Category: analysis

DDP’s fifth memo is up. If there is a general theme emerging from these Digital Democracy Project reports, it is that much of the received wisdom about the current state of the media and democracy is, if not false, at least poorly supported by the available evidence. For example, contrary to popular belief, Canadians do not live in media-driven partisan...

The fourth memo has been released. Since the Digital Democracy Project began surveying Canadians earlier this summer, immigration has consistently ranked around the middle of the list of political issues of concern to the public. Canada has a long history of embracing immigrants and refugees, but with rising populist and nativist sentiment in the United States and Europe—and the emergence...

Researchers, pundits and armchair analysts have argued for some time now that Canada is becoming more like the United States when it comes to polarization—typically understood as the segmenting of society into increasingly isolated and mutually incomprehensible political tribes. It is also common to see at least some of the blame for polarization placed on the media, where increasingly partisan social...

This is the first report from the Digital Democracy Project, a partnership between the Public Policy Forum and the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University. The goal of this report is to provide an initial snapshot of the Canadian political media ecosystem leading up to this fall’s federal election. The project uses data from both public opinion...

In summer 2015, Reddit was at the center of multiple controversies, resulting in many members quite vocally calling for mass exodus from the platform. We conducted an in-depth analysis of the resulting migration. Congratulations to everyone in the lab who made the paper happen!

We conducted a careful analysis to understand the difference between book reviews written on Goodreads vs. Amazon. Congratulations to Stefan and Edward! Book reviewing is a commonplace activity on many ecommerce sites. However, it is nested within the broader context of book buying and selling. Goodreads, an online platform for social curation of book collections, provides an opportunity to observe...