How do you decide who to vote for? Is it a careful calculation based on balancing multiple issues and priorities? Loyalty to a particular party? A strategic decision based on who might realistically win?
Your decision might be based on any of those things. However, Wilfrid Laurier University Associate Professor Jason Roy says your vote might be more influenced than you think by factors such as whether you have seen poll results, negativity in the campaign, or maybe the type of scandal, if any, that the candidate was involved in.
Roy, a faculty member in Laurier’s Department of Political Science, has spent much of his academic career studying how people form political preferences. His research is funded by a major grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.