Topics in political institution reform

Alright, lots of good ideas. I'll throw in my two cents now before too much gets set into stone. Senate Reform and Electoral reform are the two subjects people are most likely to have an opinion on, so I think that gives them a significant advantage in terms of usefulness in a survey. My call is to limit our topics to just these two spheres if we want to get some useful data to draw conclusions from. Judicial discretion and private members bills are significant issues to those of us already interested in political science, but it's probably a big leap to assume many Canadians hold views on this issues/know what either side is advocating.The worst thing for me is to get back all our questions with "missing" or "not sure" answers.

Senate Reform (particularly the Triple-E option) is not nearly as recent as the STV referendum we just had, so I would expect more moderate positions across the board, but it was more widely advertised and more clearly argued by its supporters. But because it's been a while, if we form questions around this issue, I would downplay the usefulness of a gradient scale (For example, if we were asking how effective Canadians feel the senate is, I would expect very few to say "very effective" or even "moderately effective".) I am curious however, *why* people might say it is ineffective, using a list of possible complaints (lack of elections, unrepresentative composition, tendency towards partisanship). This list feels very biased to me, but i think it would be useful to gauge dissatisfaction rather than satisfaction.

With Electoral Reform there are also many ways we can go, so narrowing down a research question might be useful. I'm down with looking at sentiments following the attempt of STV and reasons why people voted the way they did. With this data we could possibly find interesting patterns (or lack thereof) between income, geographic position, party affiliation, and opinions on representation. Perhaps we might find that the members of the NDP strongly favoured the STV system because it would benefit them, whereas Liberals tended to vote it down because it would disadvantage them. Perhaps low-income earners were less confident that parties could work together in the STV system for it to be as effective, or maybe high income-earners were worried that it would increase bureaucratic costs and increase the level of taxes they pay, while giving them less say in political matters. Really, who knows, but these are some possible theories to answer the question "Why did the STV system not pass?"

I should mention that if there are many typos in here, it's because I'm on my phone, but let's keep the discussion going!