J Lucas
Biographic Data
| ID | 24193 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Lucas |
| GIVEN NAMES | J |
| FAMILY NAME | Lucas |
| SIGNATURE | LUCAS J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Calgary |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3498-7267 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 61 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 288 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 61 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1971 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Do local politicians share their constituents' attitudes on housing policy?
In this paper, we combine a nationally representative survey of Canadians with a survey of more than 700 mayors and councillors in municipalities across Canada to explore (a) the extent to which politicians align with their constituents in their housing policy attitudes and (b) the extent to which politicians' views are more representative of more privileged local residents, such as homeowners. We find strong evidence of macrolevel attitudinal co…
Municipal Issue Publics
Issue publics—groups of citizens who care intensely about particular policy issues—are rarely studied in municipal politics. This research note provides the first systematic analysis of municipal issue publics using a nationally representative 2025 survey of more than 6,000 Canadians, including 1,300 open-ended responses. We identify 32 distinct municipal issue publics across areas such as housing, policing, public transit, climate policy, taxati…
Institutional Change as Urban Theory: The Fall of At-Large Politics in Calgary, Alberta
During moments of institutional change, advocates and critics of reform are forced to publicly and privately articulate why their city should consider or avoid a proposed change. These arguments for and against reform rely on assumptions about the character and purpose of municipal politics—the relevant cleavages, the proper purposes to which municipal politics is directed, and the character of municipal political representation. Moments of refor…
Place Consciousness and Voting in Canada
Building on Cramer’s (2016) foundational work on rural consciousness, we measure place consciousness in Canada as a unified construct capturing both in-group place identification and out-group place resentment. Using data from a large-scale Canadian survey, we then examine how place consciousness relates to federal voting behaviour across a novel typology of six urban, suburban, and rural place types. We find that place consciousness is strongest…
Beyond the mean: How thinking about the distribution of public opinions reduces politicians’ perceptual errors
Elected politicians regularly over-estimate the conservatism of their constituents’ preferences. While these findings have concerning implications for democratic representation, the magnitude and sources of so-called “conservative over-estimation” are poorly understood. We show that a novel approach to measuring politicians’ perceptions—which asks politicians to draw the distribution of their constituents’ preferences, rather than provide a point…
Urban–rural policy disagreement
Urban–rural divides are large and growing in many national elections, but the sources of this widening divide are not well understood. Recent research has pointed to policy disagreement as one possible mechanism for this growing divide; if urban and rural residents hold increasingly dissimilar policy preferences, this disagreement could produce ever‐widening urban–rural electoral divides. We investigate this possibility by creating a synthesized …
Municipal Politicians and Local Electoral Institutions in Canada: An Overview
Across Canada, tens of thousands of municipal politicians govern thousands of municipalities, making important policy decisions in domains ranging from policing to planning to environmental policy. Despite a recent flowering of research on municipal policy, administration, and politics, we still lack a great deal of basic information about municipal governance in Canada, including core municipal democratic institutions. In this research note, we …
What explains elite affective polarization? Evidence from Canadian politicians
Concerns about affective polarization are on the rise globally, and it has been associated with negative outcomes such as diminished trust in government and discrimination against out‐partisans. While elected politicians are typically thought to be a major source of mass‐level affective polarization, and despite the policy and representation consequences of heightened partisan hostility in legislatures, existing research has focused almost exclus…
Pathways to Substantive Representation: Policy Congruence and Policy Knowledge Among Canadian Local Politicians
Place Types
In this research note, we propose a new typology of geographic places for use in advancing Canadian politics research on the political effects of place. We use hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) to inductively derive place types from Aggregate Dissemination Areas (ADAs), a fine-grained unit of geography covering all of Canada, newly available from Statistics Canada. Using this approach, we uncover seven distinct place types, adding nuance to ear…
Demographic Divides in Canadian Voting, 1945–2023: The Canadian Vote Intention Dataset
This research note introduces the Canadian Vote Intention Dataset, a new, integrated, publicly available database of nearly eight decades of public opinion surveys from Gallup, Environics, Pollara, the Canadian Election Study and the Consortium on Electoral Democracy. The dataset contains 1,019,639 responses on Canadians’ federal vote intention as well as a suite of demographic and geographic variables, including age, gender, religion, language, …
Politicians' Theories of Voting Behavior
While political scientists regularly engage in spirited theoretical debates about elections and voting behavior, few have noticed that elected politicians also have theories of elections and voting. Here, we investigate politicians' positions on eight central theoretical debates in the area of elections and voting behavior and compare politicians' theories to those held by ordinary citizens. Using data from face-to-face interviews with nearly one…
Ideology in Canadian Municipal Politics
"One of the most peculiar features of municipal politics in Canada is how frequently local politicians, activists, and scholars disagree about how to describe the municipal arena. For some, municipal politics is distinct from other levels of government, a world of non-ideological elections, pragmatic and technical policy-making, and issue-by-issue policy coalitions. Others argue that municipal politics is similar to politics at other scales, with…
Issue Accountability in Non-Partisan Municipalities: A Case Study
Issue accountability – the extent to which elected representatives are rewarded or punished by voters for their legislative actions in office – is fundamental to many conceptions of healthy democratic accountability. It is not clear, however, if this form of accountability is possible in non-partisan contexts, when constituents may have considerably more difficulty acquiring information about what their elected representatives have done. In this …
Are municipal politicians ideological moderates
For more than a century, many practitioners and researchers have argued that municipal politicians are more ideologically moderate – that is, closer to the centre of a unidimensional left-right ideological scale – than their national counterparts. Testing this claim requires direct comparison of politicians who represent similar constituents but who are elected at different levels of government, but comparative data of this sort are rarely availa…
Where public health meets public opinion: Understanding political support for fluoridation in Calgary, 2021
Women's Representation in Canadian Municipalities
This research note uses a new and comprehensive data set of 22,333 municipal elected positions in 3,363 municipalities across Canada to provide a systematic analysis of women's presence in municipal office. Drawing on findings from cross-national research about women's representation in local governments, we examine whether district type, council size, urban setting, women's workforce participation, and degree of conservatism among voters account…
Understanding Support for Municipal Political Parties: Evidence from Canada
The province of Ontario, Canada, has a longstanding history of non-partisanship in municipal elections. In this distinctive context, we report results on citizen attitudes toward municipal partisanship using a survey of eligible voters in Canada's most populous province. Using a mixed-methods approach, we focus on three interrelated research questions. First, how much does citizen support for municipal parties depend on the type of party under co…
Do Women Politicians Know More about Women’s Policy Preferences? Evidence from Canada
This study draws together theories of women’s substantive representation and research on politicians’ knowledge of constituent preferences. We ask whether politicians are better at predicting their constituents’ policy preferences when they share the same gender. In doing so, we contribute to knowledge about the mechanisms underlying substantive representation. Using original surveys of 3,750 Canadians and 867 elected politicians, we test whether…
Lay theories of place effects
Combining research in political geography and social psychology, this article investigates lay theories of “place effects”—that is, ordinary citizens' beliefs about the effects that urban or rural places have on the individuals who live in them. We do so using a novel survey vignette embedded in a large‐scale survey of the Canadian public. Our results suggest that (1) citizens see rural identities as less malleable than urban identities, (2) lay …
Long‐term policymaking and politicians' beliefs about voters: Evidence from a 3‐year panel study of politicians
Politicians are required to make policy decisions that involve short‐term and long‐term tradeoffs, and existing theory largely expects election‐driven myopic thinking to dominate their reasoning when they do so. Direct evidence on this is surprisingly absent, leaving open questions on whether and when politicians do support future‐oriented policies, and what factors, beyond the shadow of elections, influence such choices. Responding to this gap, …
Are politicians democratic realists
Political scientists have long debated whether citizens meet the expectations of a ‘folk theory’ of democratic representation, in which voters correctly reward and punish politicians for their actions, make choices primarily on the basis of policy preferences and orient their decisions to the future rather than the past. But how do elected politicians themselves theorize voting behaviour? In this paper, we report results from an original survey o…
The Development of the Urban-Rural Cleavage in Anglo-American Democracies
We provide a mixed-methods, comparative analysis of the development of the urban-rural electoral cleavage in Canada, Great Britain, and the United States from the early 20th century to the present. Using aggregate election results, electoral district boundary files, and electoral district population measures, we construct a new comparable dataset of district election results and urbanity for the lower house of the legislature in each country. We …
Ballot Roll-Off in the 2021 Alberta Senate Nominee Election: Political Identities and Participation Patterns
In 2021, Alberta held Senate nominee elections for the fifth time in the province's history. Conducted concurrently with municipal elections and multiple referenda/plebiscites, the Senate race had a much lower participation rate than any of the other votes held that day. The purpose of this research note is to identify patterns of ballot roll-off—the phenomenon whereby electors cast a ballot for one race but not another—in the Senate election. Us…
Women’s Inclusion and Participation in Municipal Elections: Historical Evidence from Eligible Voters Lists
Historians and social scientists have long been interested in patterns of women’s inclusion and participation in the years that followed enfranchisement. Municipal elections—an important part of the larger history of women’s enfranchisement and electoral participation—have generally been neglected in this research. In this research note, we show how samples from lists of eligible voters in Canadian city elections can serve as a valuable data sour…
The Urban-Rural Divide in Canadian Federal Elections, 1896–2019
Using a new measure of urbanity for every federal electoral district in Canada from 1896 to the present, this article describes the long-term development of the urban-rural divide in Canadian federal elections. We focus on three questions: (1)whenthe urban-rural divide has existed in Canada, identifying three main periods—the 1920s, the 1960s and 1993–present—in which the urban-rural cleavage has been especially important in federal elections; (2…
The Development of the Urban-Rural Cleavage in Anglo-American Democracies
We provide a mixed-methods, comparative analysis of the development of the urban-rural electoral cleavage in Canada, Great Britain, and the United States from the early 20th century to the present. Using aggregate election results, electoral district boundary files, and electoral district population measures, we construct a new comparable dataset of district election results and urbanity for the lower house of the legislature in each country. We …
Asymmetries in urban, suburban, and rural place-based resentment
Do “Non-Partisan” Municipal Politicians Match the Partisanship of Their Constituents
Recent research in the United States has found that municipal governments are responsive to the ideological complexion of their cities even in the absence of partisan elections. In this paper, I test for the presence of party match—a match between the partisan character of a district and the partisanship of its municipal representative—in Canada, where municipal elections are distinctively non-partisan. Using new data on district-level party supp…
Policy Ideology and Local Ideological Representation in Canada
To enable new research on local ideology and representation in Canada, we construct a latent measure of the policy ideology of 37,500 Canadian Election Study respondents using 56 policy-relevant questions and then use multilevel regression and poststratification to estimate the average ideological position of each of Canada's 338 federal electoral districts and 250 largest municipalities. We use these local ideology estimates to examine ideologic…
The Size and Sources of Municipal Incumbency Advantage in Canada
This article uses a new dataset of nearly 2,000 municipal elections from 1874 to 2018 to estimate the size of municipal incumbency advantage in Canada for the first time. Incumbency increases the probability that a candidate will win the next election by more than 30 percentage points and accounts for well over half of overall incumbent success. Incumbency advantage varies modestly by institutional context but varies substantially over time, with…
Municipal Identity and City Interests
Urban Governance and the American Political Development Approach
This article outlines the value of the American Political Development (APD) approach for scholars of urban governance. Despite recent enthusiasm for APD, I argue that the tools of the APD approach have not yet been clearly articulated or demonstrated for urban scholars. By combining the concept of “intercurrence” with a methodological focus on shifts in urban political authority, APD allows us to capture the dynamics of urban governance in tracta…
Women's Municipal Electoral Performance: An Introduction to the Canadian Municipal Elections Database
This research note describes the Canadian Municipal Elections Database (CMED), a new publicly available and actively maintained dataset of more than 24,000 municipal elections in Canada. We describe the need for high-quality election results data for municipal politics research and describe the content, sources and construction of the CMED. To illustrate the value of the CMED, we estimate gender differences in municipal electoral performance for …
Measuring and Comparing Municipal Policy Responses to Covid-19
Municipal governments are experts in social non-distancing. From swimming pools to libraries, streetcars to public parks, municipalities bring residents together and move them around—services vital to a vibrant community in ordinary times, but potentially disastrous in a pandemic. Municipal decisions to shutter these services and enforce social distancing are thus crucial for a successful COVID-19 response
Politicians' Theories of Voting Behavior
While political scientists regularly engage in spirited theoretical debates about elections and voting behavior, few have noticed that elected politicians also have theories of elections and voting. Here, we investigate politicians' positions on eight central theoretical debates in the area of elections and voting behavior and compare politicians' theories to those held by ordinary citizens. Using data from face-to-face interviews with nearly one…
Long‐term policymaking and politicians' beliefs about voters: Evidence from a 3‐year panel study of politicians
Politicians are required to make policy decisions that involve short‐term and long‐term tradeoffs, and existing theory largely expects election‐driven myopic thinking to dominate their reasoning when they do so. Direct evidence on this is surprisingly absent, leaving open questions on whether and when politicians do support future‐oriented policies, and what factors, beyond the shadow of elections, influence such choices. Responding to this gap, …
The Ideological Structure of Municipal Non-Ideology
This paper explores the structure of elite disagreement about the ideological or nonideological character of municipal politics. I propose two possible relationships between a representative’s own ideology and their beliefs about the character of municipal politics: an “ends-against-the-middle” pattern, in which ideologues on the left and right embrace an ideological vision of municipal politics, whereas moderates insist that municipal politics i…
Spatial voting in non-partisan cities: A case study
Who Has School Spirit? Explaining Voter Participation in School Board Elections
This research note examines the correlates of turnout in Canadian school board elections. Using individual-level data from the Canadian Municipal Election Study, we find that gender, education, left-wing ideology, Conservative partisanship and parental status were associated with participation in Calgary's 2017 public school board elections. Some of these patterns relate to the specific details of Calgary's 2017 election; others, we suggest, may …
Back to the Future: Historical Political Science and the Promise of Canadian Political Development
How “historical” is Canadian political science? This paper sets out to answer this question through an analysis of historically oriented articles that have appeared in this journal from its first volume, in 1968, to 2015. We suggest that historical research in this journal is at once enduring and uneven, a pattern that we then explore in more detail in a case study, spanning forty years, of historical articles that focus on the interconnected the…
Multilevel policy from the municipal perspective: A pan‐Canadian survey
Building on in‐depth case studies and extensive theory‐building by Canadian multilevel governance scholars, this article identifies and describes multilevel policy involvement by federal, provincial, municipal, private, and NGO actors in three policy phases and eighteen policy domains that specifically involve local governments in Canada. Drawing from an original pan‐Canadian survey of municipal mayors and councillors, we show that municipal poli…
Patterns of urban governance: A sequence analysis of long-term institutional change in six Canadian cities
How do the institutional structures of urban policymaking develop over time? To answer this question, scholars have often focused on one of three contexts: the city in which a set of policy institutions exists, the higher-order government with legislative authority over those institutions, or the policy domain in which a policy task is administered. Few studies have compared the relative importance of these contexts for understanding the long-ter…
Women's Representation in Canadian Municipalities
This research note uses a new and comprehensive data set of 22,333 municipal elected positions in 3,363 municipalities across Canada to provide a systematic analysis of women's presence in municipal office. Drawing on findings from cross-national research about women's representation in local governments, we examine whether district type, council size, urban setting, women's workforce participation, and degree of conservatism among voters account…
Understanding Support for Municipal Political Parties: Evidence from Canada
The province of Ontario, Canada, has a longstanding history of non-partisanship in municipal elections. In this distinctive context, we report results on citizen attitudes toward municipal partisanship using a survey of eligible voters in Canada's most populous province. Using a mixed-methods approach, we focus on three interrelated research questions. First, how much does citizen support for municipal parties depend on the type of party under co…
Closest to the People? Incumbency Advantage and the Personal Vote in Non-Partisan Elections
Do incumbents dominate non-partisan elections because of an especially large personal vote? This question has important implications for understanding the causes of incumbent success and the benefits or drawbacks of non-partisan elections. This paper uses a natural experiment, combined with three original datasets, to estimate the size, persistence, and consequences of the personal vote in a large non-partisan city election. We first use individu…
Are municipal politicians ideological moderates
For more than a century, many practitioners and researchers have argued that municipal politicians are more ideologically moderate – that is, closer to the centre of a unidimensional left-right ideological scale – than their national counterparts. Testing this claim requires direct comparison of politicians who represent similar constituents but who are elected at different levels of government, but comparative data of this sort are rarely availa…
Do Women Politicians Know More about Women’s Policy Preferences? Evidence from Canada
This study draws together theories of women’s substantive representation and research on politicians’ knowledge of constituent preferences. We ask whether politicians are better at predicting their constituents’ policy preferences when they share the same gender. In doing so, we contribute to knowledge about the mechanisms underlying substantive representation. Using original surveys of 3,750 Canadians and 867 elected politicians, we test whether…
How do municipal mayors and councillors communicate with other levels of government? Evidence from a multi‐level survey of Canadian elected officials
While past research suggests that informal processes of dialogue play an important role in municipal intergovernmental relations in Canada, we currently know very little about their character and frequency. Who do local elected officials communicate with, and through which channels? And which municipal voices carry the most weight in these conversations? This article answers these questions from the perspective of elected politicians themselves, …
The Canadian Municipal Election Study
It is in this context of rapid growth of the field of local political behaviour that we introduce the Canadian Municipal Election Study (CMES) dataset. With a total sample size of 14,458, the dataset includes survey responses from voters and non-voters in eight of Canada’s largest cities: Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg, London, Mississauga, Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec City. Cities were chosen on the basis of size, contextual variation, and instit…
Abstracts from British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
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Local governance and the local political career in Canada: A sample dataset
This research note introduces and describes a new dataset of political actors from the city of Kitchener, Ontario. The dataset is comprised of 348 complete political careers, across four local institutions, from 1912 to the present. This research note aims to show that large‐scale databases of local political actors can contribute to our understanding of (a) local political careers, (b) the dynamics of formal and informal local institutions, and …
Forecasting the student–professor matches that result in unusually effective teaching
BACKGROUND: Two important influences on students' evaluations of teaching are relationship and professor effects. Relationship effects reflect unique matches between students and professors such that some professors are unusually effective for some students, but not for others. Professor effects reflect inter-rater agreement that some professors are more effective than others, on average across students. AIMS: We attempted to forecast students' e…
Fields of Authority: Special Purpose Governance in Ontario, 1815-2015
In Fields of Authority , Jack Lucas provides the first systematic exploration of local special purpose bodies in Ontario. Lucas uses a “policy fields” approach to explain how these local bodies in Ontario have developed from the nineteenth century to the present
Patterns of urban governance: A sequence analysis of long-term institutional change in six Canadian cities
How do the institutional structures of urban policymaking develop over time? To answer this question, scholars have often focused on one of three contexts: the city in which a set of policy institutions exists, the higher-order government with legislative authority over those institutions, or the policy domain in which a policy task is administered. Few studies have compared the relative importance of these contexts for understanding the long-ter…
Le partage des données personnelles de santé dans les usages du numérique en santé à l’épreuve du consentement exprès de la personne
Urban Governance and the American Political Development Approach
This article outlines the value of the American Political Development (APD) approach for scholars of urban governance. Despite recent enthusiasm for APD, I argue that the tools of the APD approach have not yet been clearly articulated or demonstrated for urban scholars. By combining the concept of “intercurrence” with a methodological focus on shifts in urban political authority, APD allows us to capture the dynamics of urban governance in tracta…
Back to the Future: Historical Political Science and the Promise of Canadian Political Development
How “historical” is Canadian political science? This paper sets out to answer this question through an analysis of historically oriented articles that have appeared in this journal from its first volume, in 1968, to 2015. We suggest that historical research in this journal is at once enduring and uneven, a pattern that we then explore in more detail in a case study, spanning forty years, of historical articles that focus on the interconnected the…
Toward Delegation: Social Policy Centralization in Toronto, 1870–1929
Scholars of social policy development in the United States and elsewhere have recently focused on the historical and contemporary importance of complex, delegated welfare state governance. In this article, I outline the emergence of a coordinated urban welfare state in the city of Toronto between 1870 and 1929, describing the creation of both public and private forms of coordination and centralization. I argue that we must understand social polic…
Identifying and critically examining government legislation relevant to children's dental caries in Calgary, Alberta, Canada: A health inequities lens
Analysis of legislation relevant to children's dental caries reveals policies that are more often upstream in nature, and unsurprisingly are multijurisdictional. Despite this, there remains a high prevalence and inequitable distribution of children's dental caries in Canada. This suggests that the nature of upstream involvement and fragmented government involvement is ineffective in tackling this pervasive and urgent public health issue. Implicat…
Multilevel policy from the municipal perspective: A pan‐Canadian survey
Building on in‐depth case studies and extensive theory‐building by Canadian multilevel governance scholars, this article identifies and describes multilevel policy involvement by federal, provincial, municipal, private, and NGO actors in three policy phases and eighteen policy domains that specifically involve local governments in Canada. Drawing from an original pan‐Canadian survey of municipal mayors and councillors, we show that municipal poli…
Cities and places in provincial policy agendas
This article uses a new dataset of coded Alberta Throne Speeches from 1906 to 2017 to identify patterns of provincial policy attention to place and urban place across policy issues and time. We discuss three main findings. First, provincial attention to place and urban place is influenced by policy domain: place‐based attention is generally absent in some policy domains, such as macroeconomic policy, and prevalent in others, such as health care. …
Who Has School Spirit? Explaining Voter Participation in School Board Elections
This research note examines the correlates of turnout in Canadian school board elections. Using individual-level data from the Canadian Municipal Election Study, we find that gender, education, left-wing ideology, Conservative partisanship and parental status were associated with participation in Calgary's 2017 public school board elections. Some of these patterns relate to the specific details of Calgary's 2017 election; others, we suggest, may …
Do Covid-19 Policies Affect Mobility Behaviour? Evidence from 75 Canadian and American Cities
We construct a new measure of the aggressiveness of COVID-19 policies in 75 Canadian and American cities and estimate the effect of these policies on mobility patterns in each city. Using a new dataset of five municipal COVID-19 policy indicators for each of our 75 cities, combined with 11 provincial/state policy indicators, we estimate a daily measure of the "aggressiveness" of the provincial/state and municipal COVID-19 policy mix in each city.…
Measuring and Comparing Municipal Policy Responses to Covid-19
Municipal governments are experts in social non-distancing. From swimming pools to libraries, streetcars to public parks, municipalities bring residents together and move them around—services vital to a vibrant community in ordinary times, but potentially disastrous in a pandemic. Municipal decisions to shutter these services and enforce social distancing are thus crucial for a successful COVID-19 response
Introduction to the Covid-19 Series
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Are city elections unique? Perceptions of electoral cleavages and social sorting across levels of government
The Canadian Municipal Election Study
It is in this context of rapid growth of the field of local political behaviour that we introduce the Canadian Municipal Election Study (CMES) dataset. With a total sample size of 14,458, the dataset includes survey responses from voters and non-voters in eight of Canada’s largest cities: Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg, London, Mississauga, Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec City. Cities were chosen on the basis of size, contextual variation, and instit…
Response to Pilon
February 10, 2021Dennis Pilon’s (2021) response to my article, ‘Reaction or Reform?’ (Lucas 2020), offers a number of general and specific critiques of my argument. In my view, the persuasiveness o
The Size and Sources of Municipal Incumbency Advantage in Canada
This article uses a new dataset of nearly 2,000 municipal elections from 1874 to 2018 to estimate the size of municipal incumbency advantage in Canada for the first time. Incumbency increases the probability that a candidate will win the next election by more than 30 percentage points and accounts for well over half of overall incumbent success. Incumbency advantage varies modestly by institutional context but varies substantially over time, with…
Women's Municipal Electoral Performance: An Introduction to the Canadian Municipal Elections Database
This research note describes the Canadian Municipal Elections Database (CMED), a new publicly available and actively maintained dataset of more than 24,000 municipal elections in Canada. We describe the need for high-quality election results data for municipal politics research and describe the content, sources and construction of the CMED. To illustrate the value of the CMED, we estimate gender differences in municipal electoral performance for …
Policy Ideology and Local Ideological Representation in Canada
To enable new research on local ideology and representation in Canada, we construct a latent measure of the policy ideology of 37,500 Canadian Election Study respondents using 56 policy-relevant questions and then use multilevel regression and poststratification to estimate the average ideological position of each of Canada's 338 federal electoral districts and 250 largest municipalities. We use these local ideology estimates to examine ideologic…
The structure of municipal voting in Vancouver
We offer a new interpretation of the structure of municipal electoral competition in Vancouver, focusing on the city’s high-profile municipal election in 2018. Using novel “cast vote records”—a dataset containing each of the 176,450 ballots cast in the city’s municipal election—we use a Bayesian multidimensional scaling procedure to estimate the location of every 2018 candidate and voter in Vancouver in a shared two-dimensional political space. W…
Urban home values and multi-level political accountability: Evidence from Calgary, Canada
While retrospective economic voting—that is, punishing or rewarding incumbent politicians for the performance of the economy—is well studied, much less is known about the electoral implications of the housing market across levels of government. Which, if any, levels of government are judged on the basis of real estate prices? This piece considers this question, using panel survey data and home assessment data from Calgary, Alberta, a city where h…
Do “Non-Partisan” Municipal Politicians Match the Partisanship of Their Constituents
Recent research in the United States has found that municipal governments are responsive to the ideological complexion of their cities even in the absence of partisan elections. In this paper, I test for the presence of party match—a match between the partisan character of a district and the partisanship of its municipal representative—in Canada, where municipal elections are distinctively non-partisan. Using new data on district-level party supp…
Political science (51 works) · Law (41 works) · Politics (41 works) · Law (36 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (32 works) · Public Administration (26 works) · Sociology (26 works) · Public Administration (25 works) · Economics (22 works) · Political economy (18 works)