Written by Matthew Arp and Simon Kiss G. Elliott Morris recently produced this chart of presidential approval ratings standardized by month since inauguration for Presidents Bush, Biden, and Obama. It’s exceptionally informative and gives us pause to evaluate where things are at in the United States as we head into […]
Commentary
16 posts
The 2025 Ontario election is just under a week away. As an exercise, we thought we would try to identify which ridings might be the closest ridings. To do so, we pulled the results from the 2018 and 2022 election results and calculated the winner’s margin of victory as a […]
Anyone who has ever thought about buying a house in Ontario (especially first-time homebuyers) might have noticed an uptick in housing prices in the last decade (even prior to the COVID-19 price explosion). Between 2005 and 2020, the average cost of a house in Ontario increased over $27,000 per year. […]
by Andrew R. Basso & Andrea Perrella Why has Reconciliation in Canada stalled? What barriers exist to the implementation of transitional justice? Sometimes the simplest questions can yield the most important findings. That is certainly the case for our multi-year study of settler public opinions towards Reconciliation and Indigenous peoples. […]
In LISPOP’s survey of Ontario voters in the 2022 election, we focused on attitudes toward housing. One of the series of questions that we asked respondents was to name a cause of the recent increase in house prices and rents. The next graph shows how different voters responded. On average, […]
Just what an election is about is a question at least as important as who is standing. Because most voters don’t have coherent ideologies, but rather many different attitudes, a candidate might be better off making an election about something good if you’re the incumbent (e.g. a recent uptick in unemployment) […]
By Simon J. Kiss, Jason Roy and Matthew R. Arp One of the more important dynamics of modern elections is the phenomenon of the “ballot question”. Parties, journalists and voters wrangle over what an election is “about”. The reason so much is at stake in this question is because voters […]
LISPOP commissioned a survey of voters during the 2022 election and we’ll be disseminating findings from it over the next few weeks. But as an opening, I wanted to take a look at public spending priorities in the 2022 election compared to the 2018 election. To do so, I compared […]
Welcome to the fourth in an installment of blog posts by LISPOP affiliates on different aspects of the Ontario provincial election. Our last post is by Wilfrid Laurier political scientist Andrea Perrella. A lot of attention on election campaigns focuses on “swing” voters or toss-up seats, suggesting a volatile electorate. When […]
There has been much talk of “strategic” or “tactical” voting in this spring’s Ontario election. While definitions vary, political scientists usually reserve the term for situations in which a voter supports a party that is not his or her most preferred, but one thought to have a better chance of […]