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I am from Edmonton, Alberta. I became interested in the role of the news media in the political process after working for a political party at the Legislative Assembly. My dissertation argued that changes in the provincial economy, the political party system, individual leadership style and the political economy of the media drove important changes in the government's communication and marketing bureaucracy. This has had deleterious effects in the capacity for citizens to hold their elected officials to account via their representatives. Parallel changes are evident in other jurisdictions in Canada and at the federal level. Today, I continue to write on the role of the media in the political and policy process in Canada
I pursue research in 3 major areas. I am primarily interested in Canadian political behaviour and public opinion. I am currently working primarily on dynamics of class voting in Canada which explores the evolving role that income, education and occupation play in shaping Canadians' political behaviour. In addition, I am also pursuing research in housing attitudes and policy, exploring Canadians attitudes to housing affordability and solutions to the housing crisis.
For more detailed information about my research, visit my personal website.
- Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Partnership Connection Grant (2020)
- Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Insight Grant (2018)
- Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Insight Development Grant (2013)
I am appointed to the Faculty of Graduate Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. As such, I am fully qualified to supervise master’s theses. While I do have an eclectic set of research interests, my research interests and thus my opportunities for student research align more closely with the Department of Political Science. This is my departmental “home” for these purposes. At the moment, I would be interested in supervising master’s students to pursue any of the following projects:
- Risk Perception And Risk Management: As part of my Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Insight Development Grant on applying the “Cultural Cognition” scales to the Canadian context, colleagues from the Université de Montréal and I have a significant representative, non-probability sample of Canadians and the United States that surveys respondents’ attitudes to risk perception, policy preferences, ideology party identification and demographic attitudes. It also embeds an experiment that tests framing effects on people’s attitudes to pipeline constructions in the United States. In addition, any student with an interest in risk perception as it pertains to public health practices (i.e. fluoridation or vaccines) would be welcome. We are developing a new research group at Laurier that focuses on attitudes toward public health.
- Social Basis of Environmental Attitudes: I have a long-standing interest in the role of social class in shaping political attitudes, particularly as it relates to environmental attitudes. I would particularly be interested in studying the mechanisms that drive environmental attitudes (e.g. social capital, status, level of education, field of study, etc.)
- Surveying Attitudes of Canadian Journalists: A colleague and I have developed a survey of Canadian parliamentarians, bloggers and journalists. While this is the subject of one paper currently under review, there remains more to discover in this dataset, particularly determinants of news values. A possible project here would be the construction of a coherent time series of data on journalists’ news values as this survey contains identical questions fielded in the following set of surveys: Changes in Canadian Journalists' Views about the Social and Political Roles of the News Media: A Panel Study, 1996–2003
- Historical News Coverage in Canadian Provinces (Alberta): Somewhere on my hard drive, I have a massive sample of news stories about Alberta politics from the 1990s. Students interested in the evolution of news coverage about politics in Alberta in particular or as a representative data set of news coverage in a Canadian province may find this interesting.
- Methodology: I have a strong interest in the R computing language and reproducible research. I have taken steps to develop my package that reads in newspaper articles from the ProQuest research database to R’s tm (text mining) package. I would enjoy supervising any attempt to further this package’s development and see its application in a thesis.
- The NDP: I am working on a long-term project examining the transformation of the NDP in Canada. Students with in interest in anything related to the NDP are welcome.
- Polacko, Matthew, Simon Kiss, and Peter Graefe. “The Changing Nature of Class Voting in Canada, 1965–2019.” Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue Canadienne de Science Politique 55, no. 3 (2022): 663–86. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008423922000439.
- Kiss, Simon, Peter Graefe, and Matt Polacko. “The Education And Income Voting Divides In Canada And Their Consequences For Redistributive Politics.” Electoral Studies 85 (October 2023). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2023.102648.
- Wootten, George W., and Simon J. Kiss. “The Ambiguous Definition of Open Government: Parliamentarians, Journalists and Bloggers Define Open Government In Accordance With Their Interests.” Canadian Journal of Political Science 52, no. 3 (2019): 479–99. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008423918000446
- Kiss, Simon. “Where Did All the Baby Bottles Go? Risk Perception, Media Coverage, Interest Groups And Institutional Imperatives in Canada’s Regulation of Bisphenol A.” Canadian Journal of Political Science. (2015)
- Kiss, Simon J. “Responding to the New Public: The arrival of strategic communications and managed participation in Alberta.” Canadian Public Administration. (2014)
- Kiss, Simon. “Legislation By Agenda-setting: Assessing The Media’s Role In the Regulation of Bisphenol A In The US States.” Mass Communication & Society. (2011)
- Kiss, Simon. “The Red-Green Divide in Canada : Class Differences in Environmental Attitudes in Canada and their Consequences for the Party System.” Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien. (2011)