Jean-Francois Godbout

• Université de Montréal

Generative AI has the potential to transform personalization and accessibility of education. However, it raises serious concerns about accuracy and helping students become independent critical thinkers. In this study, we designed a helpful AI "Peer" to help students correct fundamental physics misconceptions related to Newtonian mechanic concepts....

This chapter investigates party realignment in the province of Québec. Drawing from the insights of the cleavage theory crafted by Lipset and Rokkan (1967) and the American experience, the study identifies three main conflict dimensions that have structured the party system over time. These overarching issues are economic redistribution, sovereignt...

Large language models are increasingly relied upon as sources of information, but their propensity for generating false or misleading statements with high confidence poses risks for users and society. In this paper, we confront the critical problem of epistemic miscalibration $\unicode{x2013}$ where a model's linguistic assertiveness fails to refle...

Misinformation is a complex societal issue, and mitigating solutions are difficult to create due to data deficiencies. To address this problem, we have curated the largest collection of (mis)information datasets in the literature, totaling 75. From these, we evaluated the quality of all of the 36 datasets that consist of statements or claims. We as...

The rise of AI-driven manipulation poses significant risks to societal trust and democratic processes. Yet, studying these effects in real-world settings at scale is ethically and logistically impractical, highlighting a need for simulation tools that can model these dynamics in controlled settings to enable experimentation with possible defenses....

This paper develops an agent-based automated fact-checking approach for detecting misinformation. We demonstrate that combining a powerful LLM agent, which does not have access to the internet for searches, with an online web search agent yields better results than when each tool is used independently. Our approach is robust across multiple models,...

Public health measures were among the most polarizing topics debated online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Much of the discussion surrounded specific events, such as when and which particular interventions came into practise. In this work, we develop and apply an approach to measure subnational and event-driven variation of partisan polarization and...

Using a unique dataset of legislators' electoral and biographical data in the Canadian provinces of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and the federal parliament, this article analyses the extent to which family dynasties affected the career development of legislators since the mid-18th century. We find that the prevalence of dynasties was...

This volume explores the politics of minority government. Approximately one-third of parliamentary democracies are or are typically ruled by a minority government—a situation where the party or parties represented at cabinet do not between them hold a majority of seats in the national legislature. Minority governments are particularly interesting i...

This article analyzes the effect of procedural rule change on the dynamics of parliamentary speeches in the Canadian House of Commons between 1901 and 2015. During this period, several new rules were introduced to reduce the opportunities for private members to speak during the debates so that the government could get its business done within an ac...

Automatic sentiment analysis is used extensively in political science. The digitization of legislative transcripts has increased the potential application of established tools for the automated analyses of emotion in text. Unlike in writing, however, expressing emotion in speech involves intonation, facial expressions, and body lan- guage. Drawing...

Since 2015, the Canadian Senate has undergone a series of reforms designed to make it more independent, ideologically diverse, and active in the legislative process. We use loyalty scores and vote scaling algorithms to situate the voting behaviour of senators, focusing primarily on the 41st and 42nd Parliaments (2011–2019), the period just before a...

Can age, period and cohort effects help explain support for Quebec sovereignty? Previous work on this question has focused mostly on the effects of age and cohort. We contribute to this debate by adding a period perspective. As such, our study is the first to investigate the impact of age, cohort and period effects in a single study of opinion towa...

L'équipe éditoriale de la Revue canadienne de science politique/Canadian Journal of Political Science (ci-après, la Revue ) vous propose pour son cinquantième anniversaire trois textes publiés en français qui jettent un regard critique sur son passé et son avenir et qui retracent aussi, plus généralement, les enjeux inhérents à la production et à l...

This paper analyzes the development of political parties and the origin of party loyalty in the legislative Assembly of Lower Canada between 1791 and 1840. To do so, it conducts a systemic analysis of the legislative behaviour of the Members of Parliament (MPs) with various loyalty indexes. The study aims to assess the validity of two common theori...

This study offers a new perspective on the development of political parties in the Australian House of Representatives. We analyse a data set of 3060 legislative votes to estimate how parties influenced the behaviour of 287 legislators who served in the first 12 parliaments (1901-31). We show that the socialisation of members and cohort replacement...

What explains the development of legislative party voting unity? Evidence from the United States and Britain indicate that partisan sorting, cohort replacement effects, electoral incentives, and agenda control contributed to enhancing party cohesion during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Here, these mechanisms are evaluated by analysing a d...

This study analyses legislative voting in the first ten Canadian Parliaments (1867–1908). The results demonstrate that party unity in the House of Commons dramatically increased over time. From the comparative literature on legislative organization, we identify three factors to explain this trend: partisan sorting, electoral incentives and negative...

This study analyzes legislative voting in the French National Assembly during the Fifth Republic. We use an original data set of roll-call votes to understand the development of party voting unity from the Ist to the XIIIth Legislature (1958-2012). We also include a spatial analysis of legislative voting to measure the dimensionality of politics in...

Estimating the impact of turnout on House election results is problematic because of endogeneity and omitted variable bias. The following study proposes an instrumental approach to correct for these problems by using a series of fixed effects two-stage least squares panel-data regression models covering three congressional apportionment cycles (197...

The paper analyzes legislative speech records in the U.S. Senate from the 101st-108th Congresses. We apply a widely-used text classification algorithm - Support Vector Machines (SVM) - to extract the terms that are most indicative of conservative and liberal positions from legislative speeches and to predict Senators' ideological positions in the 1...

We analyze legislative voting in the 35th (1994-1997), 38th (2004-2005), and 39th (2006-2008) Canadian Parliaments. Using Poole's (2005) optimal classification algorithm, we locate MPs and their parties in a two-dimensional geometric model. The first dimension represents the division between governing and opposition parties that has been found in s...

In recent decades, the scientific forecasting of election outcomes has made great strides in a number of advanced industrial democracies. One country that has not received much attention to date is Canada. In this article, we present a vote function model to forecast Canadian federal elections. We explain our model's theoretical underpinnings and a...

Inter-party voting coalitions in three minority cabinets were analysed: the 38th (2004–05), 39th (2006–08) and 40th (2008–11) Federal Canadian Parliaments. The paper begins by developing a simple theory to explain the formation of voting coalitions. The theory predicts that electoral incentives and policy issues drive minority government support. T...

This article presents a case study of the recent merger between the Progressive-Conservative Party and the Reform/Canadian Alliance parties. The selection of this case serves to illustrate the current limits of existing party organisational change and party coalition theories when it comes to explaining party mergers. We propose an alternative theo...

In this paper, we analyze legislative voting in the 38th and 39th Canadian minority Parlia- ments. Our goal is to study coalition formation using Poole (2005a)'s Optimal Classification methodology in order to estimate the location of legislators and parties in a two dimensional spatial model. The main contention of this project is that voting coali...

The following chapter investigates the relationship between legislative activity and legislative speech in the U.S. Senate between the 101st and 108th Congress. The analysis measures the link between the quantity of speech used on the floor by particular senators and their individual level of legislative productivity. This chapter focuses on the nu...

In this paper, we analyze voting coalitions under the minority governments in the 38th and 39th Canadian Parliaments. We demonstrate that minority government support is driven by electoral incentives and policy issues. The main contention of this project is that voting coalitions are more likely to form along ideological lines—the Axelrod (1970)’s...

The authors propose a reexamination of the conditioning effect of political sophistication on economic voting in U.S. presidential elections. Replicating Gomez and Wilson's (2001) analysis with survey data from the past five American presidential elections (1988-2004), they show that low sophisticates strictly rely on sociotropic economic judgments...

The authors present a response to Gomez and Wilson's comments related to their article “Economic Voting and Political Sophistication in the United States: A Reassessment,” published in this issue of Political Research Quarterly.

This article examines the past 50 years to update an analysis of the relationship between income and partisanship. Earlier, Nadeau and Stanley noted that therewas a change in partisanship in the South from inverse class polarization, in which higher income individuals more often identified with the Democratic Party, to normal class polarization, bu...

Recent works on economic voting have shown that the economy's impact on electoral behaviour could sometimes be mediated by differences in political conditions. This article specifies and tests the mediating role of one such factor, namely regionalism, on economic voting in Canada. The potential effect of two structural factors is tested: the region...

Recent works on economic voting have shown that the economy's impact on electoral behaviour could sometimes be mediated by differences in political conditions. This article specifies and tests the mediating role of one such factor, namely regionalism, on economic voting in Canada. The potential effect of two structural factors is tested: the region...

In this paper, we analyze voting coalitions under the minority governments in the 38 th and 39 th Canadian Parliaments. We demonstrate that minority government support is driven by elec-toral incentives and policy issues. The main contention of this project is that voting coalitions are more likely to form along ideological lines—the Axelrod (1970)...

Party mergers are a rare occurrence that is seldom studied by political scientists. Whereas intra-party conflicts can often lead to party splits, inter-party cooperation will rarely produce a merger between competing parties. Drawing from the industrial organizational literature and economics, we develop a theory of party merger where a merger is p...

Abstract will be provided by author.

Legislators discuss policies and vote over policy alternatives. While the latter activity is well researched by political scientists, the former activity has, until very recently, largely been ignored by quantitative political science. We in- vestigate the relationship between positions express in parliamentary debates and voting behavior in a mult...

This paper analyzes the differences in policy preferences of voters and nonvoters by com- paring individuals who have high and low probabilities of turning out on election day. When we consider the mobilizing side of political campaigns, knowledge about which voter is more likely to participate is crucial. We suspect that candidates and parties are...

Ten countries joined the European Union in 2004. This oered a rare oppor- tunity for the existing party groups to substantively increase their share of the seats in the European Parliament by recruiting national party delegations from the new member states. As most of new member states have a relative short history of competitive multiparty system,...

We analyze legislative voting in the first three Canadian Parliaments (1867-1878). The results demonstrate that party discipline dramatically increases over time, while the discipline asso-ciated with former colonial voting blocs decreases simultaneously. Our analysis also confirms this trend using Poole (2005)'s Optimal Classification algorithm wh...

"Mémoire présenté à la faculté des études supérieures en vue de l'obtention du grade de Maîtrise ès science (M. Sc.) en science politique." Thèse (M. Sc.)--Université de Montréal, 2001.