A seemingly inescapable feature of the digital age is that people choosing to devote their lives to politics must now be ready to face a barrage of insults and disparaging comments targeted at them through social media. This article represents an effort to document this phenomenon systematically. We implement machine learning models to predict the incivility of about 2.2 m messages addressed to Canadian politicians and US Senators on Twitter. Specifically, we test whether women in politics are more heavily targeted by online incivility, as recent media reports suggested. Our estimates indicate that roughly 15% of public messages sent to Senators can be categorized as uncivil, whereas the proportion is about four points lower in Canada. We find evidence that women are more heavily targeted by uncivil messages than men, although only among highly visible politicians.

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Canadian legislatures’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have raised questions about whether and how parliaments should continue to meet during the pandemic (Reid, 2020; Thomas, 2020a). The purpose of this research note is twofold: (1) to document how Canadian legislatures have changed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and (2) to assess the effect of these responses on legislatures’ ability to fulfill their core functions. Through an analysis of parliamentary records from all elected federal, provincial and territorial legislatures in Canada, we find that the role of parliaments as sites of citizen representation has suffered the most, whereas the scrutinizing and legislative functions of parliaments have tended to be preserved, albeit in a significantly truncated form. We argue that patterns in legislatures' varied responses to the pandemic reveal which aspects of parliamentary functioning these bodies de facto prioritize and which are at risk of being eroded.

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