This article analyzes how partisanship and political information influence perceptions of government corruption at national and regional levels and whether information attenuates the impact of partisanship. The data are drawn from surveys of recent elections held in Canada, France, Germany, Spain, and Switzerland. Almost everywhere, partisans of the incumbent parties and the most-informed citizens perceive less corruption than their nonpartisan and less-informed counterparts. However, there is no evidence of an interaction effect between information and partisanship. We note one interesting exception: In Quebec, the better informed perceive more corruption, especially those who are also partisans of opposition parties. We discuss how this pattern may be related to the emergence of a corruption scandal before the Quebec election.

Regret is a basic aff ect associated with individual choice. While much research in organizational science and consumer behavior has assessed the precedents and consequents of regret, little attention has been paid to regret in political science. The present study assesses the relationship between one of the most democratically consequential forms of political behavior-voting-and feelings of regret. We examine the extent to which citizens regret how they voted after doing so and the factors that might lead one individual to be more regretful than another. Relying on surveys in fi ve diff erent countries after 11 regional and national elections, we find not only that political information leads to a decrease in post-election regret, but also that having voted correctly, or having voted in accordance with one's underlying preferences regardless of information, similarly mitigates regret. The eff ect of correct voting on regret is greater among the least informed.

Though Canada is internationally lauded for the success of its multiculturalism policies, debates about immigrant integration have arisen in recent years. These debates have turned on the extent to which religion should be accommodated in the public sphere. They have also been disproportionately concentrated in the French-speaking province of Quebec. This paper asks whether this disproportionality is due to the Quebec population being particularly unfavourable to religious accommodation and, if so, whether this disfavour is grounded in racial antipathy toward newcomers or in the province's unique religious history. The findings show that while opposition to religious accommodation is higher in Quebec, and higher among francophones, it is rooted more in the low level of religiosity of the francophone population than in racial animus. These results emphasise the importance of correctly conceptualising distinctions between ethnocentric and culturally based sources of group conflict in multicultural settings such as Canada.

Résumé Cette note de recherche a deux objectifs. Premièrement, nous présentons l'index relatif de confiance (IRC), une nouvelle mesure du potentiel de croissance et de la solidité du vote basée sur la probabilité exprimée par les électeurs de voter pour l'ensemble des partis dans leur circonscription. Nous nous penchons en détail sur les avantages de l'IRC et montrons qu'il permet d’évaluer le potentiel de croissance et la solidité du vote des partis politiques au niveau des circonscriptions et au niveau provincial. Deuxièmement, nous appliquons cet index au cas du Parti québécois à l'aide d’échantillons de grandes tailles récoltés pendant les campagnes électorales québécoises de 2012, 2014, et 2018. Cela nous permet d'illustrer et de tirer des constats sur le potentiel de croissance du Parti québécois.

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