Canadian Municipal Politicians and Ideological Preferences
Do Canadian Municipal Politicians Represent the Ideological Preferences of their Constituents?
Dr. Jack Lucas, University of Calgary
Friday, April 8, 10:30 am – 12:00 noon
SSC 6201, 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, Lucas presents results of four interrelated studies on local ideological representation at the municipal level. In the first study, Lucas shows that Canadian municipal politicians tend to match the federal partisanship of their districts, and Lucas argues that this ‘party match’ is evidence of ideological representation. In the remaining studies, Lucas combines 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.
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.
Presented by the Centre for Urban Policy and Local Governance, The Department of Political Science and the Centre for Computational and Quantitative Social Science
