New Publication: Finance Ministers and the Budgets of Ontario

I just found out that Finance Ministers and the Budgets of Ontario was selected as a finalist for the 2012 Ontario Legislature Speaker's Book Award -- congrats to all those involved with this work! 

Here's a link:

Dutil, Patrice, Peter Malachy Ryan, and André Gossignac. “From Thoughts to Words: The Budget Speech in Ontario (1968-2003)” [Chapter Nine]. Finance Ministers and the Budgets of Ontario. University of Toronto Press, 2010.

http://www.utppublishing.com/The-Guardian-Perspectives-on-the-Ministry-of-Finance-of-Ontario.html

Dissertation Link in Digital Commons: Agenda Setting

How does the Digital Commons help works to circulate you ask?

Well, I've barely had the link up to my dissertation in Digital Commons for less than a week (without even advertising that it was posted), and I've already had 50 downloads simply from its topical crosslisting functions.

So, let's see what happens when some other network pings start to connect to it:

Ryan, Peter Malachy, "Agenda Setting in English Canada in the Age of Minority Government, 2004-2011" (2012). Theses and dissertations. Paper 1162.


http://digitalcommons.ryerson.ca/dissertations/1162

Alberta Election 2012: Election Day Social Media Results

Here's the last report on the uses of social media in the 2012 Alberta Election:

http://stw.ryerson.ca/~pryan/Social_Media_Alberta_Election_Results_2012.pdf

Over the entire course of the election no party leader changed their rank in terms of social media uses as compared to the previous weeks. Danielle Smith increased her “likes” for her politician Facebook page from 9,955 to 29,559 over the campaign to win the Facebook battle; her increase demonstrates a true explosion of social media in a Canadian provincial election as compared to previous campaigns (for example, Prime Minister Stephen Harper currently has 2,796 “likes” for his politician page). Smith also used YouTube to the greatest effect of the leaders, but she did not surpass Alison Redford’s Twitter base of 13,054 followers.

It is interesting to note that Smith’s social media support did not translate into the kind of support pollsters were predicting, especially when compared to the results of the election. In the future, researchers may want to investigate what forces and tactics drove Smith’s large gains on social media, and why party support lags that of the individual leaders (see the final numbers in the report).

Alberta Election 2012: Social Media Report (Week 4)

Here's the social media analysis for Week 4 of the Alberta Election Campaign that were captured on Monday, April 16th, 2012. There are still no changes in the leader board for social media uses heading into Election Day on Monday, April 23rd, 2012:

http://stw.ryerson.ca/~pryan/Alberta_Election_2012_Week4.pdf

Alberta Election 2012: Social Media Report

I'm posting here a quick summary of the social media campaign during the first two weeks of the Alberta 2012 provincial election for those interested (see the attached document):

Alberta Election 2012: Social Media Report

The report is meant as a follow-up to Tony Seckus' Calgary Herald article on April 7, 2012:

http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/politics/Alberta+election+Twitter+about+social+media/6425304/story.html

I'll update the report each week until the end of the election.

APSA 2009 Paper: Hyperlink Analysis of the Anti and Pro Gun Control Advocacy Networks

We currently have a working paper available in the APSA 2009 conference proceedings:

Devereaux, Z.P., Cukier, W., Ryan, P. M., & Thomlinson, N.R. (2009, September 5). Using the Issue Crawler to Map Gun Control Issue-Networks. APSA 2009: Toronto Meeting [Conference Paper]. Available at SSRN:

http://ssrn.com/abstract=1449612

We would appreciate any comments on the paper before we send it off to a journal for formal publication.


On another note, my blog activity has gone through the roof in the past few months for two reasons:

1) SSHRC season (everyone is looking for SSHRC advice):
http://prnetworks.blogspot.com/2007/10/phd-dissertation-proposal-sshrc.html


2) CPSA Paper on the "Canadian Gun Registry":
http://prnetworks.blogspot.com/2009/08/canadian-firearms-registry.html

Those two blog entries are now the most searched for on my site. Facebook policy is still popular too, but no where as near as these top two.

Lawrence Lessig on the Google Book Search Settlement - "Static goods, dynamic bads"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Svytkew5qPI