Our Department is pleased to welcome Carey Doberstein as Assistant Professor in Canadian Politics. He will be joining our Department on July 1st, 2019, as one of four new faculty members in Political Science.
Please join us in welcoming Carey, and read on to learn more about his innovative and progressive research programs.
Carey Doberstein (PhD, UofT) arrives to UBC after five years at UBC’s Okanagan campus as a tenure-track assistant professor of political science. His research interests and publications traverse several core domains of political science and public policy and administration in a Canadian context, but is united by a focus in studying both the democratic and policy implications of forms of governance that include citizens and civil society actors in policy planning decision-making, with a particular focus on urban or local government issues. He also maintains a research programme using experimental methods, including surveys of citizens and public servants, as well as participatory planning simulations related to urban development, housing, and homelessness.
Doberstein is Associate Editor of Canadian Public Administration, where he leads the Book Review and New Frontiers sections, and maintains a presence in the media in his areas of expertise within Canadian politics. At UBCO, Doberstein’s teaching was recognized as within the top 10 percent of faculty members and was awarded the Teaching Honor Roll.
He holds a SSHRC Insight Grant (2018-2023) for designing and evaluating collaborative governance through experimentation. Read more about Doberstein’s research programs and publications below.
Watch this video:
Doberstein talks about his work on Canadians’ attitudes towards homelessness:
[youtube]https://youtu.be/sYzww5u6Z6M[/youtube]
Doberstein’s Research Programs:
Doberstein’s work is focused primarily on governance in Canada, with special attention to the relationships between public servants, civil society actors, and citizens in governance arrangements that are decentred, multi-level, and networked. In this context, he is interested in questions of representation, expertise, accountability, and the policy implications of these governance patterns, which most often appear at the local level. To examine these areas, Doberstein maintains three related research programs.
- Institutional analysis of decentred, multilevel, networked governance
- In his first book, Building a Collaborative Advantage: Network Governance and Homelessness Policy-making in Canada (UBC Press, 2016), Doberstein conducted a comparative institutional analysis of eight homelessness governance networks in three Canadian cities over a 15 year period, identifying key structural patterns of governance that associated with policy innovation and policy coordination. He sought to identify the policy implications of different institutional configurations.
- In a SSHRC-funded (2015-2018) project, Doberstein examined health care governance at the local level by focusing on the democratic and accountability features of such institutions. He looked at Ontario’s fourteen Local Health Integration Networks (LHINs), which have a provincial mandate to provide more opportunities for citizens and stakeholders to deliberate and influence health care policy and investment decisions. Doberstein’s central question asked, despite providing more opportunities for citizen deliberation and influence, are LHINs democratic? He discovered that while popular criticisms of LHINs are in fact misplaced, the democratic “system” of local health care governance is indeed plagued by severed connections among the various layers of deliberation and policy-making. His research has been prepared as a monograph entitled Distributed Democracy: Health Care Governance in Ontario (with University of Toronto Press).
- The notion of expertise and how information is sought and used in policy-making
- Doberstein has published experimental studies involving public servants in Canada in which they were presented with policy research and analysis from various sources—academia, think tanks, advocacy groups—and with the authorship/source of these articles altered to isolate how powerful the source, rather than the content, is in shaping how the public servants assess their credibility.
- Doberstein is working with Étienne Charbonneau from the Université du Québec to create a panel of thousands of Canadian public sector professionals in partnership with IPAC to run more survey experiments with this population in the coming years.
- How citizens engage with government as part of local consultations and public engagement, which is a phenomenon where expectations are high and satisfaction often low
- These are too often opportunities that do not make citizens feel genuinely heard, but also do not encourage citizens to take a broader view of the competing pressures faced by policymakers. This SSHRC-funded (2018-2022) agenda connects to Doberstein’s earlier research by examining group processes that involve stakeholders and citizens (research area 1), but through experimentation (research area 2). In particular, Doberstein is exploring how role-playing (in identities different from their own) within traditional consultation methods, for example, around housing and land-use policy, can nudge people into new and unfamiliar territory as they reflect and deliberate these issues.
Select Publications:
- Carey Doberstein. 2016. Building a Collaborative Advantage: Network Governance and Homelessness Policy-Making in Canada. UBC press.
- Carey Doberstein & Alison Smith. 2018. Citizen support for spending to reduce homelessness in Canada’s largest urban centres. Housing Studies. DOI:10.1080/02673037.2018.1520820
- Carey Doberstein & Alison Smith. 2018. When political values and perceptions of deservingness collide: Evaluating public support for homelessness investments in Canada. International Journal of Social Welfare, 0: 1-11.
- Carey Doberstein. 2017. The Credibility Chasm in Policy Research from Academics, Think Tanks, and Advocacy Organizations. Canadian Public Policy, 43(4).
- Carey Doberstein. 2017. An emerging experimental approach to public administration research in Canada. Canadian Public Administration / Administration Publique du Canada, 60(1): 135-139.
- Nichols, Naomi; Doberstein, Carey (Eds.). 2016. Exploring Effective Systems Responses to Homelessness. Toronto: The Homeless Hub Press.
- Carey Doberstein. 2016. Whom Do Bureaucrats Believe? A Randomized Controlled Experiment Testing Perceptions of Credibility of Policy Research. The Policy Studies Journal, 00:00.
- Carey Doberstein, Ross Hickey, Eric Li. 2016. Nudging NIMBY: Do positive messages regarding the benefits of increased housing density influence resident stated housing development preferences? Land Use Policy, 54: 276–289.
