The Digital Democracy Project is a joint initiative led by the Ottawa-based Public Policy Forum and the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University. The project studied the media ecosystem in the run-up to and during Canada’s October 2019 federal election by monitoring digital and social media and by conducting both regular national surveys and a study of a metered sample of online consumption. The project communicated its preliminary research findings publicly on a regular basis from August to October 2019. The project director is Taylor Owen, Associate Professor and Beaverbrook Chair in Media, Ethics and Communications in the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University.
The online data analysis team was led by Derek Ruths, Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University, and the survey analysis team was led by Peter Loewen, Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto and the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy.
The project is funded by The Rossy Foundation, the Luminate Group, the McConnell Foundation, and with support from the Mozilla Foundation. The project is also participating in the Digital Ecosystem Research Challenge, a collaborative research project led by Taylor Owen and Elizabeth Dubois, Assistant Professor at the University of Ottawa, and funded by a grant from Heritage Canada. The DDP shared survey and online data with the 18 research projects funded through this collaboration.
