distinct social preferences on political activity we conducted an experiment in which participants played f…
Anti-intellectualism and the mass public’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic
Do Voters Judge the Performance of Female and Male Politicians Differently? Experimental Evidence from the United States and Australia
Do gender stereotypes about agency affect how voters judge the governing performance of political executives? We explore this question using two conjoint experiments: one conducted in the United States and the other in Australia. Contrary to our expectations, we find no evidence in either experiment to suggest that female political executives (i.e., governors, premiers, and mayors) receive lower levels of credit than their male counterparts for p…
Electoral Confidence, Overconfidence, and Risky Behavior: Evidence from a Study with Elected Politicians
What Draws Politicians’ Attention? An Experimental Study of Issue Framing and its Effect on Individual Political Elites
Nice guys finish last: Personality and political success
Testing the power of arguments in referendums: A Bradley-Terry approach
Affinity, Antipathy and Political Participation: How Our Concern For Others Makes Us Vote
Some citizens differ in their levels of concern for the supporters of various parties. I demonstrate how such concerns can motivate citizens to vote. I first present a simple formal model that incorporates concern for others and election benefits to explain the decision to vote. By predicting substantial turnout, this model overcomes the “paradox of participation.” I then verify the model empirically. I utilize a series dictator games in an onlin…
Measuring Preferences and Behaviours in the 2019 Canadian Election Study
The 2019 Canadian Election Study (CES) consists of two separate surveys with campaign-period rolling cross-sections and post-election follow-ups. The parallel studies were conducted online and through a random-digit-dial (RDD) telephone survey. Both continue the long tradition of gathering information about the attitudes, opinions, preferences and behaviours of the Canadian public. The online survey, in particular, introduces some important innov…
The Impact of News Photos on Support for Military Action
Drawing on two experiments embedded in online surveys, this article examines the impact of news photos on support for military action. In 2011, respondents were asked about support for ongoing military involvement in Afghanistan while being randomly exposed to one of two photos—one of a soldier with a child, the other of a soldier with a gun. The former photo increased expressed support for war; and the effect was greater for those who self-ident…
The French Electoral System and its Effects
The most original feature of the French Fifth Republic is the use of a two-round system for both presidential and legislative elections. This article considers the effects of this electoral system and its development in the first 50 years of the Republic. It distinguishes between two types of effects: mechanical and psychological. It reviews the theoretical arguments for each and the available evidence. The authors first specify a series of vote–…
The ephemeral effects of fact-checks on Covid-19 misperceptions in the United States, Great Britain and Canada
Socio-demographic disparities in knowledge, practices, and ability to comply with Covid-19 public health measures in Canada
Policies to help address issues of public adherence include targeted messaging for men and younger age groups, social supports for those who need to self-isolate, changes in workplace policies to discourage presenteeism, and provincially co-ordinated masking and safe school policies
Logarithmic versus Linear Visualizations of Covid-19 Cases Do Not Affect Citizens’ Support for Confinement
The SARS-CoV-2 virus was first identified in Wuhan, China, in late December 2019, and it quickly spread to many countries. By March 2020, the virus had triggered a global pandemic (World Health Organization, 2020). In response to this crisis, governments have implemented unprecedented public health measures. The success of these policies will largely depend on the public's willingness to comply with new rules. A key factor in citizens’ willingnes…
Nationalism and ethnic heterogeneity: The importance of local context for nationalist party vote choice
Voters Punish Politicians with Depression
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Did Bill C-24 Affect Voter Turnout? Evidence from the 2000 and 2004 Elections
By tying subsidies to vote totals, Bill C-24 substantially changed the way Canadian national parties are financed. This raises the possibility of increased voter turnout, as parties face greater incentives to maximize vote totals, and voters face greater incentives to turn out. We consider this possibility. We show that turnout was not differently affected by closeness in 2004 than in 2000; that candidates' efforts were not greater in 2004 in mor…
Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics
Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics , Ian Shapiro, Rogers M. Smith and Tarek E. Masoud, eds., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. xi., 419. This important volume recounts a meeting of some the best minds in political science, but, in the end, it is a meeting in the physical sense (as the volume comes out of a conference held at Yale in 2002) and not really in any intellectual sense. The ostensible goal of the volume is to p…
Does Compulsory Voting Lead to More Informed and Engaged Citizens? An Experimental Test
Does compulsory voting lead to more knowledgeable and engaged citizens? We report the results from a recent experiment measuring such “second-order effects” in a compulsory voting environment. We conducted the experiment during the 2007 Quebec provincial election among 121 students at a Montreal CEGEP. To receive payment, all the students were required to complete two surveys; half were also required to vote. By comparing knowledge and engagement…
The French Electoral System and its Effects
The most original feature of the French Fifth Republic is the use of a two-round system for both presidential and legislative elections. This article considers the effects of this electoral system and its development in the first 50 years of the Republic. It distinguishes between two types of effects: mechanical and psychological. It reviews the theoretical arguments for each and the available evidence. The authors first specify a series of vote–…
(In)Significant Elections? Federal By-elections in Canada, 1963–2008
Despite the development of electoral studies in Canada, by-elections have received little attention from researchers. We believe that these are important political events. This research note examines the 121 federal by-elections held between general elections from 1963 to 2008. Our analysis indicates that turnout in by-elections is driven by the larger societal determinants of turnout and not the characteristics of each race. We also find that th…
Affinity, Antipathy and Political Participation: How Our Concern For Others Makes Us Vote
Some citizens differ in their levels of concern for the supporters of various parties. I demonstrate how such concerns can motivate citizens to vote. I first present a simple formal model that incorporates concern for others and election benefits to explain the decision to vote. By predicting substantial turnout, this model overcomes the “paradox of participation.” I then verify the model empirically. I utilize a series dictator games in an onlin…
Help Me Help You: Conducting Field Experiments with Political Elites
Field experiments can teach important facts about the political world to both political scientists and political elites, whose shared interest in how that world actually works should encourage greater collaboration between the two. Nonetheless, for political scientists, conducting field experiments with elites can seem prohibitively challenging. Drawing on four field experiments with political elites, two in Benin and two in Canada, we outline ke…
Social Preferences and Political Participation
Models of political participation have begun to incorporate actors who possess "social preferences." However, these models have failed to take into account the potentially incongruent political goals of different social preference types. These goals are likely to play an important role in shaping political behavior. To examine the effect of distinct social preferences on political activity we conducted an experiment in which participants played f…
For want of a nail: Negative persuasion in a party leadership race
Should party leadership candidates communicate their policy positions to the party’s electorate? And should they do so when their own ideal position is outside their party’s mainstream? This article presents evidence from a field experiment into the communication of controversial policy positions through direct mail. Working with a front-running campaign during the race for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada, we randomly assigned a sub…
The Heritability of Duty and Voter Turnout
Testing the power of arguments in referendums: A Bradley-Terry approach
Fair Isn't Always Equal: Constituency Population and the Quality of Representation in Canada
Is there a conflict between the principles of representation by population and the representation of communities of interest? In Canada, the legal requirement to design electoral districts based on pre-existing regions and communities of interest has produced large discrepancies in district populations. Several authors claim that this situation has a deleterious effect on the representational experiences of those citizens living in more populous …
A Natural Experiment in Proposal Power and Electoral Success
Does lawmaker behavior influence electoral outcomes? Observational studies cannot elucidate the effect of legislative proposals on electoral outcomes, since effects are confounded by unobserved differences in legislative and political skill. We take advantage of a unique natural experiment in the Canadian House of Commons that allows us to estimate how proposing legislation affects election outcomes. The right of noncabinet members to propose leg…
Nationalism and ethnic heterogeneity: The importance of local context for nationalist party vote choice
Beauty contests and strategic voting
The Impact of News Photos on Support for Military Action
Drawing on two experiments embedded in online surveys, this article examines the impact of news photos on support for military action. In 2011, respondents were asked about support for ongoing military involvement in Afghanistan while being randomly exposed to one of two photos—one of a soldier with a child, the other of a soldier with a gun. The former photo increased expressed support for war; and the effect was greater for those who self-ident…
Negative Affectivity, Political Contention, and Turnout: A Genopolitics Field Experiment
Recent genopolitics and political psychology research suggests individuals' biological differences influence political participation. The interaction between individual differences and environments has received less attention, not least because of the confound of self‐selection into environments. To test the interaction between innate predispositions and an exogenous environmental influence, we conducted a field experiment during the 2010 Califor…
Media Motivation and Elite Rhetoric in Comparative Perspective
The exchange of diverse points of view in elite deliberation is considered a cornerstone of democracy. This study presents evidence that variations in political motivation for media use predict the tendency of politicians to present deliberative rhetoric that considers multiple points of view regarding issues and sees those views as related to one another. We surveyed 111 incumbent Members of Parliament in Belgium, Canada, and Israel and analyzed…
Service Representation in a Federal System: A Field Experiment
Federal systems can also provide citizens with multiple avenues to obtain service representation. In shared issue areas, citizens are officially represented by two sets of politicians. When politicians are willing to cross jurisdictional boundaries, citizens might also obtain help or information from more than one set of politicians, even in areas of exclusive jurisdiction. We report an experiment designed to examine responses to requests for ass…
Implementation Intentions, Information, and Voter Turnout: An Experimental Study
Are citizens more likely to vote when they are asked to make plans about how they will cast their ballots? Such planning—typically described as “implementation intentions”—has been shown to increase many types of desirable behaviors, including exercising and healthy eating, receiving vaccinations, physical rehabilitation, and recycling. Important earlier work in political science suggests voter turnout can also be influenced by implementation int…
What Draws Politicians’ Attention? An Experimental Study of Issue Framing and its Effect on Individual Political Elites
Nonrepresentative Representatives: An Experimental Study of the Decision Making of Elected Politicians
A considerable body of work in political science is built upon the assumption that politicians are more purposive, strategic decision makers than the citizens who elect them. At the same time, other work suggests that the personality profiles of office seekers and the environment they operate in systematically amplifies certain choice anomalies. These contrasting perspectives persist absent direct evidence on the reasoning characteristics of repr…
Nonrepresentative Representatives: An Experimental Study of the Decision Making of Elected Politicians - Corrigendum
Nice guys finish last: Personality and political success
Policy Transformation in Canada: Is the Past Prologue
Political science (65 works) · Politics (53 works) · Law (52 works) · Law (49 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (47 works) · Psychology (35 works) · Economics (29 works) · Social Psychology (27 works) · Sociology (26 works) · Social Psychology (23 works)