The Structure of Municipal Voting in Vancouver

Abstract

We offer a new interpretation of the structure of municipal electoral competition in Vancouver, focusing on the city’s high-profile municipal election in 2018. Using novel “cast vote records” – a dataset containing each of the 176,450 ballots cast in the city’s municipal election – we use a Bayesian multidimensional scaling procedure to estimate the location of every 2018 candidate and voter in Vancouver in a shared two-dimensional political space. We then match observed votes from the cast vote records to survey responses in the Canadian Municipal Election Study (CMES), a large election survey undertaken in Vancouver in 2018, using 96 CMES variables to interpret our two measured dimensions of electoral competition. We find evidence of a single primary dimension of competition, structured by left-right ideology, along with a secondary dimension dividing establishment from upstart parties of the right. Our paper supplies a new interpretation of Vancouver’s electoral landscape, clarifies our understanding of the role of left-right ideology in municipal electoral competition, and demonstrates the promise of cast vote records for research on municipal elections and voting.