Katherine Sullivan, Ph.D. Candidate

katherine.sullivan@umontreal.ca


Graduate Student

Université de Montréal

City: Montreal, Quebec

Country: Canada

About Me:

Katherine V.R. Sullivan is a political science PhD student at l'Université de Montréal under the supervision of Frédérick Bastien. Her interest in political communication began to take shape during her master’s degree in communication at the University of Ottawa under the supervision of Pierre C. Bélanger, during her research focused on the use of Twitter by Quebec politicians. Sullivan has since published an article on the use of Twitter by political candidates during the 2014 Quebec elections with a particular interest for the platform’s e-democratic potential. Sullivan is currently working on several projects focusing on municipal political actors in Canada, including a case study of the use of Twitter by mayoral candidates during the 2017 municipal elections in Montreal. Her most recent work focuses on political image-making by Canadian mayors through the use of Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Finally, in addition to being a member of the Research chair in electoral studies and the Center for the study of democratic citizenship, she is also part of the Research group in political communication.  

Research Interests

Political Communication

Canadian Politics

Gender and Politics

Social Media

Women In Politics

Gender Gap

Countries of Interest

Canada

Publications:

Journal Articles:

(2016) La cyberdémocratie québécoise : Twitter bashing, #VoteCampus et selfies, Politique et sociétés

Social media’s democratic potential is now part of many political scientists’ agendas even though research in this particular field is quite new. The first analysis of the use of Twitter in a Canadian political context only dates back to 2011. We contribute to recent literature by exploring the ways in which candidates used Twitter during the 2014 Quebec general elections. According to cyber optimists, the Twittersphere facilitates interactions with political leaders and increases access to information, as well as encourages political participation. On the contrary, cyber pessimists are more inclined to see digital spaces as new breeding grounds for political spin doctors. To examine these dichotomous perspectives, we conducted a content analysis of over 13,000 tweets published by candidates of the main parties. Our results demonstrate that candidates of the three main parties used Twitter mainly as a political marketing tool, namely Twitter bashing. Tweets published by candidates of Québec Solidaire (that are statistically significantly different) were mostly e-democratic.