The Mount Allison University Alumni Board has selected Prof. Peter Loewen, director of the Centre for the Study of the United States and American Studies Program, as the 2014 recipient of the Contemporary Achievement Award. This award recognizes both professional and personal achievements of an alumnus/alumna early in their career.Professor Loewen’s use of social media, documenting his many personal adventures, has continuously inspired people over the years.
More on Professor Loewen
Peter Loewen is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto at Mississauga. His work focusses on political behaviour broadly conceived, but especially in the Anglo-American democracies. He has been published in such journals as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Electoral Studies, Political Psychology, and the Canadian Journal of Political Science.
Professor Loewen’s work is currently taking place in three broad streams. The first is concerned with understanding how individual differences—which we may understand as dispositional, longstanding, and occasionally fundamental psychological and behavioural differences between people—matter for political behaviour. This work combines experiments and surveys in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. The second stream is interested in understanding the representational behaviour of politicians and political elites. Broadly speaking, this research is interested in the decisions and actions taken by these elites when presented with a representational opportunity or challenge. This research combines natural experiments, field experiments, and, in the future, extensive interviewing and survey experimentation. The third stream is concerned with statistical and experimental methods in political science.
He received his PhD from the Université de Montréal, and completed post-doctoral fellowships at the University of British Columbia, and the University of California San Diego. His research is funded by SSHRC, the European Research Council, and by a Government of Ontario Early Researcher Award.
In addition to his UofT duties, Professor Loewen has undertaken extensive public-facing work. He writes a regular column for the Ottawa Citizen, and has in the past contributed to The Globe and Mail, and the Toronto Star. He has engaged in past electoral engagement work with Vote Compass in partnership with the Wall Street Journal, CBC, and Australian Broadcasting Corporation. He also engages in ongoing consulting work with various electoral management bodies.
