Adrienne Davidson, PhD
Professor & Scholar of Political Science
RESEARCH OVERVIEW
As a scholar of public policy, I am interested in identifying why and when governments make policy change, and studying the impacts that policy change has on citizens.
The relationship between citizens and government is bidirectional. Citizens can shape the policy decisions of governments—they can push governments to act through voting behaviour, through shifts in public opinion, or through direct political action. Government decisions shape citizens’ experiences of the state. Yet, the material and interpretive effects of policy are not evenly distributed. The way public policy distributes resources or influences the relationships between different groups within a population feeds back into the experiences and opinions of citizens, and structures the opportunities for citizens to influence policy.
I explore these questions within several ongoing research projects, under the following three broader categories:
Lessons from Crisis
Why do governments respond differently to global crises, like the COVID-19 pandemic? What sources of evidence do policymakers use to make and justify decisions, and how do they communicate with the public about evidence and risk? How does the public judge the information and decisions as legitimate, or not?
Policy Feedback in Child Care and Public Schooling
How do the decisions governments make contribute to policy feedback effects, including distributive inequalities related access to high quality early learning environments? How do parents make decisions about child care and schooling, and how has COVID-19 constrained their decision-making?
Settler and State Politics of Indigenous Reconciliation
How have hybrid policy paradigms emerged in relation to the US and Canadian governments’ adoption of modern land claims policy? What are the institutional and political reverberations? What are the dynamics of settler identity and policy preferences in Canada? How does the settler political majority influence policy outcomes?
FEATURED PUBLICATIONS
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School Closure Decisions in Alberta and Ontario during COVID-19: Discourse and Data
Canadian Journal of Political Science
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Politics and Religion: Identifying the Correlates of Support for Merging the Public and Separate School Systems in Ontario
Canadian Journal of Education
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Incomplete Sovereigns: Explaining Variation in Indigenous Self-Governance in the United States and Canada
American Review of Canadian Studies
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Child Care Policy and Child Care Burden: The Distributive Implications of Regulation Decisions
Journal of Behavioral Public Administration
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Building trust means letting the public be part of COVID-19 decisions
Policy Options
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Puzzling Publics: The Role of Reflexive Learning in Universal Pre-Kindergarten Policy Innovation in Canada and the US
Public Policy and Administration
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Negotiating Aboriginal Self-Government in Canada: An Analysis of the Inuvialuit Experience
Canadian Journal of Political Science
