Municipal Election Candidate Survey

Local Democracy Project

Principal Investigator: Zack Taylor PhD, Political Science, University of Western Ontario
Co-Investigators:

Sandra Breux, Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique
Kristin Good, Political Science, Dalhousie University
Martin Horak, Political Science, University of Western Ontario

The purpose of this page is to provide you with additional information about the survey you are being invited to participate in.

The survey is part of the first-ever Canada-wide study of local elections and local campaign finance. Our broad research questions include the following:

What strategies and tools do candidates for local office use in their election campaigns?
How do local campaign finance rules affect campaign activities?
How do campaign strategies and campaign finance rules affect election outcomes?
What attitudes do candidates for local office have about campaign finance rules, and about local democracy?

Your participation in this study is voluntary. You may decide not to be in this study. Even if you consent to participate you have the right to not answer individual questions or to withdraw from the study. To withdraw from the study, simply close your web browser at any time before you have completed the survey. If you choose not to participate or to withdraw from the study, it will have no effect on you. Due to the nature of the data collection process and our procedures for confidentiality, it is no longer possible for you to withdraw your data once you have completed the survey.

The survey you are being asked to complete today will take about 10 minutes. Should you complete today’s survey, you will be re-contacted and invited to participate in an additional 5-minute survey at the end of the local election campaign period.

The benefit of participating in our study is that your responses will help us to know more about how local campaign finance rules shape local election campaigns and outcomes across Canada. There are no personal benefits from your participation. There are no foreseeable potential risks, harms, vulnerabilities or inconveniences as a result of participating in this study.

Your confidentiality will be maintained at all times. For the purposes of our research, data from this survey will be linked to publicly available election results and campaign finance disclosure information. All identifiable information will be deleted from the survey dataset so that individual participants’ anonymity will be protected. Only the Principal Investigator will have access to the linked data. All data will be analyzed in an aggregate manner (that is, by combining responses from many respondents).

The survey data will be stored on a secure server at Western University and will be retained for a minimum of 7 years. Representatives of Western University’s Non-Medical Research Ethics Board may require access to your study-related records to monitor the conduct of the research.

All identifiable information will be deleted from the dataset collected so that individual participants’ anonymity will be protected. The de-identified data will be accessible by the study investigators as well as the broader scientific community. More specifically, the data will be posted on a secure academic data archive (https://borealisdata.ca) so that data may be inspected and analyzed by other researchers. The data that will be shared on this archive will not contain any information that can identify you.

You do not waive any legal right by participating in this study.

If you have questions at any time about the study or its results, you may contact:

Dr. Zack Taylor
Department of Political Science
University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario, Canada
mldproject@uwo.ca

If you have any questions about your rights as a research participant or the conduct of this study, you may contact The Office of Human Research Ethics (519) 661-3036, 1-844-720-9816, email: ethics@uwo.ca. This office oversees the ethical conduct of research studies and is not part of the study team. Everything that you discuss will be kept confidential.

Completion of the survey indicates your consent to participate.

If you wish to complete the survey, please close this window and click on “Take the Survey” to begin.

Please save or print a copy of this Letter of Information for your records.