Research

Interests

• Public opinion and political behaviour
• Activism, social movements, and climate politics
• Large language models in political science: as research tools and as sources of persuasion
• Quebec and Canadian politics

Manuscripts in preparation

• Piral, J., Foisy, L.-O. M., & Dufresne, Y. (2026). Silicon sampling and voting behaviour in Canada: Theory or anarchy? [Manuscript in preparation].
• Foisy, L.-O. M., Pelletier, C., Proulx, É., Piral, J., & Dufresne, Y. (2026). Language doesn't matter: Evaluating the efficacy of large language models in analyzing sentiment in non-English textual data [Manuscript in preparation].

Presentations

• Piral, J., & Foisy, L.-O. M. (2027, January 13–16). Silicon sampling and voting behaviour in Canada: Theory or anarchy? [Paper proposal submitted]. Southern Political Science Association Annual Meeting, St. Pete Beach, FL, United States.
• Piral, J. (2026, August 24). Introduction to R [Workshop]. Interdisciplinary Methods School (EIOM), Université Laval, Québec City, Canada.

Research positions

Panel coordinator, Datagotchi project, CAPP and CLESSN, Université Laval
September 2026 to present · Supervised by Shannon Dinan and Yannick Dufresne

Coordinating the reactivation of the CAPP online panel (about 59,000 respondents) during the 2026 Quebec election; wrote and programmed a bilingual Qualtrics survey and checked its ethics coverage.

Research assistant, Datagotchi project, CLESSN, Université Laval
July 2026 to present · Supervised by Yannick Dufresne

Added social media data to the knowledge base of Prof. Datagotchi, an LLM-based chatbot that answers citizens’ questions about party platforms; outreach and science communication.

Research assistant, Vitrine démocratique, CAPP, Université Laval
June 2026 to present · Supervised by Shannon Dinan and Yannick Dufresne

Building automated text-analysis tools that feed a public dashboard on Quebec media coverage, party promises, and parliamentary debates.

Research assistant, populism and climate change, OREV, Université Laval
November 2025 to present · Supervised by Alexandre Gajevic Sayegh and Eric Montigny

Snowball literature review on the links between populism and climate policy.

Research assistant, International Environmental Agreements Database (IEADB), CIRGoM, Université Laval
January to September 2026 · Supervised by Jean-Frédéric Morin

Documentary research, web scraping, and data cleaning in R.

Research assistant, Mouvement Entreprises Vertes Québec, Institut EDS, Université Laval
June to November 2025 · Supervised by Marc Journeault and Alexandre Gajevic Sayegh

Systematic literature review (Zotero, Covidence).

Affiliations

• CAPP: Centre d’analyse des politiques publiques
• CLESSN: Chaire de leadership en enseignement des sciences sociales numériques
• OREV: Observatoire de Recherche en Économie Verte
• Institut EDS: Institut en environnement, développement et société
• CIRGoM: Centre interdisciplinaire de recherche sur la gouvernance mondiale
• CÉCD: Centre pour l’étude de la citoyenneté démocratique
• Chaire de recherche sur la démocratie et les institutions parlementaires
• GRCP: Groupe de recherche en communication politique