Political Parties and Local Elections: Consequences for Voters

• In Event: Understanding Municipal Elections: New Data and Approaches from Canada

Abstract

Local elections vary from other subnational and national contests in Canada in that political parties are not always present. This variation is fundamentally important because it changes how we understand competition – rather than choosing between candidates that represent organizations with established ideology and reputations, races are fought between individual candidates who cannot be evaluated without knowledge of their own specific attributes. Further, the nature of parties in local elections varies substantially in this country – some are short term while others are well-established, and some are ideologically driven while others rise and fall to support a mayoral candidate. What does the presence of political parties, and variation in the type of party, mean for local elections? Multiple studies have demonstrated that electors in non-partisan elections often look for available information shortcuts, but the availability of such cues varies depending on the exact nature of partisan competition. In this paper, we compare local elections in Canada’s three largest cities, which provide just this variation – Toronto, where political parties do not exist but some candidates have ties to parties at other levels of government; Montreal, where parties are both candidate-centered and ideological; and Vancouver, where local ideological parties have structured competition for many years (but where an independent candidate won the mayoral race in 2018). In this paper, we focus on evaluating the role of information, incumbency and partisanship, including at other levels of government, for candidate evaluations and vote choice in these different electoral contexts.

Authors

• Laura Stephenson, University of Western Ontario

• Michael McGregor