About

I am a professor in the Department of Political Science at Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland & Labrador, Canada. I specialize in the study of elections, voting and public opinion in established democracies. While much of my work focuses on Canada or the United States, I am also a student of comparative political behaviour. My research has appeared in, among others, the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, and the British Journal of Political Science, and I recently published my first book, Quality Control: Experiments on the Microfoundations of Retrospective Voting (co-authored with Austin Hart), with Cambridge University Press. 

Thematically, my research investigates interactions between political information and political attitudes. I study such interactions mainly in the areas of:

Currently, much of my research activity concerns the mass politics of economic inequality (e.g., this recent paper) and the microfoundations of retrospective voting (e.g., this recent book).

Elsewhere on the site you can find details regarding my on-going research and publications in these areas. My Google Scholar page is here and my Publons profile is here. 

My research has been discussed in pieces in MarketWatch, the Washington Center for Equitable Growth blog, the Monkey Cage (The Washington Post) and the USAPP blog at the London School of Economics. I periodically comment on Canadian politics, as I did on partisanship in the 2015 federal election and regionalism in the 2019 federal election.

I'm part of the large team of researchers comprising the Consortium on Electoral Democracy (C-Dem), which, among other things, conducted the 2019 and 2021 Canadian Election Studies. I was also a member of the Canadian Municipal Election Study, which fielded studies of elections in 8 Canadian cities in 2017 and 2018. 

From 2017 to 2019, I spent my summers as an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES) at the University of Mannheim (Mannheim, Germany). During the 2016-17 academic year, I held the Fulbright Visiting Research Chair at Vanderbilt University (Nashville, Tennessee). I was a collaborator on the Canadian Election Studies of 2011 and 2015. From 2011 to 2016, I was Director of the Canadian Opinion Research Archive in the School of Policy Studies at Queen’s University (Kingston, Ontario). Prior to my arrival at Memorial in 2012, I was an Assistant Professor at Queen's University, where I was tenured and promoted to Associate Professor (effective July, 2012).