Erick Lachapelle

Dr. Lachapelle's interests mainly concern the political economics of environmental and energy issues at different levels. I focus primarily on North American territories, from a perspective of international comparisons. I am interested, first of all, in understanding how political players forge their preferences and behaviour in relation to complex issues, so as to explain why governments adopt certain environmental and energy policies. At both the micro and macro levels, my research is aimed at understanding how these players' interests and preferences shape the institutional context in which they operate.

This work has led me to study different factors, such as the role of experts and interest groups, partisan ideology, risk perceptions, voter preferences and the regional concentration of resources and interests (in connection with voting rules, electoral boundaries and federalism). I am actively working on 5 projects, several of them funded by different public- and private-sector sources, including the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Fonds de recherche du Québec - Société et culture (FQRSC), Canada's Public Policy Forum (PPF) and Sustainable Prosperity (SP).