Thierry arrived in October and will be visiting the Canadian Studies Center for two months. He will dedicate the time to framing the study of online political behaviors in Québec and Canada. He will be working on two projects during his stay here at the University.
The first project looks at how political parties in Québec and France campaigned online during their last legislative and presidential elections (respectively) in 2012. He will be working on two articles while in Seattle. The first will be a paper version of a talk he gave in Stockholm in September on social media use within online campaign strategies. The second deals with online users’s demands, expectations and evaluations of what parties provide online during elections. Thierry will also travel to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to give a talk on this project in the Communication Department at the invitation of Professor Dhavan Shah. He will also be drafting two panel proposals on online campaigns for the International Political Science Association’s meeting in Montréal in July 2014. This comparative project will end next year with the production of a book dedicated to these two election campaigns.
The second project investigates online citizenship in Canada. Thierry looks at how Canadians use online technologies to engage politically and experience their citizenship. The study will be carried over the next 4 years (2013-2017) and Thierry will be working with his colleagues on their first phone survey which should go in the field around this November. A short visit to the University of Phoenix, at the invitation of Professor Karen Mossberger, is also planned for Thierry.
Thierry Giasson is Associate Professor in the Information and Communication Department of the Université Laval in Quebec City. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Montreal. Mr. Giasson is the principal investigator of the research group in political communication (GPCR) from Laval University. He is also an associate researcher at the Institute of Information Technology and Society (ITIS) at Laval University and the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship (CSDC) from McGill University.