Sophie Borwein
Biographic Data
| ID | 962372 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sophie Borwein |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sophie |
| FAMILY NAME | Borwein |
| SIGNATURE | BORWEIN S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of British Columbia |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6698-6648 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 96 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
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 …
Place Consciousness and Voting in Canada
Building on Cramer’s (2016) foundational work on rural consciousness, we measure place consciousness in Canada as a unified construct capturing both in-group place identification and out-group place resentment. Using data from a large-scale Canadian survey, we then examine how place consciousness relates to federal voting behaviour across a novel typology of six urban, suburban, and rural place types. We find that place consciousness is strongest…
Urban–rural policy disagreement
Urban–rural divides are large and growing in many national elections, but the sources of this widening divide are not well understood. Recent research has pointed to policy disagreement as one possible mechanism for this growing divide; if urban and rural residents hold increasingly dissimilar policy preferences, this disagreement could produce ever‐widening urban–rural electoral divides. We investigate this possibility by creating a synthesized …
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 …
Place Types
In this research note, we propose a new typology of geographic places for use in advancing Canadian politics research on the political effects of place. We use hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) to inductively derive place types from Aggregate Dissemination Areas (ADAs), a fine-grained unit of geography covering all of Canada, newly available from Statistics Canada. Using this approach, we uncover seven distinct place types, adding nuance to ear…
Income Inequality and Parent Education Spending in Canada
Comparative research documents substantial education- and income-based class gaps in parent spending on children’s education, with important repercussions for the perpetuation of intergenerational (dis)advantage. Spurred by higher levels of income inequality and associated economic transformations, some speculate these gaps may have widened, as parents feel intensified pressure to best position their children in increasingly competitive labour ma…
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…
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…
Lay theories of place effects
Combining research in political geography and social psychology, this article investigates lay theories of “place effects”—that is, ordinary citizens' beliefs about the effects that urban or rural places have on the individuals who live in them. We do so using a novel survey vignette embedded in a large‐scale survey of the Canadian public. Our results suggest that (1) citizens see rural identities as less malleable than urban identities, (2) lay …
Who Can Assert Ownership Over Automation? Workplace Technological Change, Populist and Ethno-nationalist Rhetoric, and Candidate Support
Groups, Identity, and Redistributive Preferences in Canada
Recent political developments in established democracies have renewed attention to the politics of identity. Some commentators have expressed concern that polities are fracturing along increasingly narrow social identity lines, in the process, losing their ability to build solidarity around shared commitments such as redistribution. This article takes stock of the strength of Canadian social identities and their consequences for redistributive pr…
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…
National standards or territorial autonomy? Public opinion and the politics of fiscal federalism for healthcare in Canada
Focusing on public opinion, this paper studies the politics of fiscal federalism by analysing support for the level and conditionality of intergovernmental transfers for healthcare. Leveraging a representative survey of the Canadian population conducted in 2022, we show that preferences for fiscal federalism reflect territorial identity and ideology. Left-wing respondents are more likely than right-wing ones to prefer higher, conditional transfer…
Municipal Identity and City Interests
Not Hidden but Not Visible: Government Funding of Independent Schools in Canada
A growing body of comparative public policy research examines the effects of delegated delivery of public services and the related emergence of what is labelled a submerged state that obscures the role of government in the provision of public services. Data limitations have constrained investigations of these dynamics in Canada, including for K–12 education. In this research note, we draw on charitable tax records and provincial and federal spend…
Asymmetries in urban, suburban, and rural place-based resentment
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…
Do ministers’ occupational and social class backgrounds influence social spending
Recent studies have reported a relationship between legislators’ occupational and social class backgrounds and their economic policy preferences, but these analyses have largely been confined to legislative actors in presidential systems (e.g., Carnes 2012, 2013; Carnes and Lupu 2015; but see O’Grady 2018). This paper extends this research to the study of government executives in parliamentary systems. It uses a new dataset of the occupational ba…
Fiscal burdens and knowledge of immigrant selection criteria
Both scholarly and popular accounts of Canada's relatively non-conflictual immigration politics have attributed substantial power to the selectivity of the country’s immigration policy. In this paper, we use new measures of knowledge of the fiscally selective elements of the immigration system to demonstrate that individuals who know more about the system are, in fact, more supportive of immigration, and that this impact is strongest among those …
Policy Transformation in Canada: Is the Past Prologue
Asymmetries in urban, suburban, and rural place-based resentment
Municipal Identity and City Interests
Do ministers’ occupational and social class backgrounds influence social spending
Recent studies have reported a relationship between legislators’ occupational and social class backgrounds and their economic policy preferences, but these analyses have largely been confined to legislative actors in presidential systems (e.g., Carnes 2012, 2013; Carnes and Lupu 2015; but see O’Grady 2018). This paper extends this research to the study of government executives in parliamentary systems. It uses a new dataset of the occupational ba…
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…
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
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…
National standards or territorial autonomy? Public opinion and the politics of fiscal federalism for healthcare in Canada
Focusing on public opinion, this paper studies the politics of fiscal federalism by analysing support for the level and conditionality of intergovernmental transfers for healthcare. Leveraging a representative survey of the Canadian population conducted in 2022, we show that preferences for fiscal federalism reflect territorial identity and ideology. Left-wing respondents are more likely than right-wing ones to prefer higher, conditional transfer…
Urban–rural policy disagreement
Urban–rural divides are large and growing in many national elections, but the sources of this widening divide are not well understood. Recent research has pointed to policy disagreement as one possible mechanism for this growing divide; if urban and rural residents hold increasingly dissimilar policy preferences, this disagreement could produce ever‐widening urban–rural electoral divides. We investigate this possibility by creating a synthesized …
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 …
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…
Lay theories of place effects
Combining research in political geography and social psychology, this article investigates lay theories of “place effects”—that is, ordinary citizens' beliefs about the effects that urban or rural places have on the individuals who live in them. We do so using a novel survey vignette embedded in a large‐scale survey of the Canadian public. Our results suggest that (1) citizens see rural identities as less malleable than urban identities, (2) lay …
Not Hidden but Not Visible: Government Funding of Independent Schools in Canada
A growing body of comparative public policy research examines the effects of delegated delivery of public services and the related emergence of what is labelled a submerged state that obscures the role of government in the provision of public services. Data limitations have constrained investigations of these dynamics in Canada, including for K–12 education. In this research note, we draw on charitable tax records and provincial and federal spend…
Fiscal burdens and knowledge of immigrant selection criteria
Both scholarly and popular accounts of Canada's relatively non-conflictual immigration politics have attributed substantial power to the selectivity of the country’s immigration policy. In this paper, we use new measures of knowledge of the fiscally selective elements of the immigration system to demonstrate that individuals who know more about the system are, in fact, more supportive of immigration, and that this impact is strongest among those …
Income Inequality and Parent Education Spending in Canada
Comparative research documents substantial education- and income-based class gaps in parent spending on children’s education, with important repercussions for the perpetuation of intergenerational (dis)advantage. Spurred by higher levels of income inequality and associated economic transformations, some speculate these gaps may have widened, as parents feel intensified pressure to best position their children in increasingly competitive labour ma…
Policy Transformation in Canada: Is the Past Prologue
Do ministers’ occupational and social class backgrounds influence social spending
Recent studies have reported a relationship between legislators’ occupational and social class backgrounds and their economic policy preferences, but these analyses have largely been confined to legislative actors in presidential systems (e.g., Carnes 2012, 2013; Carnes and Lupu 2015; but see O’Grady 2018). This paper extends this research to the study of government executives in parliamentary systems. It uses a new dataset of the occupational ba…
Fiscal burdens and knowledge of immigrant selection criteria
Both scholarly and popular accounts of Canada's relatively non-conflictual immigration politics have attributed substantial power to the selectivity of the country’s immigration policy. In this paper, we use new measures of knowledge of the fiscally selective elements of the immigration system to demonstrate that individuals who know more about the system are, in fact, more supportive of immigration, and that this impact is strongest among those …
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…
National standards or territorial autonomy? Public opinion and the politics of fiscal federalism for healthcare in Canada
Focusing on public opinion, this paper studies the politics of fiscal federalism by analysing support for the level and conditionality of intergovernmental transfers for healthcare. Leveraging a representative survey of the Canadian population conducted in 2022, we show that preferences for fiscal federalism reflect territorial identity and ideology. Left-wing respondents are more likely than right-wing ones to prefer higher, conditional transfer…
Municipal Identity and City Interests
Not Hidden but Not Visible: Government Funding of Independent Schools in Canada
A growing body of comparative public policy research examines the effects of delegated delivery of public services and the related emergence of what is labelled a submerged state that obscures the role of government in the provision of public services. Data limitations have constrained investigations of these dynamics in Canada, including for K–12 education. In this research note, we draw on charitable tax records and provincial and federal spend…
Asymmetries in urban, suburban, and rural place-based resentment
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…
Lay theories of place effects
Combining research in political geography and social psychology, this article investigates lay theories of “place effects”—that is, ordinary citizens' beliefs about the effects that urban or rural places have on the individuals who live in them. We do so using a novel survey vignette embedded in a large‐scale survey of the Canadian public. Our results suggest that (1) citizens see rural identities as less malleable than urban identities, (2) lay …
Who Can Assert Ownership Over Automation? Workplace Technological Change, Populist and Ethno-nationalist Rhetoric, and Candidate Support
Groups, Identity, and Redistributive Preferences in Canada
Recent political developments in established democracies have renewed attention to the politics of identity. Some commentators have expressed concern that polities are fracturing along increasingly narrow social identity lines, in the process, losing their ability to build solidarity around shared commitments such as redistribution. This article takes stock of the strength of Canadian social identities and their consequences for redistributive pr…
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…
Urban–rural policy disagreement
Urban–rural divides are large and growing in many national elections, but the sources of this widening divide are not well understood. Recent research has pointed to policy disagreement as one possible mechanism for this growing divide; if urban and rural residents hold increasingly dissimilar policy preferences, this disagreement could produce ever‐widening urban–rural electoral divides. We investigate this possibility by creating a synthesized …
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 …
Place Types
In this research note, we propose a new typology of geographic places for use in advancing Canadian politics research on the political effects of place. We use hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) to inductively derive place types from Aggregate Dissemination Areas (ADAs), a fine-grained unit of geography covering all of Canada, newly available from Statistics Canada. Using this approach, we uncover seven distinct place types, adding nuance to ear…
Income Inequality and Parent Education Spending in Canada
Comparative research documents substantial education- and income-based class gaps in parent spending on children’s education, with important repercussions for the perpetuation of intergenerational (dis)advantage. Spurred by higher levels of income inequality and associated economic transformations, some speculate these gaps may have widened, as parents feel intensified pressure to best position their children in increasingly competitive labour ma…
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…
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 …
Place Consciousness and Voting in Canada
Building on Cramer’s (2016) foundational work on rural consciousness, we measure place consciousness in Canada as a unified construct capturing both in-group place identification and out-group place resentment. Using data from a large-scale Canadian survey, we then examine how place consciousness relates to federal voting behaviour across a novel typology of six urban, suburban, and rural place types. We find that place consciousness is strongest…
Political science (11 works) · Politics (11 works) · Economics (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Place Attachment and Urban Studies (4 works) · Psychology (4 works) · Business (3 works)