Executive

Clifton van der Linden, Founder and Executive Director
Cliff is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. He holds an honours BA in economics and political science from McMaster University and an MA in journalism from the University of Western Ontario. He has worked as a reporter for the Financial Post, is past-chair of the G8 Research Group at the Munk School of Global Affairs, and served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of International Law and International Relations. He has been a visiting scholar at the Free University Amsterdam and the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. Cliff is a past winner of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship, the Ontario Graduate Scholarship, and the Adel S. Sedra Distinguished Graduate Award.

Yannick Dufresne, Director of Communications
Yannick is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. He received his BA and MSc from the Université de Montréal. His areas of specialization are Canadian politics and political behaviour and his current research focuses on campaign strategies and voting patterns. His formal training includes the program in quantitative methods and social research provided by the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). He is presently the recipient of a doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and has previously been awarded the Ontario Graduate Scholarship and the Ken Bryden Scholarship in Canadian Government and Politics.

Gregory Eady, Director of Analytics
Greg is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. His areas of specialization are comparative politics and international relations, and his current research focuses on explaining the start of civil wars through the use of statistical data. His formal training includes the program in quantitative methods and social research provided by the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). Greg is a recipient of the Canada Graduate Scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and was offered the the Ontario Graduate Scholarship. He received a BA in history from the University of Waterloo and an MA in political science from Wilfrid Laurier University.

Kelly Hinton, Director of Operations
Kelly holds a Master of Arts in political science from the University of Toronto, where her research focused on protest voting in the 2006 Canadian federal election and the influence of party spending on vote behaviour. Following her studies, she worked as a policy associate at the Mowat Centre for Policy Innovation. Her work principally concentrated on economic transformation in the Great Lakes Region and public transit in Canadian global city-regions. In her role as policy associate, Kelly was also the lead project and content manager for the inaugural Great Lakes – St. Lawrence Region Summit held in partnership with the Brookings Institution. Her additional research includes behavioural voting, elections, and voter attitudes. Kelly previously worked as Project Development Officer for Vote Compass, contributing to the development and execution of the application in the Ontario, Alberta, Quebec, and U.S elections. She received her BAH in political studies from Queen’s University.

Jennifer Hove, Director of Research
Jen is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada doctoral fellow in political science at the University of Toronto. Her research areas include foreign policy attitudes, women and politics, and political behaviour. She has co-authored several articles exploring Canadian attitudes towards the mission in Afghanistan, published in the Canadian Journal of Political Science. Jennifer’s dissertation research focuses on changes to political attitudes and behaviour in Afghanistan as a result of international intervention, with emphasis on gender dynamics. Prior to beginning her doctoral studies, Jen contributed to research projects on Aboriginal education in Canada (supported by the CD Howe Institute) and BC energy policy. Internationally, she has worked for the BRAC University Institute of Educational Development, as part of a CIDA-funded program in Bangladesh; and collaborated on research aimed at expanding educational access in Bangladesh, India, Ghana and South Africa. Jen has a Master of Public Policy from Simon Fraser University, and studied International Relations at the University of British Columbia.

Peter Loewen, Director of Strategy
Peter is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto. He received his undergraduate education at Mount Allison University and his PhD from the Université de Montréal. His research regularly engages survey research, experiments, and quantitative modeling. His principal research interests are in understanding why individuals participate in politics and why individuals hold different political opinions from one another. He is also interested in understanding how politicians choose to represent citizens, both within Parliament and in their constituency offices. Finally, recent research focuses on why individuals are more likely to cooperate and participate with people who are more similar to themselves than those who are different. This research involves a series of surveys and experiments in rural Malawi. He is a past winner of multiple awards from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Project Associates

David Houle
David is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science and the Centre for Environment at the University of Toronto. He holds a master’s degree in policy analysis and a bachelor’s degree in economics and politics from Laval University. He was awarded several graduate scholarships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Fonds québécois de recherche sur la société et la culture (FQRSC), and the University of Toronto. His research focuses on climate change and atmospheric pollutant policies in federal and provincial governments in Canada. Other research interests include public policy, Quebec and Canadian politics. He has contributed to several edited books, published at Presses de l’Université Laval and UBC Press, and academic journals.

Yvonne Su
Yvonne is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. She studies the intersection of age, gender, and representation in the House of Commons. Her interest in Canadian politics and youth engagement comes from a history of encouraging political participation. Described by Rick Mercer as ‘whip smart, involved, passionate, [and] articulate’, Yvonne co-founded the Vote Mob Movement that mobilized over 45 Vote Mobs across the county in the last federal election. Internationally, Yvonne has consulted for and participated in international projects in Bangladesh, South Africa and Greenland. Yvonne has a MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration from the University of Oxford and a BA in International Development from the University of Guelph. She is the recipient of a Doctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Academic Advisory Board

André Blais is Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Université de Montréal.  He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada as well as a research fellow with the Centre for the Study of  Democratic Citizenship, the Centre interuniversitaire de recherche en économie quantitative (CIREQ), and the Center for Interuniversity Research Analysis on Organizations (CIRANO).  He is past president of the Canadian Political Science Association and was principle co-investigator of the 1997, 2000, 2004 and 2006 Canadian Election Studies.  His research interests are elections, electoral systems, turnout, public opinion, and methodology.

Elisabeth Gidengil is Hiram Mills Professor in the Department of Political Science at McGill University and Director of the inter-university Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship.  She was educated at the London School of Economics, New York University and McGill University and was a fellow at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University.  She was co-investigator on the 1993, 1997, 2000, 2004 and 2006 Canadian Election Studies and principal investigator for the 2008 Canadian Election Study.  Her research focuses on voting behaviour and public opinion, with special interests in questions relating to gender and media coverage.  She has published numerous articles in international journals and co-authored several books, including Unsteady State: The 1997 Federal Election, Citizens and Anatomy of a Liberal Victory: Making Sense of the 2000 Canadian Election.

Richard Johnston is Professor in the Department of Political Science and Director of the Centre of the Study of Democratic Institutions, both at the University of British Columbia.  He has also taught at the University of Toronto, the California Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and the University of Pennsylvania.  He is currently a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence, serving as visiting scientist on ELECDEM, an EU doctoral training programme.  He is author or co-author of five books and over 70 journal articles and chapters, and co-editor of three books.  He was principal investigator of the Canadian Election Studies in 1988 and 1992-3, Research Director of the (US) National Annenberg Election Survey, and oversaw fieldwork for the 2000-2003 Equality, Security, and Community Survey (Canada).  He has served on advisory panels for the New Zealand, British, German,Turkish, and American National Election Studies.

Neil Nevitte is Professor in the Department of Political Science and at the School of Public Policy and Governance. His research interests include political participation and value change, and a selection of his authored and co-authored works include the books The Decline of Deference: Canadian Value Change in Comparative Perspective 1981-1990, Unsteady State: The 1997 Federal Election, Citizens and Anatomy of a Liberal Victory: Making Sense of the 2000 Canadian Election.  His past honours include a Connaught Research Fellowship in Social Sciences from the University of Toronto, and a Fulbright Senior Research Fellow from the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University.  He received his BA and MA from McMaster University, and his PhD from Duke University.