Welcome to my website.

I am an Assistant Professor of Political Science in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto, St. George Campus. I am Director of the Policy, Elections, and Representation Lab.

I was previously the lead survey analyst for the Media Ecosystem Observatory and Digital Democracy Project research teams. I received my PhD at UBC’s Department of Political Science. I specialize in political communication, public opinion, and American and Canadian politics. You can find my CV here.

Broadly speaking, I am interested in how elite behaviour and the mass media together shape public attitudes. My particular focus is on mass polarization and in understanding attitudes towards areas of scientific and economic consensus, like climate change and vaccination.

My research projects have used a variety of methods, including media content analysis (including dictionary-based methods, machine learning, and manual coding), experiments, and time series analysis. I have work featured in the American Political Science Review, Nature Human Behaviour, the Journal of Politics, the British Journal of Political Science, Political Communication, Political Behavior, Public Opinion Quarterly, among others. More information on my publications can be found here. You can find my Google Scholar profile here.

My dissertation examines the coverage of expert consensus in the media, and explores the conditions under which experts can be persuasive to average citizens. It also seeks to establish a link between party elite behaviour communicated through the mass media and the polarization of American public opinion on climate science (with Dominik Stecula). You can find my completed dissertation here. Components of this project are featured in BJPolS, POQ, and Political Communication.

Ongoing projects include the exploration of:

  • The causes and consequences of affective polarization in Canada
  • The causal relationship between (mis)perceptions of polarization and affective polarization (with Natasha Goel)
  • The effects of out-party antipathy and personality traits on support for democratic norm erosion and political violence (with Thomas Galipeau and Natasha Goel)
  • Partisan motivated reasoning in Canada (with Scott Matthews)
  • The relationship between values and NIMBY sentiment (with Alex Rivard and Dominik Stecula)
  • Indigenous resentment and NIMBY attitudes (with Alex Rivard and Edana Beauvais)
  • The Canadian public’s response to COVID-19 (with Peter Loewen and Melissa Baker)

More details on my ongoing research can be found here.

I have also provided commentary on U.S. and Canadian politics in the Washington Post‘s Monkey Cage blog, CBC News Network, Global BC, City‘s Breakfast Television, CBC Radio, Roundhouse Radio, among others. More information can be found here.

You can contact me by following this link. Go Bills!

Header photo credit: University of Toronto