Research
The following is a selection of my research projects. Please feel free to contact me for further details.
McAndrews, John R., Jonah I. Goldberg, Peter John Loewen, Daniel Rubenson, and Benjamin Allen Stevens. Forthcoming. “Non-Electoral Motivations to Represent Marginalized Groups in a Democracy: Evidence from an unelected legislature.” Legislative Studies Quarterly.
Do legislators from marginalized groups have non-electoral motivations to represent 'their' group? Previous observational and experimental research on this question focuses on elected politicians and is thus unable to isolate representation absent a desire to win re-election. We address this limitation by observing the decision-making of appointed legislators who, by institutional design, have no personal re-election motive. We administered to Canadian senators and their staff a novel survey instrument that captured how they prioritized learning about the policy opinions of various groups of citizens. We show that senators' group identities—specifically, those associated with racial and regional minorities—influenced which group's views they chose to learn about. The findings refine the central conclusion of the literature and have implications for the study not only of unelected legislators but also of elected officials in settings where public monitoring is weak. Link to article
de Geus, Roosmarijn A., John R. McAndrews, Peter John Loewen, and Aaron Martin. Forthcoming. “Do Voters Judge the Performance of Female and Male Politicians Differently? Experimental Evidence from the United States and Australia.” Political Research Quarterly.
Do gender stereotypes about agency affect how voters judge the governing performance of political executives? We explore this question using two conjoint experiments: one conducted in the United States and the other in Australia. Contrary to our expectations, we find no evidence in either experiment to suggest that female political executives (i.e., governors, premiers, and mayors) receive lower levels of credit than their male counterparts for positive governing performance. We do find evidence that female executives receive less blame than male executives for poor governing performance—but only in the U.S. case. Taken together, our findings suggest that the stereotype of male agency has only a limited effect on voters’ retrospective judgments. Moreover, the results indicate that—when performance information is presented in unframed, factual terms—agentic stereotyping by voters does not, in itself, present a serious obstacle to the re-election of women in powerful executive positions. Link to article
McAndrews, John R., Feodor Snagovsky, and Paul E.J. Thomas. 2020. “How Citizens Judge Extreme Legislative Dissent: Experimental Evidence from Canada on Party Switching.” Parliamentary Affairs 73(2): 323-341.
Prior research suggests that voters prefer legislators who dissent from their party (e.g., by speaking out or rebelling in legislative votes) to those who remain loyal to their party. We examine whether this preference extends to extreme instances of dissent where legislators switch parties. Using what we believe is the first survey experiment to examine party switching, we show that, overall, Canadian voters are not more likely to approve of an MP’s decision to engage in this kind of extreme dissent than an MP who remains loyal to their party. Instead, respondents’ support for party switching—and the inferences they draw about legislators’ motivations for doing so—depend in predictable ways on their partisanship and policy attitudes. This suggests that there are important limits to voters’ endorsement of independent-mindedness among legislators. Link to article
McAndrews, John R., Bert A. Rockman, and Colin Campbell. 2019. “The Causes and Consequences of Career Bureaucratic Influence.” In The United States and Canada: How Two Democracies Differ and Why It Matters, Paul Quirk, ed. Oxford University Press.
This chapter examines the influence that senior career officials in the bureaucracy have on the policy decisions that politicians make. It argues that institutional differences tend to facilitate more bureaucratic influence in Canada than in the United States (U.S.). Furthermore, it contends that the greater the influence of these career bureaucrats on the policy formulation process, the more carefully policy alternatives are considered—and, ultimately, the better the selected policy tends to perform overall. The chapter illustrates these arguments with a pair of historical vignettes concerning Canadian and American defense and environmental policymaking, as well as examples drawn from the Obama and Trump administrations and the Harper and Trudeau governments. It concludes with a discussion of the growing cross-national trend toward the politicization of the career bureaucracy. Link to book
Allen Stevens, Benjamin, Md Mujahedul Islam, Roosmarijn de Geus, Jonah Goldberg, John R. McAndrews, Alex Mierke-Zatwarnicki, Peter John Loewen, and Daniel Rubenson. 2019. “Local Candidate Effects in Canadian Elections.” Canadian Journal of Political Science 52(1): 83-96.
What impact do local candidates have on elections in single member district plurality electoral systems? We provide new evidence using data from a large election study carried out during the 2015 Canadian federal election. We improve on the measurement of local candidate effects by asking over 20,000 survey respondents to rate the candidates in their constituency directly. We present three estimates. We find that when all voters are considered together, local candidate evaluations are decisive for approximately 4 per cent of voters. Second, these evaluations are decisive for the outcome of 10 per cent of constituency contests. Third, when models are estimated for each constituency, we find significant evaluation effects for 14 per cent of candidates. Link to article
McAndrews, John R., Roosmarijn de Geus, and Peter John Loewen. Voters punish politicians for credible allegations of sexual misconduct.
Do voters punish politicians for allegations of sexual misconduct? Do the details of the misconduct matter? Using population-based survey experiments of US and Australian citizens we conduct the first cross-national study to explore these questions. We vary a range of attributes of the sexual misconduct allegations, such as the power dynamic between accuser and accused, the age of an allegation, and the severity of the misconduct. We find that voters exact substantial punishments on politicians accused of sexual misconduct. However, we find that the details of the allegations rarely condition voters’ responses. Rather, the most influential factor in shaping voters’ judgements is the amount of evidence from an investigation available to substantiate the allegations. Our study provides insights into how voters process the information available about sexual misconduct allegations and speaks strongly in favour of independent investigations in these matters.
McAndrews, John R. Does It Still Count as a Win? Public reactions to the passage of ideologically divisive bills in the US Congress
This paper takes as its starting point the often-asserted and theoretically important claim that Americans are more approving of the president and the majority party when they succeed in passing their bills in Congress than when they fail to do so. I test this assertion using a series of original survey experiments that varied the outcome of ideologically divisive bills—the type of legislation that, I argue, citizens are most likely to hear about. I find that, on average, participants do indeed reward successful political actors. Nevertheless, I show that this reward is typically concentrated among individuals already predisposed to favour the bill. In addition, I find no evidence that participants who are hostile to the bill punish its passage—contrary to recent scholarship on this question. My findings suggest that the president and the congressional majority party can reap the electoral credit for legislative success from policy supporters without incurring the wrath of policy opponents.
McAndrews, John R. Losing in Congress: How voters judge the legislative performance of the president and the majority party in light of bill failure
This paper takes up questions about the sophistication of citizens’ judgments of legislative performance and outcomes. Research in psychology and political science offers reasons to suspect that common biases may interfere with such judgments and, by extension, distort lawmakers’ incentives. I investigate these concerns using original survey experiments that hold constant the bill outcome (as failure) but vary the additional information about proponents’ performance. Contrary to widely held expectations, I find that participants make sensible use of this information when it is provided. Specifically, participants rate unsuccessful bill proponents much more favourably in the presence of information suggesting good legislative performance than in the presence of information suggesting poor performance; in effect, participants acknowledge the qualitative difference in proponents’ performance despite their failure in Congress. Moreover, I show that in the absence of such diagnostic information, individuals’ judgments of unsuccessful bill proponents still reflect realistic basic beliefs about legislative performance and the obstacles to congressional action. In particular, I find that citizens’ judgments largely fit with expectations derived from rational Bayesian updating of beliefs about legislative performance given news of congressional failure.
McAndrews, John R. Why Say Anything? Explaining MPs' Participation in Government Bill Debates in the Canadian House of Commons
I examine why some Canadian MPs participate more in House of Commons debates and, moreover, why some bills are subject to substantially greater debate than others. Drawing on an original dataset of debates over government bills, I find no evidence that electorally vulnerable MPs participate more (contrary to the pattern in Question Period) or that parliamentary parties engage in these debates in order to persuade others—even during minority government. Instead, I show that debate participation by opposition parties is tied to the parliamentary calendar, consistent with an intent to obstruct the passage of bills.
McAndrews, John R. The Deliberative Performance of Canadian Parliamentary Committees, 2001-2017
The scrutiny of bills is a key function of Parliament. But how well does Parliament do this job? On the one hand, scholars often point to committees as the legislative venue most likely to fulfill this mandate. In fact, political parties regularly advocate enhancing the role of committees with this purpose in mind. On the other hand, several recent media reports have highlighted notable failures of committee scrutiny. In light of these competing perspectives, I am currently undertaking the first large-scale investigation of the deliberative performance of House of Commons and Senate committees.
For the purposes of this project, I define deliberative performance as the consideration of relevant policy knowledge. While this conception focuses on only some dimensions of deliberation, it is especially relevant for policy making institutions. With this definition in mind, the project seeks to answer three main questions: (1) when needed, do committees collect relevant policy information; (2) what political conditions, institutional arrangements, and legislator characteristics promote or impede rigorous committee deliberation; and (3) does committee deliberation improve final decision making?