Zak Taylor
Biographic Data
| ID | 298764 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Zak Taylor |
| GIVEN NAMES | Zak |
| FAMILY NAME | Taylor |
| SIGNATURE | TAYLOR Z |
| AFFILIATIONS | Western University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9372-2704 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 175 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1976 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Campaign Capital, Resource Mobilization, and Candidate Performance in Local Elections
In Canada, municipal elections are typically non-partisan contests. Incumbents enjoy a large advantage in these settings, whereas non-incumbents must mobilize campaign resources to make their name and message known to residents. How do non-incumbents mobilize campaign resources without support from party organizations? We suggest that they draw on what we call campaign capital . Campaign capital comprises pre-existing endowments candidates can ut…
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 …
Political Divisions in Large Cities: The Socio-Spatial Basis of Legislative Behavior in Chicago and Toronto
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 …
Dimensions of Local Authority: Mapping Local Political Institutions in Canada's Cities
Our knowledge of the institutional features of local government in Canadian cities is surprisingly fragmentary. The academic literature has long identified dominant tendencies in Canadian local institutions, but systematic empirical data has been missing. In this article, we address this gap in knowledge in two ways. We introduce the Canadian Municipal Attributes Portal (CMAP), a new open-access database that contains information on dozens of ins…
The domestic politics of selective permeability: Disaggregating the Canadian migration state
Hollifield’s ‘migration state’ concept draws attention to the political tension between openness and closure in liberal-democratic countries, arguing that domestic migration policy regimes represent an equilibrium outcome between security, rights, markets, and culture. This overstates national strategic control over migration and borders. Through a case study of recent developments in Canada, sometimes held up as the paradigmatic centralised libe…
The Russian invasion of Ukraine: Implications for politics, territory and governance
10.1080/21622671.2023.2256119
Local autonomy: Unconditional Elites and Conditional Publics
This paper investigates elite and mass attitudes towards local autonomy. Using surveys of more than 1, 200 elected municipal politicians and 5, 800 citizens in Canada, we ask three questions: Do citizens agree with their elected representatives about the need for increased power for local authorities? Are predictors of support for expanded local power similar among elites and the public? Finally, do elected politicians understand their constituen…
Canada's Federal Electoral Districts, 1867–2021: New Digital Boundary Files and a Comparative Investigation of District Compactness
We introduce new data resources to enable spatial and nonspatial research on Canadian elections, electoral history and political geography. These include a comprehensive set of distinct identification codes for every federal electoral district in Canada from 1867 to the present, a complete set of digital boundary files for these electoral districts, historical census data aggregated to federal electoral districts, and tools to connect our distric…
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 Political Geography of Immigration: Party Competition for Immigrants’ Votes in Canada, 1997–2019
Why has the Conservative Party of Canada largely supported high immigration rates and multiculturalism, and put considerable effort into recruiting New Canadians into its electoral coalition? More generally, why is Canada perhaps the only Western democracy without a major, consistently anti-immigrant or nativist party? I argue that none of Canada’s major national parties have adopted an anti-immigration or nativist platform because of incentives …
Local election campaign finance regimes in Canada: Toward a research agenda
The regulation of election campaign donation, fundraising, expenditure, and advertising is an enduring object of study and reform. Compared to the federal and provincial levels, virtually no attention has been paid to Canadian municipal campaign finance regimes. This is surprising given the urban political economy literature’s focus on business influence on local politics and policy and evidence of corruption in Canadian local government. We take…
The Spatial Articulation of Urban Political Cleavages
Synthesizing and extending multiple literatures, this article develops a new approach for exploring the spatial articulation of urban political cleavages. We pursue three questions: (1) To what extent does electoral conflict materialize between rather than within neighborhoods? (2) How salient are group, place, and location in defining urban cleavages? (3) How do these sources inflect one another? To answer these questions, the article analyzes a…
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 …
Finding the future in policy discourse: An analysis of city resilience plans
Managing future uncertainty is the essence of planning. How planners conceptualize the future therefore has important practical and normative implications as contemporary decisions have long-term impacts that may be irreversible and distribute costs and benefits across society. A discourse analysis of strategies prepared under the 100 Resilient Cities programme reveals that while they are ostensibly forward-looking and cognizant of uncertainty, m…
Populism in the City: The Case of Ford Nation
Do Institutions and Rules Influence Electoral Accessibility and Competitiveness? Considering the 2014 Toronto Ward Elections
Electoral and campaign finance reforms are believed to improve the competitiveness of elections and the accessibility of the electoral process; however, the interaction between electoral institutions and competitiveness and accessibility in nonpartisan municipal elections remains understudied. This article examines the City of Toronto, which exemplifies many of the reforms proposed in the American context, including a strict campaign finance regi…
Pathways to legitimacy
Planners are centrally concerned with the legitimacy of planning institutions and practices. In a democratic society, governments depend on the voluntary compliance of external actors for the implementation of their policies. Planning theorists have largely focused on the inclusiveness and quality of deliberation in goal-setting. This article expands this focus using Scharpf’s and Schmidt’s distinction between three domains of legitimation—input,…
A new tool for neighbourhood change research: The Canadian Longitudinal Census Tract Database, 1971–2016
Performing longitudinal analysis of socio‐economic change in small‐area spatial units such as census tracts presents several methodological complications and requires significant data preparation. Unit boundaries are revised each census year because of changes in population and delineation methodologies. This limits cross‐year comparison since data are not representative of the same spatial units. To address these problems, we have developed an i…
If Different, then Why? Explaining the Divergent Political Development of Canadian and American Local Governance
Twenty-five years ago, Goldberg and Mercer argued that differences between Canadian and American cities stemmed from distinct political cultures. Taking an alternative approach, this article surveys the historical development, through a series of critical junctures, of distinct institutional foundations of local government and intergovernmental relations in Canada. These institutional forms—greater reliance on general-purpose local government and…
Commentary on Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City by Warren Magnusson
Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City is Warren Magnusson's most recent book. It will find a permanent place as a key contribution in the annals of urban studies, urban politics, political and state theory and international relations, marking a turning point in the way scholars, activists and policymakers see the world. In particular, Magnusson fundamentally questions how we understand and analyse our world from the perspective of the state (t…
Canadian Urban Politics: Another “Black Hole”
This article supplements and enriches Judd’s and Sapotichne, Jones, and Wolfe’s Judd, D. (2005). Everything is always going to hell: Urban scholars as end-times prophets. Urban Affairs Review, 41(2), 119–131.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] controversial diagnosis of a disjuncture between “mainstream” political science and the study of urban politics in the United States by suggesting that Canadian urban political science scholar…
Canadian Political Science and the City: A Limited Engagement
This paper expands on the work of Higgins, whose 1979 review remains the only synthetic overview of the field, by presenting an updated analysis of the study of municipal, local and urban issues in Canadian political science. We conclude that despite several discursive shifts—from the descriptive works of the 1950s and 1960s, through to the blossoming of interdisciplinary research in the 1980s and 1990s—Higgins' principal conclusion, that the var…
The Military Justice Debate
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 …
Populism in the City: The Case of Ford Nation
The Spatial Articulation of Urban Political Cleavages
Synthesizing and extending multiple literatures, this article develops a new approach for exploring the spatial articulation of urban political cleavages. We pursue three questions: (1) To what extent does electoral conflict materialize between rather than within neighborhoods? (2) How salient are group, place, and location in defining urban cleavages? (3) How do these sources inflect one another? To answer these questions, the article analyzes a…
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 …
Canadian Political Science and the City: A Limited Engagement
This paper expands on the work of Higgins, whose 1979 review remains the only synthetic overview of the field, by presenting an updated analysis of the study of municipal, local and urban issues in Canadian political science. We conclude that despite several discursive shifts—from the descriptive works of the 1950s and 1960s, through to the blossoming of interdisciplinary research in the 1980s and 1990s—Higgins' principal conclusion, that the var…
The domestic politics of selective permeability: Disaggregating the Canadian migration state
Hollifield’s ‘migration state’ concept draws attention to the political tension between openness and closure in liberal-democratic countries, arguing that domestic migration policy regimes represent an equilibrium outcome between security, rights, markets, and culture. This overstates national strategic control over migration and borders. Through a case study of recent developments in Canada, sometimes held up as the paradigmatic centralised libe…
Do Institutions and Rules Influence Electoral Accessibility and Competitiveness? Considering the 2014 Toronto Ward Elections
Electoral and campaign finance reforms are believed to improve the competitiveness of elections and the accessibility of the electoral process; however, the interaction between electoral institutions and competitiveness and accessibility in nonpartisan municipal elections remains understudied. This article examines the City of Toronto, which exemplifies many of the reforms proposed in the American context, including a strict campaign finance regi…
Canadian Urban Politics: Another “Black Hole”
This article supplements and enriches Judd’s and Sapotichne, Jones, and Wolfe’s Judd, D. (2005). Everything is always going to hell: Urban scholars as end-times prophets. Urban Affairs Review, 41(2), 119–131.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] controversial diagnosis of a disjuncture between “mainstream” political science and the study of urban politics in the United States by suggesting that Canadian urban political science scholar…
Finding the future in policy discourse: An analysis of city resilience plans
Managing future uncertainty is the essence of planning. How planners conceptualize the future therefore has important practical and normative implications as contemporary decisions have long-term impacts that may be irreversible and distribute costs and benefits across society. A discourse analysis of strategies prepared under the 100 Resilient Cities programme reveals that while they are ostensibly forward-looking and cognizant of uncertainty, m…
Pathways to legitimacy
Planners are centrally concerned with the legitimacy of planning institutions and practices. In a democratic society, governments depend on the voluntary compliance of external actors for the implementation of their policies. Planning theorists have largely focused on the inclusiveness and quality of deliberation in goal-setting. This article expands this focus using Scharpf’s and Schmidt’s distinction between three domains of legitimation—input,…
A new tool for neighbourhood change research: The Canadian Longitudinal Census Tract Database, 1971–2016
Performing longitudinal analysis of socio‐economic change in small‐area spatial units such as census tracts presents several methodological complications and requires significant data preparation. Unit boundaries are revised each census year because of changes in population and delineation methodologies. This limits cross‐year comparison since data are not representative of the same spatial units. To address these problems, we have developed an i…
The Russian invasion of Ukraine: Implications for politics, territory and governance
10.1080/21622671.2023.2256119
Local election campaign finance regimes in Canada: Toward a research agenda
The regulation of election campaign donation, fundraising, expenditure, and advertising is an enduring object of study and reform. Compared to the federal and provincial levels, virtually no attention has been paid to Canadian municipal campaign finance regimes. This is surprising given the urban political economy literature’s focus on business influence on local politics and policy and evidence of corruption in Canadian local government. We take…
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 …
Local autonomy: Unconditional Elites and Conditional Publics
This paper investigates elite and mass attitudes towards local autonomy. Using surveys of more than 1, 200 elected municipal politicians and 5, 800 citizens in Canada, we ask three questions: Do citizens agree with their elected representatives about the need for increased power for local authorities? Are predictors of support for expanded local power similar among elites and the public? Finally, do elected politicians understand their constituen…
Canada's Federal Electoral Districts, 1867–2021: New Digital Boundary Files and a Comparative Investigation of District Compactness
We introduce new data resources to enable spatial and nonspatial research on Canadian elections, electoral history and political geography. These include a comprehensive set of distinct identification codes for every federal electoral district in Canada from 1867 to the present, a complete set of digital boundary files for these electoral districts, historical census data aggregated to federal electoral districts, and tools to connect our distric…
Political Divisions in Large Cities: The Socio-Spatial Basis of Legislative Behavior in Chicago and Toronto
Dimensions of Local Authority: Mapping Local Political Institutions in Canada's Cities
Our knowledge of the institutional features of local government in Canadian cities is surprisingly fragmentary. The academic literature has long identified dominant tendencies in Canadian local institutions, but systematic empirical data has been missing. In this article, we address this gap in knowledge in two ways. We introduce the Canadian Municipal Attributes Portal (CMAP), a new open-access database that contains information on dozens of ins…
The Military Justice Debate
Canadian Urban Politics: Another “Black Hole”
This article supplements and enriches Judd’s and Sapotichne, Jones, and Wolfe’s Judd, D. (2005). Everything is always going to hell: Urban scholars as end-times prophets. Urban Affairs Review, 41(2), 119–131.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] controversial diagnosis of a disjuncture between “mainstream” political science and the study of urban politics in the United States by suggesting that Canadian urban political science scholar…
Canadian Political Science and the City: A Limited Engagement
This paper expands on the work of Higgins, whose 1979 review remains the only synthetic overview of the field, by presenting an updated analysis of the study of municipal, local and urban issues in Canadian political science. We conclude that despite several discursive shifts—from the descriptive works of the 1950s and 1960s, through to the blossoming of interdisciplinary research in the 1980s and 1990s—Higgins' principal conclusion, that the var…
Commentary on Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City by Warren Magnusson
Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City is Warren Magnusson's most recent book. It will find a permanent place as a key contribution in the annals of urban studies, urban politics, political and state theory and international relations, marking a turning point in the way scholars, activists and policymakers see the world. In particular, Magnusson fundamentally questions how we understand and analyse our world from the perspective of the state (t…
If Different, then Why? Explaining the Divergent Political Development of Canadian and American Local Governance
Twenty-five years ago, Goldberg and Mercer argued that differences between Canadian and American cities stemmed from distinct political cultures. Taking an alternative approach, this article surveys the historical development, through a series of critical junctures, of distinct institutional foundations of local government and intergovernmental relations in Canada. These institutional forms—greater reliance on general-purpose local government and…
Pathways to legitimacy
Planners are centrally concerned with the legitimacy of planning institutions and practices. In a democratic society, governments depend on the voluntary compliance of external actors for the implementation of their policies. Planning theorists have largely focused on the inclusiveness and quality of deliberation in goal-setting. This article expands this focus using Scharpf’s and Schmidt’s distinction between three domains of legitimation—input,…
A new tool for neighbourhood change research: The Canadian Longitudinal Census Tract Database, 1971–2016
Performing longitudinal analysis of socio‐economic change in small‐area spatial units such as census tracts presents several methodological complications and requires significant data preparation. Unit boundaries are revised each census year because of changes in population and delineation methodologies. This limits cross‐year comparison since data are not representative of the same spatial units. To address these problems, we have developed an i…
Populism in the City: The Case of Ford Nation
Do Institutions and Rules Influence Electoral Accessibility and Competitiveness? Considering the 2014 Toronto Ward Elections
Electoral and campaign finance reforms are believed to improve the competitiveness of elections and the accessibility of the electoral process; however, the interaction between electoral institutions and competitiveness and accessibility in nonpartisan municipal elections remains understudied. This article examines the City of Toronto, which exemplifies many of the reforms proposed in the American context, including a strict campaign finance regi…
Finding the future in policy discourse: An analysis of city resilience plans
Managing future uncertainty is the essence of planning. How planners conceptualize the future therefore has important practical and normative implications as contemporary decisions have long-term impacts that may be irreversible and distribute costs and benefits across society. A discourse analysis of strategies prepared under the 100 Resilient Cities programme reveals that while they are ostensibly forward-looking and cognizant of uncertainty, m…
The Political Geography of Immigration: Party Competition for Immigrants’ Votes in Canada, 1997–2019
Why has the Conservative Party of Canada largely supported high immigration rates and multiculturalism, and put considerable effort into recruiting New Canadians into its electoral coalition? More generally, why is Canada perhaps the only Western democracy without a major, consistently anti-immigrant or nativist party? I argue that none of Canada’s major national parties have adopted an anti-immigration or nativist platform because of incentives …
Local election campaign finance regimes in Canada: Toward a research agenda
The regulation of election campaign donation, fundraising, expenditure, and advertising is an enduring object of study and reform. Compared to the federal and provincial levels, virtually no attention has been paid to Canadian municipal campaign finance regimes. This is surprising given the urban political economy literature’s focus on business influence on local politics and policy and evidence of corruption in Canadian local government. We take…
The Spatial Articulation of Urban Political Cleavages
Synthesizing and extending multiple literatures, this article develops a new approach for exploring the spatial articulation of urban political cleavages. We pursue three questions: (1) To what extent does electoral conflict materialize between rather than within neighborhoods? (2) How salient are group, place, and location in defining urban cleavages? (3) How do these sources inflect one another? To answer these questions, the article analyzes a…
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 …
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 Russian invasion of Ukraine: Implications for politics, territory and governance
10.1080/21622671.2023.2256119
Local autonomy: Unconditional Elites and Conditional Publics
This paper investigates elite and mass attitudes towards local autonomy. Using surveys of more than 1, 200 elected municipal politicians and 5, 800 citizens in Canada, we ask three questions: Do citizens agree with their elected representatives about the need for increased power for local authorities? Are predictors of support for expanded local power similar among elites and the public? Finally, do elected politicians understand their constituen…
Canada's Federal Electoral Districts, 1867–2021: New Digital Boundary Files and a Comparative Investigation of District Compactness
We introduce new data resources to enable spatial and nonspatial research on Canadian elections, electoral history and political geography. These include a comprehensive set of distinct identification codes for every federal electoral district in Canada from 1867 to the present, a complete set of digital boundary files for these electoral districts, historical census data aggregated to federal electoral districts, and tools to connect our distric…
Political Divisions in Large Cities: The Socio-Spatial Basis of Legislative Behavior in Chicago and Toronto
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 …
Dimensions of Local Authority: Mapping Local Political Institutions in Canada's Cities
Our knowledge of the institutional features of local government in Canadian cities is surprisingly fragmentary. The academic literature has long identified dominant tendencies in Canadian local institutions, but systematic empirical data has been missing. In this article, we address this gap in knowledge in two ways. We introduce the Canadian Municipal Attributes Portal (CMAP), a new open-access database that contains information on dozens of ins…
The domestic politics of selective permeability: Disaggregating the Canadian migration state
Hollifield’s ‘migration state’ concept draws attention to the political tension between openness and closure in liberal-democratic countries, arguing that domestic migration policy regimes represent an equilibrium outcome between security, rights, markets, and culture. This overstates national strategic control over migration and borders. Through a case study of recent developments in Canada, sometimes held up as the paradigmatic centralised libe…
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 …
Campaign Capital, Resource Mobilization, and Candidate Performance in Local Elections
In Canada, municipal elections are typically non-partisan contests. Incumbents enjoy a large advantage in these settings, whereas non-incumbents must mobilize campaign resources to make their name and message known to residents. How do non-incumbents mobilize campaign resources without support from party organizations? We suggest that they draw on what we call campaign capital . Campaign capital comprises pre-existing endowments candidates can ut…
Political science (22 works) · Law (19 works) · Politics (19 works) · Law (17 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (14 works) · Geography (10 works) · Economics (9 works) · Public Administration (9 works) · Political economy (8 works)