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Elisabeth
Gidengil
Elisabeth Gidengil
is a professor in the Department
of Political Science at McGill
University. She holds degrees from the London School of Economics,
New York University, and McGill University. Her research interests
include voting behaviour, public opinion, and the media, with a
special interest in gender and representation. She co-directed the
survey of Canadians' opinions on electoral democracy for the Royal
Commission on Electoral Reform and Party Financing (the Lortie Comission)
and has been a member of the 1992 Charlottetown Referendum / 1993,
1997, and 2000 Canadian
Election Study team. She is co-author of Making Representative
Democracy Work: The Views of Canadians (1991), The Challenge
of Direct Democracy: The 1992 Canadian Referendum (1996), Unsteady
State: The 1997 Canadian Federal Election (2000), Anatomy
of A Liberal Victory: Making Sense of the Vote in the 2000 Canadian
Election Study (2002), and The Democratic Audit of Canada:
Citizens (2004) in addition to numerous journal articles. View
Curriculum Vitae
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Citizens
(2004).
Citizens
are at the heart of any meaningful definition of democracy.
So what does it say about the health of Canadian democracy
when fewer citizens are exercising their right to vote and
party membership rolls are shrinking? Is an increasingly well-educated
citizenry turning away from traditional electoral politics
in search of more meaningful forms of democratic engagement?
Or is an ever-wider swathe of Canadian society simply disengaging
from politics altogether? This volume draws on a rich array
of public opinion data to determine how engaged Canadians
are in the country’s democratic life and which Canadians
are most—and least—engaged. This is the first comprehensive
assessment of citizen engagement in Canada. It raises challenging
questions, not just about the interests and capabilities of
Canadians as democratic citizens, but also about the performance
of our democratic institutions.
(University
of British Columbia Press)
The
Canadian Democratic Audit |
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Anatomy
of a Liberal Victory: Making Sense of the Vote in the 2000 Canadian
Election
André Blais, Elisabeth Gidengil, Richard Nadeau, Neil
Nevitte (2002)
Anatomy of a Liberal Victory provides a comprehensive account
of the factors that led Canadians to vote the way they did in
the 2000 Canadian election. The authors address in particular
the following questions: Why was turnout so low? What were Canadians’
perceptions of the economy and how much impact did these perceptions
have on vote choice? What were voters’ opinions on the
major issues of the day and did these opinions affect their
decision on election day? What did voters think of the leaders
and how much weight did these evaluations have on their choice?
(Peterborough:
Broadview Press)
Click
here for information on the coding schemes used in the
content analysis for Chapters 1 and 2 of the book
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Unsteady
State: The 1997 Canadian Federal Election
Neil Nevitte, André Blais, Elisabeth Gidengil, Richard
Nadeau (2000)
How did the 1997 Canadian Federal Election differ from those
that have come before it? Had the country’s demographics
changed dramatically enough to flummox pollsters and the parties?
Are we headed toward American-style politics as candidate campaigns
become highly charged and even more personal? Neil Nevitte,
André Blais, Elisabeth Gidengil and Richard Nadeau examine
what worked, what didn’t and why for the four major parties
and the independent candidates in Unsteady State. (Don
Mills: Oxford University Press)
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The
Challenge of Direct Democracy: The 1992 Canadian Referendum
André
Blais, Neil Nevitte, Elisabeth Gidengil, Richard Johnston
(1996)
Based
on extensive surveys conducted during and after the 1992 referendum
on the Charlottetown Accord, The Challenge of Direct Democracy
is a comprehensive investigation of voter opinion, intention,
perception, and behaviour in a referendum. The authors investigate
voters' responses to arguments for and against the Accord,
examine how well informed voters were, and explore a variety
of explanations for the negative result.
(Montreal and Kingston: McGill Queen's University Press)
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