Guest Speaker Catherine Ouellet

DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE SPEAKER SERIES

Lifestyle as a Social Marker: Exploring the Link Between Lifestyle and Political Choice in Quebec

Catherine Ouellet  (Université de Montréal)

Friday, February 23, 2024

12:30-2:00pm

Hall Building, Room H-1220

The lowering of traditional social cleavages in predicting political preferences does not necessarily mean that group membership for detecting political behavior does not exist; it might only be the case that the boundaries of these groups need to be redefined. By relying on unique pool data, Ouellet investigates the relevance of lifestyle for capturing and delineating social groups within which people share political attitudes. Findings show the relevance of lifestyle to better predict voting intentions, but also that lifestyle clusters are significantly associated with vote choice, even after controlling for sociodemographic characteristics. This research contributes to the debate on the weakening of socio-structural influence on vote choice and reassess the importance of both contextual and individual variables in explaining and understanding our political world.

Catherine Ouellet is completing her PhD in political science at the University of Toronto and is an incoming Assistant Professor at the political science department of the Université de Montréal. She is one of the co-creators of the data collection tool Datagotchi.