Dr. Rebecca Wallace, a political scientist specializing in immigration and minority issues, officially joined the program this month as a John A. Sproul Research Fellow. As a visiting researcher, Dr. Wallace will assist program director Irene Bloemraad in analyzing data on attitudes toward immigrants in Canada and the United States. Following the conclusion of her term at Berkeley in June, Dr. Wallace will start a faculty appointment as an assistant professor of political science at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia.
We sat down with Dr. Wallace to ask her about her own research, the project she’s working on at Berkeley, and what initially drew her to the position.
Tell us a bit about yourself.
I’m from a rural part of Canada in southern Ontario. I attended Queen’s University for both my undergraduate and graduate degrees, where I discovered an interest in social policy. There, I had the chance to work with Keith Banting, who has written a lot about multiculturalism and social integration, and Elizabeth Goodyear-Grant, who explores issues related to political communications and media. Both had a major influence in shaping my research.
What was your doctoral research about?
My dissertation centered on trying to understand how “deservingness” is conceptualized and framed in Canada around social assistance and welfare policy. The big motivation for me was asking why we consider some groups more deserving of help than others, and uncovering the role that the media plays in that process. It’s a common thread in American research that the media plays a predominant role in shaping people’s perceptions about social policy. But in Canada, we actually haven’t seen a lot of research in this area. In political science, we often assume that findings in the American case translate to what’s happening in Canada. But the cultural context is very different and so is the political climate, and we have a lot to learn from studying the Canadian case when it comes to diversity and redistribution. For example, looking at the public opinion data, we see some different dynamics emerge, especially when it comes to supporting immigrants and their access to welfare.
For the project itself, I first looked at media coverage to see how the media frames deservingness for different groups in Canada, including immigrants and Indigenous peoples, then reviewed the public opinion data to see how people perceive deservingness. I ended the project with a media framing experiment, which looks at how people’s opinions of welfare and deservingness change based on what they read in news coverage. Essentially, it’s the first work that really looks at the codification of deservingness in news media and its effects on public attitudes.
What were your findings?
I found that news media was generally quite negative when it comes to the framing of Indigenous peoples, which is not surprising. However, the media was actually quite positive when it comes to framing immigrants who are on social assistance. They’re generally viewed as much more deserving of assistance, even compared to general Canadian recipients. But interestingly, when we look at the experimental results, the impact of framing is reversed. There isn’t really much change when people read articles about immigrants. In contrast, public opinion changes most profoundly, and for the better, when people read news articles where Indigenous people are framed as deserving recipients. They are much more likely to support these individuals’ access to welfare.
Where do you plan to take your research from here?
I’m working on turning this research into a book at this point, and it’s going really well; I have an advance contract with the University of Toronto Press, and I’m hoping to get that to them by the end of the summer. I think my research really suggests that we have to dig a bit deeper into these intra-case comparisons. Canada’s a really rich country to do that in, because we have so many social groups of different backgrounds; we can think about comparisons of race, gender, region, citizenship, and more. And it’s also a subject that could be fruitful for comparative studies between Canada and the United States.
Why did you apply to be a Canadian Studies Sproul Fellow?
When I first heard about this position, I was immediately drawn to it given Berkeley’s reputation. But I’m also very excited to work with Irene. A lot of Canadian scholars in our field are very familiar with Irene’s work, and I love that she’s a very interdisciplinary researcher at heart. Her work branches into political science, sociology, psychology, and it’s well-read across a number of fields. So Irene herself was a major draw for me. She’s somebody I can really see myself working well with and learning a lot from, especially with this current project around immigration.
In addition to Irene, Berkeley has a lot of great training opportunities, especially in the area of computational analysis, text analysis and data work. There’s a lot of really cool stuff going on, and I thought, where better to learn this? Berkeley’s on the cutting edge of a lot of these up-and-coming areas of analysis. I was looking forward to being on campus, but with COVID that’s obviously a challenge.
What will you be working on during your time at Berkeley?
The project Irene and I will be working on directly relates to my own research. We’re looking at how framing affects immigrant claims-making to certain social rights or protections. We want to see how framing can affect whether people support certain policies or initiatives. If advocacy organizations are trying to create certain initiatives around expanding or protecting these rights, they’ll often appeal to ideas like human rights or Canadian or American values. So we’re trying to see how effective appeals to different types of rights are, by comparing a few stories about immigrants that frame the narrative through one of these contexts, and measuring the response. Irene has previously looked at this in the American context, but we’d like to expand it and place it in a comparative context.
Why do you think it's important to study Canada?
As a proud Canadian, I’m inherently a fan of Canadian studies! But in general, the Canadian case is often overlooked, and I think that’s a big mistake. Really, Canadian policy should be placed at the forefront in a lot of these discussions. Especially in areas like immigration, the environment, and Indigenous politics, there’s so much to learn from the Canadian experience, both for good and bad. And I think that there’s a lot of assumptions that what happens in the United States translates directly to the Canadian context, which isn’t necessarily the case.
I think it’s critical that we continue to reinforce the Canadian-American relationship, which has been strained in recent years. We have to go back to an open dialogue, because both countries gain so much from each other.