Revisiting Local Campaign Effects: An Experiment Involving Literature Mail Drops in the 2007 Ontario Election

An invariant feature of constituency election campaigns is the literature mail drop, usually a one-page leaflet or card left at the door profiling the candidate and appealing for electoral support. In this article, we report on a field experiment designed to assess the effects of such mail drops. The experiment was conducted during the 2007 Ontario provincial election campaign in the constituency of Cambridge and entailed distributing literature for the Green party candidate in that constituency. After randomly assigning constituency polls to treatment and control groups, and delivering the Green candidate’s partisan literature only to the selected treatment group polls, we compared the candidate’s support levels in the treated polls with those in the control group. Our research detected a modest effect associated with the literature drop. The effect was largely limited to constituency neighbourhoods fitting at least part of the Green party’s traditional demographic, that is, those with higher than average socio-economic status

In praise of the parasite: the dark organizational theory of Michel Serres

Michel Serres’ concept of ‘the parasite’ provides for a sustained rethinking of basic categories in human social science. As an example of post-Kantian philosophy, Serres critiques the classical logic of identity as based on a ‘third man’ argument. This third space – personified as the parasite – is essential to thinking communication and transformation in systems. Parasitism operates through the logic of taking without giving or ‘abuse value’. But the parasite nevertheless makes exchange possible by creating connections between otherwise incommensurable forms of ordering. Human relations oscillate through period of disequilibrium, often involving scapegoating and exclusion, as parasitic cascades emerge. However, parasites in the form of jokers and quasi-objects create powerful mechanisms for creating collectivity and individuality. The ‘dark organizational theory’ of Serres allows for adequate descriptions of these processes

They have escaped the weight of darkness: The problem space of Michel Serres

The final scene in Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies is a single uninterrupted shot following the character György Eszter into the main square of the small Hungarian town where he lives. The square is oddly calm after the riots and chaos of the previous evening. Debris lies everywhere. At its centre is the colossal body of a whale, perched in the broken shell of the circus truck that brought it into the town the day before. Eszter slowly approaches the rotting body and gazes into its milky, decaying eye. We recall the words he has previously spoken to Valuska: ‘Nem számít semmi. Semmi nem számít’ (‘Nothing counts. Nothing counts at all’)

The 2007 Provincial Election and Electoral System Referendum in Ontario

Ontario’s general election in Oct. 10, 2007, was unprecedented for several reasons. The election was held on a date fixed by legislation and not one set by the premier or his caucus, something new to Ontario and relatively new to Canadian politics. Turnout declined to 53%, the lowest ever in Ontario history. The incumbent Liberals won a second consecutive majority government, something the party had not achieved since 1937. And finally, the election featured a referendum question that asked voters in Ontario to approve reforms to the electoral system, a proposal that was overwhelmingly rejected. This article explores each of the above-stated elements as they unfolded in the election

Exit Polling in Canada: An Experiment

Although exit polling has not been used to study Canadian elections before, such polls have methodological features that make them a potentially useful complement to data collected through more conventional designs. This paper reports on an experiment with exit polling in one constituency in the 2003 Ontario provincial election. Using student volunteers, a research team at Wilfrid Laurier University conducted an exit poll in the bellwether constituency of Kitchener Centre to assess the feasibility of mounting this kind of study on a broader scale. The experiment was successful in a number of respects. It produced a sample of 653 voters that broadly reflected the partisan character of the constituency, and which can hence be used to shed light on patterns of vote-switching and voter motivations in that constituency. It also yielded insights about best practices in mounting an exit poll in the Ontario context, as well as about the potential for using wireless communication devices to transmit respondent data from the field. The researchers conclude that exit polling on a limited basis (selected constituencies) is feasible, but the costs and logistics associated with this methodology make a province-wide or country-wide study unsupportable at present

Dilemmas of memory: The mind is not a tape recorder

The dynamics of memory are broadly distributed across relationships, institutions, material affordances and, of course, discursive practices. The Chancellor's memory is an attempt to show how the subject matter parsed by cognitive psychology can be lifted wholesale into a discursive approach. Discursive Psychology has its roots in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, a discipline that was acutely aware of the vacuous nature of claims to systematicity, rigor, and most notoriously replication. Dave Middleton's early work shared a concern with the linguistic steering of children's activities, having been part of the group that refined the experimental demonstration of scaffolding in parent child interactions. These studies were critical to a move in developmental psychology of placing cognitive development in a sociocultural context. Edwards and Goodwin argue that lexical development in children is poorly grasped when it is treated in terms of gradual conceptual understanding, because this implies that thinking precedes doing