Political opportunity structures and the representation of women and visible minorities in municipal elections

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 te...

Do “Non-Partisan” Municipal Politicians Match the Partisanship of Their Constituents?:

Through the twentieth century, Canadian city politics has operated under the pretense of non-partisanship. Municipal governments have been a refuge for special interests who, garbed in antipartyism and common sense, were left alone to rule their local roosts. For instance, the Civic Non-Partisan Association, Vancouver's dominant political organization and living oxymoron, long espoused the Burkean notion that council "should not be a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests."1 With its recent and massive restructuring of urban government in Ontario however, the government of Premier Mike Harris has rendered Canadians a service: by focussing public attention on "who does what" at both levels of government, Harris inadvertently smoked out almost everyone with a priorized municipal agenda. In spite of its somewhat brutal methods, the Ontario provincial government has provoked a broad rethinking of how local political business should be transacted. Canadian city politics have yet to mature, either as they might or as their citizens have a right to expect. In the small debate about local democracy and citizen-centred government one obvious question is scarcely considered: should formal parties be introduced into civic elections in Canada's major cities?2 Over the years non-partisanship has veiled a conservative and incrementalist policy-making style that seems inappropriate for postmodern metropolises. That non-partisanship is a conservative force is really not all that surprising. Among the political gladiators in Vancouver, Canada's most overtly partisan city, the most conservative faction has seen the city as a business and somehow independent of politics.3 The Maud Commission in Great Britain found anti-party feeling strongest among rural, suburban and more conservative councillors generally. In Canada, voter turnout is very low municipally compared to other political levels, perhaps because the issues at stake are obscured by the lack of coherent policy positions. Debates and decisions of local councils are generally understood to be muddled when not petty; this obscures partisan ties to other levels and to avoid quasi-ministerial accountability for the consequences of council actions. In addition to this general concern with appropriate representation, non-partisan local politics has not been benign but inefficient and wrong. When well-educated citizens are denied fundamental opportunities for reasonable democratic choice, as Henry Milner's comparative study has convincingly argued, municipal electoral participation is discouraged.4 There may well be a growing appreciation among the civic political elite of the importance of these issues in big city elections.5 But by the evidence from the playing fields, little partisanship is admitted to in Canadian city politics in the 1990s.6 Even where they have been most successful over the years, Canada's purely local city parties have been very small cadres, often no more than a few dozen activists in the gladiatorial roles. For example, in Edmonton, the Citizens' Committee that held all council seats between 1945 and 1959 was never a large group: "when founded in 1936 it comprised 41 professionals and businessmen led by the president of the chamber of commerce, and at its nomination meeting in 1962 only 27 members were present, including candidates."7 Enough party-like activity, such as slate-making, has taken place during the twentieth century to inform a small debate as to whether such behaviours, or even open party politics are desirable.8 Across the Prairies, the hypocrisy of pretended non-partisanship prevailed in city elections in Regina and Saskatoon in October, 1988. These elections saw Saskatoon Mayor C. Wright retire after being given an Order-in-Council appointment by the provincial Conservatives, to be replaced by 12-year council veteran and New Democrat Henry Dayday. In Regina's march of the political toreadors, new Mayor D. …

Finding the Trolls Under Your Bridge: The New Case for Party Politics in Canadian Cities

Purpose: The purpose of this research was examine potential barriers and facilitators to the implementation of healthy public policy related to aging, specifically in municipal planning and transportation departments, in the suburban context Research Questions: What are the factors which influence successful implementation of healthy public policy in municipal and, specifically, suburban contexts? How do suburban planning and transportation policies interface with policies aimed at physical environmental changes to shape the built environment in ways that are theorized to affect seniors‘ health? Methods and Results: A qualitative case study approach was used to examine Strathcona County‘s Older Adults Plan (2009a) Strathcona County is a municipality bordering Edmonton, Alberta, Canada Data was collected through document reviews and 19 semi-structured interviews with 21 individuals involved in the development of the plan or potentially affected by its implementation Results were triangulated in a final analysis of policy implementation capacity in

/pdf/exploring-barriers-and-facilitators-to-the-implementation-of-4zmcjdvwg8.pdf

Exploring barriers and facilitators to the implementation of healthy aging policy in suburban planning and transportation departments

Affective polarization is on the rise globally, and has been associated with 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, existing research has focused almost exclusively on the measurement and explanation of affective polarization among citizens. As a result, we know far less about elite affective polarization: the degree of partisan hostility held by elected politicians themselves. In this paper, we explore whether affective polarization persists among political elites even in the absence of political institutions that incentivize partisan animosity. We do so by leveraging the distinctive institutional setting of Canadian municipal politics, using an original survey of sitting local politicians to compare affective polarization between politicians and citizens and to explore, for the first time, individual-level predictors of elite affective polarization. We find that Canadian local politicians are, on average, less affectively polarized than the citizens they represent. However, levels of affective polarization among these politicians vary considerably, with higher levels of affective polarization among politicians who are ideologues, partisans, and who harbour strong progressive ambition. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for research on affective polarization and describe the need for comparative studies of affective polarization among political elites. 

What Explains Elite Affective Polarization? Evidence from Canadian Politicians

Recent municipal elections in Canada's major cities have revealed a keen competition for power increasingly rooted in ideological divisions. These competitions have directly challenged the once comfortable but essentially suffocating mythology of growth-focussed boosterism. It is in the selection of the community's most visible spokesperson, the mayor, that divisions may become clearest. This case study of one such city-wide campaign, that of 1992 in Edmonton, Alberta, focusses on the logistics of shaping competitive ideologies and divergent cultural images to the rough-and-tumble of election politics. The role assumed by the city hall press gallery is assessed. Some explanation is offered as to why contemporary city campaigns are at their most bitter as ideological choice becomes more clearly defined, and as individuals personify issues and ideas rather than alternative brands of boosterism. General municipal elections have historically been run differently from those in the other worlds of Canadian politics. Councillors have fixed terms, so their next rendezvous with electors is known from day one. Electoral lists are usually established well in advance of the actual date of polling. For most local jurisdictions outside Quebec the elections have not traditionally been partisan -- even when the federal and provincial sympathies are well known among the gladiator class, with voting based on principal rather than principle.(f.1) While it has long been my argument that it is both necessary and desirable to professionalize city politics by engaging the partisans above-board,(f.2) by long-standing convention city campaigns have been less formal and not as professionally conducted as federal and provincial campaigns (in even the smallest provinces). Voter turnout is usually very low; in fact, beyond the communities within the Census Metropolitan Areas it has often proven necessary for local establishments to coerce unsuspecting local notables "to serve" the sentence of a term or two. The central case to be made in this essay is that elections in Canada's major cities have changed and it is in the race for the mayor's chair that the evidence of this now appears most clearly. Campaigns have become more professionally run and gladiators once exclusively focussed on the "senior" levels of government have become extensively involved. While this phenomenon has been manifest in Toronto, Vancouver, Winnipeg and even Montreal over the past few years,(f.3) several reasons for new levels of involvement will be considered in the specific context of the October 1992 mayoralty campaign in Edmonton, Alberta. Essentially, I argue that a combination of factors has caused ideological divisions drawn from the political culture of the city to become sharpened, to represent tangible goals and, in consequence, to cause campaigns to be fought on the cusp of these differences. In examining in considerable detail the functional policy choices made, recent analyses of modern problems in the Canadian metropolis tend to overlook who is in charge of making those choices and how they got there.(f.4) Christopher Leo has stated the situation plainly: "[The] more conventional approach to city politics ... operates on the explicit or implicit assumption that government is a kind of neutral decision-making and implementation machinery that tabulates public opinion and produces policies responsive to the demands it identifies."(f.5) With Leo, I share the perception that politics -- especially in and of the city -- is about ideology actively applied through the electoral pursuit of power. More importantly, it appears that contemporary city politics are themselves evolving in this direction,(f.6) and this essay examines the top level of one such contest. The "non-partisan" labels applied to most major Canadian municipal elections merely disguise the fact that they are anything but apolitical. The suffocating mythology of our urban politics is that they are consensual, boosterish, growth-directed. …

City Campaigns on the Cusp and the Edmonton Mayoralty Election of 1992

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Finding the Trolls Under Your Bridge: The New Case for Party Politics in Canadian Cities

City Campaigns on the Cusp and the Edmonton Mayoralty Election of 1992