Working Papers

[Lachance_Beauvais_What_Role_Does_Affective_Proximity_Play_in_Canadian_Elections___Draft_for_presentation.pdf) (with Edana Beauvais) Voters' feelings toward social and political groups can impact their political behaviour. How does group-based affect— voters' relatively warmer or colder feelings toward different groups —impact their vote choice? The goal of our present work is twofold. Our frst task is descriptive: What does the "affective space" look like in Canada? To answer this question, we use data from the Canadian Election Study on feelings toward ethnic groups, sexual minorities, political parties, and national groups (e.g., Canadians, Quebeckers, and Americans). We use unsupervised machine learning techniques to reduce the dimensionality of affective space in Canada. Our second task is inferential: How does group-based affect impact vote choice? To answer this question, we regress vote choice on two, uncorrelated dimensions of group-based affect— ideological and ethnocultural —in seven different elections from 1993 to 2019 in Quebec and Canada outside Quebec. Our results suggest that voters' group-based affect contributes to polarized pluralism in the party system (Johnston, 2017), but that fault lines are also emerging.