Previous research has examined whether voters will punish candidates who engage in sexual harassment in national-level elections, revealing partisanship as a strong predictor of electoral punishment. Using original survey data, we evaluate whether the public supports a broader range of sanctions (e.g. apologies, training, and removal from office) that legislatures can impose upon politicians who perpetrate sexual harassment in Canada’s municipalities, a non-partisan context. In the absence of partisan-based motivated reasoning, we find that women are more likely than men to support the removal from office of a councillor who engages in sexual harassment. Respondents who do not believe that sexism is a problem and are skeptical about claims of gender-based violence are also less likely to support punishment in these cases. These findings have relevance for democratic institutions, revealing that sanctions imposed on politicians who perpetrate sexual harassment can help maintain political accountability and restore public trust.

The Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope has carried out a survey of the entire Southern Sky at 887.5 MHz. The wide area, high angular resolution, and broad bandwidth provided by the low-band Rapid ASKAP Continuum Survey (RACS-low) allow the production of a next-generation rotation measure (RM) grid across the entire Southern Sky. Here we introduce this project as Spectral and Polarisation in Cutouts of Extragalactic sources from RACS (SPICE-RACS). In our first data release, we image 30 RACS-low fields in Stokes I, Q, U at 25$^{\prime\prime}$ angular resolution, across 744–1032 MHz with 1 MHz spectral resolution. Using a bespoke, highly parallelised, software pipeline we are able to rapidly process wide-area spectro-polarimetric ASKAP observations. Notably, we use ‘postage stamp’ cutouts to assess the polarisation properties of 105912 radio components detected in total intensity. We find that our Stokes Q and U images have an rms noise of $\sim$80 $\unicode{x03BC}$Jy PSF$^{-1}$, and our correction for instrumental polarisation leakage allows us to characterise components with $\gtrsim$1% polarisation fraction over most of the field of view. We produce a broadband polarised radio component catalogue that contains 5818 RM measurements over an area of $\sim$1300 deg$^{2}$ with an average error in RM of $1.6^{+1.1}_{-1.0}$ rad m$^{-2}$, and an average linear polarisation fraction $3.4^{+3.0}_{-1.6}$ %. We determine this subset of components using the conditions that the polarised signal-to-noise ratio is $>$8, the polarisation fraction is above our estimated polarised leakage, and the Stokes I spectrum has a reliable model. Our catalogue provides an areal density of $4\pm2$ RMs deg$^{-2}$; an increase of $\sim$4 times over the previous state-of-the-art (Taylor, Stil, Sunstrum 2009, ApJ, 702, 1230). Meaning that, having used just 3% of the RACS-low sky area, we have produced the 3rd largest RM catalogue to date. This catalogue has broad applications for studying astrophysical magnetic fields; notably revealing remarkable structure in the Galactic RM sky. We will explore this Galactic structure in a follow-up paper. We will also apply the techniques described here to produce an all-Southern-sky RM catalogue from RACS observations. Finally, we make our catalogue, spectra, images, and processing pipeline publicly available.

Incumbent city councillors have an almost insurmountable advantage in Canadian municipal elections. This article aims to improve our understanding of the municipal incumbency advantage by considering the ability of electors to correctly identify the two most competitive candidates in one's ward and the factors associated with being able to do so. Using survey data from the Canadian Municipal Election Study (CMES), we consider the case of the 2018 elections in Mississauga, a city with typically high rates of incumbent re-election. Survey respondents were asked to identify the two most competitive candidates in their local ward races. We find that comparatively few electors are able to recognize which challenger serves as the strongest threat to a sitting councillor, a finding that suggests that coordination problems may help to contribute to high rates of incumbent success. We identify several individual-level and ward-level correlates of correctly identifying the first-place and second-place finishers. We do note, however, that there is a significant amount of variation among the thousands of municipalities in Canada, so findings from this case should be tested in other settings, including larger or smaller cities where levels of information might be different.

Disaffection of youth from politics is a well-documented phenomenon in many countries. In this article, we consider whether the social networks of young people have the same influence on political engagement as they have been found to have for older adults. We use a single dataset to test the effects of discussion and disagreement on the political engagement of young people (30 and under) and older adults. We find that social network discussion has a stronger effect on the engagement of young people but that disagreement has no clear differential effect.

Voter participation is widely viewed as invaluable by democratic theorists, and a large majority of members of the Canadian public believe that low turnout weakens Canadian democracy. In response to decreasing rates of turnout in federal elections, Elections Canada has run advertising campaigns during the last several election campaigns encouraging Canadians to participate by voting. Using Election Canadian Study data from 2006 and 2008, this note examines the effect of Elections Canada's advertisements upon turnout and the partisan outcome of elections. Results reveal that the ad campaigns have effects upon both factors. The ads increase turnout among segments of the population with traditionally low turnout rates and are associated with an overall decrease in the Conservative party's vote share.

We observed with HARPS, the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect for 40 of the 75 transiting hot Jupiters discovered in the Southern Hemisphere by WASP. Our observations reveal a wide distribution in orbital inclinations indicative of past dynamical interactions. Our data also demonstrate the important effect produced by tidal interactions in shaping the spin–orbit (β) angle distribution. We briefly present and interpret the data we collected in a series of graphs.

Abstract. Concern about the environment has grown around the world. Important work has assessed the correlates of support for the environment and its relationship to values (for example, Inglehart, 1995). Recent comparative work on political party positioning demonstrates how the issue has increasingly taken on a left–right dimension (Dalton, 2009). Filling a void in the literature, this paper explores how and whether the environmental issue has been incorporated into the ideological space of Canadian citizens and reflected in the views of the major political parties outside of Quebec. In particular, we first consider the extent to which the environment is a left–right issue in the minds of Canadian citizens. We follow this by assessing the effect of environmental concern on citizens' views of political parties and whether this issue tends to operate as a positional or valence issue in differentiating political parties. We use the Canadian Election Studies from 2000–2006 to address these research questions empirically.

Résumé. L'intérêt pour la protection de l'environnement s'est intensifié autour du monde. Des recherches ont été menées sur la corrélation entre l'idéologie et la protection de l'environnement (par exemple, Inglehart 1995). Une étude récente sur le positionnement des partis politiques en matière d'environnement démontre que la question prend de plus en plus une dimension gauche–droite (Dalton 2009). Dans le but de combler un manque dans la littérature, cet article tente d'établir dans quelle mesure l'environnement a effectivement été intégré dans l'espace idéologique des citoyens canadiens et se reflète dans l'opinion sur les principaux partis politiques à l'extérieur du Québec. Nous examinons d'abord jusqu'à quel point l'environnement est considéré par les Canadiens comme un enjeu politique de gauche ou de droite. Nous évaluons ensuite l'effet de cet intérêt pour l'environnement sur l'opinion des citoyens canadiens à l'égard des partis politiques en vue de déterminer s'il s'agit là d'un enjeu de valeur ou d'un enjeu positionnel dans les choix politiques et électoraux. Nous appuyons empiriquement notre étude sur les données de l'Étude électorale canadienne de 2000 à 2006.

A yield problem is observed with tungsten vias formed on copper interconnects. Copper migration can occur during chemical vapor deposition (CVD) of tungsten, if there are defects in the liner inside the via. Copper can react quickly with SiH4 during the early stages of tungsten deposition, when SiH4-reduction of WF6 is used. Under severe conditions, large amounts of copper diffuse out of the underlying metal layer, resulting in copper silicide formation in the via and leaving voids in the copper wire. Copper migration can be minimized by reducing the time that the wafers are exposed to SiH4.