Jules Piral

I am an M.A. student in political science at Université Laval, in Québec City, supervised by Alexandre Gajevic Sayegh and Yannick Dufresne. My graduate studies are funded by a Canada Graduate Research Scholarship (Master’s) from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

My research sits at the intersection of public opinion, activism and climate politics, and large language models, which I study both as research tools and as new sources of political persuasion.

My master’s thesis asks whether presenting governments or corporations, rather than individuals, as responsible for the climate crisis makes citizens more tolerant of activism, and whether a conversation with an AI chatbot persuades more than a short text.

Currently

• Coordinating the CAPP online panel and designing surveys for the Datagotchi project.
• Building automated text-analysis tools for the Vitrine démocratique, a public dashboard on Quebec politics.
• Writing a paper on silicon sampling (can LLMs simulate Canadian voters?), submitted for presentation at the Southern Political Science Association meeting in January 2027.

More on the research and teaching pages, or in my CV.

Contact

The best way to reach me is by email: jules.piral.1@ulaval.ca.