PhD candidate lead on APSR article

January 9, 2018

A paper that won the APSA 2017 Legislative Studies CQ Press Award (September 2017) has just been published in the American Political Science Review (APSR), political science’s premier scholarly research journal. The lead on the paper, entitled “Non-Representative Representatives: An Experimental Study of the Decision Making of Elected Politicians” is PhD candidate Lior Sheffer, an achievement seldom met by graduate students.

Calling the publication of the article “a testament to the incredible support and opportunity extended to me by my supervisor and co-author Peter Loewen, and by the other principal investigators of INFOPOL,” the project involved over a dozen faculty, post-docs and PhD students in three countries and spanned almost five years.

Inclusion in the APSR also validates Sheffer’s academic interest in studying elite political decision making: “At the University of Toronto, I’m proud to be part of a small but expanding group of political scientists who are interested in political behaviour, political psychology and quantitative methodology, complementing the department’s longstanding strengths in other fields in political science. I’m very excited to see graduate students and new faculty getting involved in such research, and I’m sure the department will reap the benefits in the coming years.”

As mentioned, the paper is co-authored by U of T political science Professor Peter Loewen, Stuart Soroka (University of Michigan), Stefaan Walgrave (University of Antwerp) and Tamir Sheafer (Hebrew University). A copy of the paper is available here.

Photo: Lior Sheffer