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April 8, 2022: Jack Lucas Lecture
Virtual Lecture
Do Canadian Municipal Politicians Represent the Ideological Preferences of their Constituents?
Friday, April 8, 2022 · 10:30am–12:00pm · SSC 6210 and Zoom
The role of left-right ideology in municipal politics has been a subject of longstanding debate among both practitioners and academics in Canada. In this talk, I present results of four interrelated studies on local ideological representation at the municipal level. In the first study, I show that Canadian municipal politicians tend to match the federal partisanship of their districts, and I argue that this “party match” is evidence of ideological representation. In the remaining studies, I combine mass and elite survey data to show that citizens' latent policy preferences are strongly related to those of their municipal representatives. These findings, which are part of a book project on ideology in Canadian municipal politics, have implications for our understanding of Canadian municipalities and for the relationship between local politics and provincial/federal politics.
Co-presented with the Department of Political Science and the Centre for Computational and Quantitative Social Science.
Jack Lucas is an associate professor of political science at the University of Calgary. His research focuses on Canadian urban politics, Canadian political development and municipal democracy and representation. He is currently working with Western's Dave Armstrong and Zack Taylor on a project about the long-term development of urban-rural divides in Canadian politics, and with Western's Cam Anderson on a SSHRC-funded project about the 2022 Ontario provincial and municipal elections. His most recent book, Big City Elections in Canada, co-edited with Mike McGregor, was published by University of Toronto Press. He directs the Canadian Municipal Barometer, an annual survey of mayors and councillors in municipalities across Canada.