Women's Municipal Electoral Performance: An Introduction to the Canadian Municipal Elections Database

Lucas, Jack; Merrill, Reed; Blidook, Kelly; Breux, Sandra; Conrad, Laura; Eidelman, Gabriel; Koop, Royce; Marciano, Daniella; Taylor, Zack; Vallette, Salomé

doi:10.1017/s000842392000102x

Cited by 10 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…By potentially giving them the ability to reach voters who otherwise might not have voted, introducing Internet voting could entice more women to run for office, even if it does not make them more likely to win. To test this possibly, we run an additional model which incorporates data on political candidacies from the Canadian Municipal Elections Database (Lucas et al, 2021a). The database contains candidate-level data on elections in over 2000 Canadian municipalities, including candidate gender, which was manually coded from archival records (Lucas et al, 2021b).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does the Introduction of Online Voting Create Diversity in Representation?

Wigginton

Stockemer

2021

Political Studies Review

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The Internet’s effect on political communication is omnipresent. However, very few jurisdictions around the globe allow their citizens to cast their ballot online. What are the electoral consequences of this reform? Research, so far, has mainly looked at security considerations and effects on turnout. In this research note, we broaden the scope of prior studies by examining the effect of online voting on diversity in representation. Using the voting results of municipalities in the Canadian province of Ontario both before and after the implementation of online voting, we test whether this reform has increased the representation of women and youth. We do not find that Internet voting has any significant impact on which candidates are elected, with both the gender and age of elected mayors being constant across online and traditional elections. We further find that the number of woman candidates does not increase with online voting.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does the Introduction of Online Voting Create Diversity in Representation?

Wigginton

Stockemer

2021

Political Studies Review

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“…Our estimates of policy ideology in Canadian municipalities could be matched with data on municipal spending and public policy outputs to better understand local policy responsiveness in Canada (Einstein and Kogan, 2016; Tausanovitch and Warshaw, 2014). Alternatively, ideology estimates could be matched with data from the Canadian Municipal Elections Database (Lucas et al, 2021) to understand the relationship between a municipality's ideological complexion and its electoral outcomes, such as electoral competitiveness, incumbent success rates, patterns of racial and gender candidacy, and turnout. Municipal ideology estimates could also be matched with census data to better understand how place characteristics relate to policy ideology.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Policy Ideology and Local Ideological Representation in Canada

Lucas

Armstrong

2021

Can J Pol Sci

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To enable new research on local ideology and representation in Canada, we construct a latent measure of the policy ideology of 37,500 Canadian Election Study respondents using 56 policy-relevant questions and then use multilevel regression and poststratification to estimate the average ideological position of each of Canada's 338 federal electoral districts and 250 largest municipalities. We use these local ideology estimates to examine ideological representation in Canadian municipal politics. Combining our municipal ideology estimates with elite survey data from more than 900 Canadian municipal politicians, we find evidence of a strong relationship between mass and elite ideology. This relationship is consistent across differing municipal population sizes and institutional structures. We conclude with additional detail on our publicly available individual and aggregate measures and describe their potential uses for future research on ideology and representation in Canadian politics at all levels.

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“…Researchers have experimented with several methods for gathering data on candidate demographics, including surveys (Andrew et al, 2008; Black and Hicks, 2006), probability-based classifiers (Lucas et al, 2021; Sevi, 2021) and genealogical approaches based on publicly available biographical materials and surname and photographic analysis (Black, 2008). Many researchers combine two or more of these techniques.…”

Section: Data Collection and Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Other Canadian research tracks candidates’ gender and racial background but includes only aggregate numbers, such as the total number of women or racialized candidates, and this prevents researchers from linking these data to other variables (Black, 2017). Like others (Lucas et al, 2021; Sevi, 2021), we expand the possibilities by providing publicly accessible data at the district level for all candidates, and we add novel data on racial and Indigenous backgrounds. These data can be tracked as dependent variables across multiple elections or included as independent variables to understand the relationship between candidate background and other political phenomena.…”

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confidence: 99%

A New Dataset on the Demographics of Canadian Federal Election Candidates

et al. 2021

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This research note reports on a new effort to track candidate diversity in Canadian elections. The dataset covers 4,516 candidates who ran in the 2008, 2011, 2015 and 2019 federal elections and includes novel data on their race, Indigenous background and age, alongside information on gender, occupation, prior electoral experience and electoral outcome. We outline the process for collecting and systematizing these data, which relied on genealogical methods and the principle of triangulation. The data can be used to track diversity among electoral candidates over time or merged with other sources to answer district-level questions about representational diversity, electoral dynamics, vote choice and political communications. The method could also be replicated and applied to other levels of government.

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Women's Municipal Electoral Performance: An Introduction to the Canadian Municipal Elections Database

Cited by 10 publications

References 22 publications

Does the Introduction of Online Voting Create Diversity in Representation?

Does the Introduction of Online Voting Create Diversity in Representation?

Policy Ideology and Local Ideological Representation in Canada

A New Dataset on the Demographics of Canadian Federal Election Candidates

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