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I originally hail 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.
- 2010 – Assistant Professor, Journalism and Leadership, Wilfrid Laurier University.
- 2008-2010 – Social Sciences and Humanities Research council, Post-Doctoral Fellow, John F. Kennedy Institute For North America Studies, Freie Universität Berlin.
- 2003-2008 – PhD, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario.
I pursue research in 3 major areas. First, I am interested in examining the political roles played by the Canadian news media, be it in the process of public policy formulation, election campaigns or opinion formation. Second, I am interested in the field of risk management, risk perception and environmental politics. Lastly, I maintain an ongoing interest in the nature of social democratic politics and parties in advanced industrialized societies, particularly in Canada and Germany.
For more detailed information about my research, visit my personal website.
- 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.
- 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)
With a PhD in Political Studies from Queen’s University I consider myself qualified to comment in politics on Canadian politics, with a focus on public opinion, political communication (including journalism) and political parties. In the interests of full transparency, I think it is worthwhile for me to provide a disclosure statement of my past and present partisan affiliation. I first joined the Alberta (and therefore Canada's) NDP in 1994 and remain an active member to this day. I worked for the Alberta New Democratic Party’s legislative caucus from 1999 to 2002. That said, I place a high priority on differentiating between my partisan activity and my scholarship. My preference is for journalists to not quote my partisan affiliation but it is entirely their decision. I will commit to providing commentary that is in accordance with my knowledge of the state of social scientific evidence on the topic at hand and journalists and citizens are free to judge my commentary against that standard.
While it is common to equate partisans as unthinking foot-soldiers, I tend to think of partisans of all stripes as the best of democratic citizens – people who invest the time, energy and resources into the democratic process, gaining crucial skills as citizens educating themselves about current affairs, learning how to forge coalitions, broker and accept compromises and engage in political competition that is transparently regulated by a combination of laws and traditions. I see no tension in being both an expert and a partisan. In that sense, I agree with Harvard political scientist Nancy Rosenblum that “what is needed is not more independence but more and better partisanship.”