Seminar 5

Date:   25 March, 2014

Time:  4 - 5.15pm

Venue: Building 24, Copland, Room 1171, LJ Hume Centre

Speaker: Louis Massicotte is a professor at the Department of Political Science at Universite Laval, in Quebec City, Canada. He taught at the University of Montreal for 14 years, and was guest professor at American University in Washington DC. He was also head of a Research Chair on Democracy and Parliamentary Institutions.
 
His articles have been published in Electoral Studies, the European Journal of Political Research, the Journal of Commonwealth Studies, the Canadian Journal of Political Scienceand Canadian Public Administration. His other works include two books: Establishing the Rules of the Game: Election Laws in Democracies (2003) and Le Parlement du Quebec en transition (2009).
 
In an earlier life, Louis was a research officer in the Library of the Canadian Parliament, and Chief, Policy and Strategic Planning at Elections Canada. He was involved in the democratic development of 13 countries, mostly in Africa.    

Paper Title:  Who Won the Election? Lessons from the Canadian Coalition Crisis in 2008

Paper Abstract:  When the outcome of an election is a hung Parliament, who is entitled to form the government? The traditional answer is: whichever party (or parties) that can secure the confidence of the House. This view was challenged during the Canadian coalition crisis by those who held that the leading party was entitled to hold office. The presentation will test whether this view is supported by British and Australian precedents since 1900.