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 first time, finding that women are, on average, more likely than men to win municipal elections in Canada.

Au Québec, les élections municipales se caractérisent par la faible mobilisation qu’elles suscitent. Cette réalité est encore plus frappante chez les jeunes électeurs. Si les causes de cette abstention demeurent encore largement méconnues, la spécificité de l’échelle municipale est souvent mise de l’avant. Ce constat invite à délaisser les analyses plus traditionnelles du vote pour considérer l’acte électoral comme un geste symbolique d’identification à un territoire, porteur d’un ensemble de valeurs, susceptibles de diverger selon l’âge de l’électeur. L’objectif de notre propos est ainsi de saisir ce que signifie, pour les jeunes électeurs, l’acte de voter à l’échelle municipale. À partir de la passation de questionnaires et de la réalisation de six groupes de discussions avec des électeurs âgés en moyenne de 20,7 ans et étudiant à Montréal, notre recherche met en évidence le rôle crucial que jouent la quantité et la nature de l’information politique dans les représentations des jeunes. Aux yeux de nos répondants, l’échelle municipale est peu lisible, peu accessible et ne sous-tend pas de réel projet politique – contrairement à l’échelle provinciale et dans une moindre mesure et de façon très différente, à l’échelle fédérale. Si l’influence parentale se fait sentir dans la mobilisation de certains, votants ou abstentionnistes affichent leur volonté d’être davantage informés sur ce niveau de gouvernement.

While municipal elections in Quebec are characterized by low voter turnout, it appears that people over 65 years old are the ones who vote in higher numbers. In fact, this is the case for both federal and provincial elections. However, the lack of individual data on municipal elections does not yet allow us to say that seniors vote more than younger people. This finding invites political scientists to look at the electoral behaviour of individual voters and the importance attached to the act of voting at this level of government. In addition, the majority of studies on elections focus on the behaviours of voters living in large cities such as Montreal or Quebec City. In Quebec, the few studies that have looked at medium size municipality voting behaviour have mainly studied the cities of Quebec City, but not Montreal. Based on 19 interviews conducted with people aged between 65 and 84 and living in one medium size cities, Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, our research illustrates the importance of the exercise of a duty, the access to political information, the proximity of electoral behaviour and the influential role of seniors. According to participants, it is easier to talk to municipal candidates and get to know the person who will become their official representative, compared to the provincial and federal levels where it is more difficult to talk to candidates. Also, their knowledge of the municipal political system is better than when they were younger. While voting is similarly important at each level of government, participants felt that voting at the municipal level is directly relevant to them because of the municipal services but also by the influence they can have on their councillor.

Big City Elections in Canada, edited by Jack Lucas and R. Michael McGregor, addresses two key questions: Why do voters vote-or not vote-at the municipal level? And why do they vote the way they do?The empirical basis for the volume is data from Canadian Municipal Election Study (CMES) survey (of which McGregor is the principal investigator) of voters and non-voters in eight Canadian municipalities: Calgary,

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