Electoral Reform committee  I am not sure if that helps answer your question.

Electoral Reform committee  I think so. Where the mechanism applies for me is that we know no one gets to be a candidate for a political party without the leader signing the nomination policy, so I would backstop this idea by saying that if leaders wanted their candidates to look a certain way, they would

Electoral Reform committee  Yes, exactly. This is the thing. I understand that particular policy and I am deeply cynical when I endorse it, but no party leader is going to set up a scenario in which they're not going to get their full reimbursement. They'll direct their people to find the candidates to maxi

Electoral Reform committee  One of the things, when it comes to empirical models, is that the type of electoral system stands in as a blunt indicator. You can't say the system causes a bunch of things, because you don't know what is actually working as the causal mechanism. In the case of Australia, I wou

Electoral Reform committee  Not quite. I would say the argument that I am picking up on is one from Hanna Pitkin, which is sometimes colloquially referred to as “mirror representation.” This is the idea that every group in a society ought to be as present in its representative institutions as its demographi

Electoral Reform committee  Yes. Socio-demographics are the easiest ones to identify, and to be frank, women are the easiest socio-demographic group to capture as this big umbrella, on the understanding that all of these groups are going to be very diverse in their own policy-relevant viewpoints. Some wil

Electoral Reform committee  I would say that the distribution of votes and how that maps on to the distribution of seats is a different question from what the population looks like and what the representatives look like. Those things ought to be seen as distinct. Of course, since I have indicated that I t

Electoral Reform committee  Therefore the question has to come—

Electoral Reform committee  I know what the public is probably going to tell you, because we've asked it in the Canadian election study. Politically engaged Canadians tend to be older and whiter and more wealthy and more masculine than the Canadian population as a whole, and they're going to be disproport

Electoral Reform committee  The research we have is in progress, so I don't want to make a strong “research says” kind of conclusion. In addition to everything I've already stated, however, one thing that's becoming clear is that the nature of the Internet, and particularly one's online past, has had a chil

Electoral Reform committee  Thank you for the question. This links very closely to a project I have with my co-editor, Amanda Bittner, who's at Memorial University, and an international panel of scholars looking at the impact of gender and parental status in politics. A number of things come through very cl

Electoral Reform committee  Just as a point of clarification, are you asking about public financing for political parties, such as the per-vote subsidy or something along that line?

Electoral Reform committee  I'm inclined to agree with my colleague Dr. Massicotte that these questions are distinct, but I also think they are linked. In the literature on party and campaign finance internationally, most countries do have some form of public financing. It's broadly seen to be a good thin

Electoral Reform committee  As long as it's not phrased as “the shift was necessary but insufficient”, because I don't think the shift was necessary; but it certainly has been insufficient, yes.

Electoral Reform committee  I would say that introducing any kind of a party vote would be a change from what we do now, which is vote for a local candidate. If you were to move to a mixed member proportional system, under which you vote in the district and then you also vote for your party overall, or if y