Political Leadership and Executive Politics
My first research interest is in political leadership and executive politics. Currently, I am working on three research agendas in these areas.
1) Prime ministerial power and institutions. My PhD dissertation traced the institutional development of ‘prime ministerial branches’ in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom: the supporting organizations, like the Privy Council Office in Canada or the Cabinet Office in the UK, which help prime ministers to perform their complex and multidimensional roles. I am currently adapting the dissertation as a book, Pillars of Power: Building the Westminster Prime Ministerial Branches, 1945-2020, under contract with UBC Press.
2) Cabinet and cabinet process. Cabinet is one of the core executive decision-making arenas in parliamentary systems. I’m interested in the processes of cabinet decision-making, representation within cabinet structure, and how prime ministers and party leaders use cabinet to achieve their goals.
A lot of my recent work examines cabinet committees: groups of cabinet ministers assigned to specific policy or coordination responsibilities. This is a very understudied area, and I have been at the forefront of advancing knowledge. I’ve published articles assessing cabinet committees as strategic tools of prime ministerial leadership, as a window into government formation and collegial and collective decision-making, and gender and regional representation and their relationship to influence within cabinet committees, in collaboration with Nora Siklodi (Portsmouth) and Nicholas Allen (Royal Holloway, University of London).
I’ve also begun researching mandate letters: the ‘to-do’ lists that Canadian prime ministers and premiers send to their cabinet ministers, informing them of their roles, expectations, and specific policy outcomes they should work to achieve. My interest is in how these letters frame ministerial activity: how they induce networks of ministerial coordination and how they ‘construct’ ministerial policy roles. This work has been published in the Canadian Journal of Political Science and Canadian Public Administration, and more is on the way!
Political Representation and Behaviour
I’ve been a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of New Brunswick, Saint John, since 2022. In this role, I’ve been working with Joanna Everitt (UNB - Saint John), Karen Bird (McMaster), Angelia Wagner (Alberta), and Mireille Lalancette (UQTR) on the SSHRC-funded project Identity, Images and Impact: The Role of Local Candidate Identity, Media Representations and Voter.
My work has involved designing, conducting, and analyzing an online survey with two experiments on racialized political engagement and candidate stereotypes. We fielded this survey in Spring 2023 and are in the process of publishing several studies from this rich data. One of our studies examines the attitudes of Chinese Canadians towards Chinese Canadian candidates. Another study looks at how diversity of candidates impacts attitudes about running for office. We’ve also assessed the role of district diversity in generating racialized engagement.
Our survey data is also a foundation for a book project, Inclusive Politics: Building Trust through Diverse Local Candidates, under contract with UBC Press. In the context of declining trust in politics and politicians, we seek to theorize and assess the role of candidates in trust relationships with voters. We examine questions such as: what kinds of candidates tend to generate higher trust? What kinds of voters are more trusting? What is the role of intersectional identities in trust?