Political Science Speaker Series: Dr. Fred Cutler (UBC)

“Institutions, Contexts, and Citizens’ Judgments of Their Democracy” About the Talk: In this paper we critique existing research on citizens’ Satisfaction with Democracy (SWD) and propose conceptual and empirical solutions to several problems. This paper proposes an encompassing theoretical model of institutional and individual-level determinants of citizens’ satisfaction with democracy and then estimates that model with cross-national survey and macro data.The key step is starting with a well-specified individual-level model of SWD separate from the effects of institutions on the individual-level determinants. We then employ state-of-the-art multilevel mediation models (Preacher et al. 2010) to estimate this model on a merged dataset of ESS and country-level contextual data. Thus, the first step in successfully estimating such a model is theoretical: to properly specify the relationship from contextual factors (especially institutions) through possible individual-level mediators, to the outcome of interest – Satisfaction with Democracy. The results show that citizens’ judgments of democracy are based mostly in outputs and lived experience, not in institutional variation or its political consequences. (With Andrea Nuesser and Ben Nyblade).

Location:

Social Science Tower – Room 729

Speaker:

Fred Cutler (Ph.D. Michigan) is an Associate Professor of Political Science at UBC and Academic Chair of the Faculty of Arts Instructional Support and Information Technology unit. He does research in public opinion, elections, federalism, and political psychology. He has been Principal Investigator of the Canadian Election Study 2011-2015. He is also a member of the Making Electoral Democracy Work research team, conducting experiments to understand the effects of different members of political parties on voters.

More information at http://www.ucalgary.ca/events/calendar/political-science-speaker-series-dr-fred-cutler-ubc