Meet our Newest Graduate: Reed Merrill!

Meet Our Newest Graduate! 

Reed Merrill’s MA thesis was entitled “Explaining Population Based Variation in Municipal Incumbent Success in Canada: Acclamation and the Incumbency Cue”. It was written under the supervision of Dr. Jack Lucas

  

Tell us a bit about your thesis!  What was it about and what were its main arguments? 

So, my thesis was about incumbency and municipal elections in Canada. I had just finished helping Dr. Jack Lucas gather election results for every Canadian municipality and decided that it would be really interesting to work with this new dataset. One area that had not been explored before was how incumbency functions in the elections of differently sized municipalities. I started by looking at how often incumbent candidates are re-elected, and found that they won elections at a much higher rate in smaller municipalities. To get an idea of why this might be, I then used an experiment to focus in on the incumbency cue—how incumbency sends positive signals to voters about the quality of candidates—and found that people in very small municipalities (populations smaller than about 10,000) don’t favour incumbent candidates nearly as much as those who live in larger cities. The scope of my project only allows me to speculate about why this might be, but some literature coming out of the United States suggests that, on average, rural residents have a sort of anti-establishment sentiment that might bias them against those who have already held office. In combination with this, I think it could also be that rural voters desire more personalized forms of information about incumbents before they are willing to vote for them. 

  

Any favourite memories from your research or at UCalgary Political Science you’d like to share? 

My time at the UCalgary Political Science Department was filled with great experiences. Our department had a really fun and diverse academic culture. I enjoyed being around so many other students who studied a really broad range of topics. I also had a great time as a research assistant on the Canadian Municipal Barometer project. I was able to become part of an academic research team and see firsthand how this type of thing is done in practice. I also met so many great people who were on the project that I wouldn’t have known otherwise.

Where has your degree taken you now?  

These days I’m pursuing my PhD in Political Science at the University of Arizona, which is located in Tucson, Arizona. My family and I are really enjoying living in the Sonoran Desert, which is beautiful and nothing like what we’ve previously been exposed to. My research interests have extended out of the work I did during my M.A. to include broader questions about political psychology and behaviour, such as how democratic citizens perceive and react to threats to democratic norms and institutions.

Any final words of advice? 

My advice is for political science students that are interested in doing research is to allow your interests to change and grow until you find something you’re really passionate about. I went from being interested in global development to indigenous politics to elections to political psychology and behaviour. I think a path like this, while being difficult at times, has really helped me become committed to, and happy with, my current research. 

 

Congratulations Reed Merrill on your degree! 

 

To find out more about our current and past graduate students, please visit the Political Science website.