Place, Politics, and Urban Political Order in Toronto, London (UK), and Chicago

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

Abstract

Building on the neighborhood effects tradition and field theory in sociology, this paper presents an innovative comparative analysis of mayoral voting in three cities: Toronto, London (UK), and Chicago. Urban space is conceptualized as a spatial field cooperation and antagonism among neighborhoods. The paper explores and demonstrates the enduring importance of space and place in shaping political behavior through statistical analysis of aggregate neighbourhood-scale electoral behaviour and qualitative analysis of election campaign discourse in multiple elections over a period of approximately two decades.

For each city, we constructed an original spatial database of neighborhood-scale aggregate voting behavior in all municipal elections for which small-area returns were available. Geographical consistency across time was secured by apportioning data pertaining to small areas such as polling station or electoral precinct areas, whose boundaries frequently change, to larger, neighborhood-sized geographic units that are consistent across time (census tracts in Toronto and the Chicago, wards in London). Winning and losing candidates’ electoral coalitions are strongly spatially articulated in each election, each comprising combinations of areas defined by high and low factor scores. Electoral data were then joined to social, housing, transportation, and other variables drawn from the national census.

Principal component analysis of neighborhood-level mayoral candidate support across multiple elections in each city reveals that most voting behavior is explained by a limited number of factors that are highly correlated with compositional and contextual neighborhood characteristics. Moreover, each factor is highly spatially autocorrelated. That is, each dominates broad contiguous areas of the city.

In Toronto and London, the dominant factor manifests as a division between “core” (progressive) and “suburban” (conservative) zones. Based on its correlation with census variables, we conceptualize this factor as a measure of urban versus suburban lifestyles, which includes the presence or absence of non-traditional households, older and denser housing, creative-sector employment, and public transit use. The second factor reflects additional variation among suburban tracts. In Toronto, politics have split into right-populist anti-establishment and mainstream conservative camps. We identify socio-economic status as a driver of this split, as neighborhoods with higher populations of well-off and educated professionals support mainstream conservative candidates, while disadvantaged and blue-collar neighborhoods support conservative populists. In London, we find evidence of both left- and right-wing (racist) populist mobilization in the suburban zone, arrayed against support for mainstream conservative options. In Chicago, the dominant factor is race, whereby candidates assemble spatial coalitions of neighborhoods segregated by ethno-racial identity, which in turn is strongly correlated with socio-economic status.

In addition to identifying these factors and locating them in space, the paper invokes qualitative data—news media and campaign literature—to show how spatially-clustered political patterns are produced and reproduced over time as candidates seek to selectively activate spatial cleavages through campaigning.

The result is a unique comparative and longitudinal study of neighborhood-scale electoral behaviour that demonstrates the enduring utility of ecological analysis to understand social phenomena. The American case, Chicago, is found to revolve around compositional variables (race and class), while the Toronto and London cases turn on a mix of compositional and contextual variables (place-based lifestyles). Our analysis suggests that aggregate political behavior cannot be reduced to commonly-invoked predictors of urban voting, such as ethnicity or class. Rather, place matters: political choice is systematically patterned by historically persistent social, economic, institutional, and physical contexts. Place characteristics enable politicians to differentially activate latent spatial identities and thereby elevate or diminish the political salience of neighbourhood characteristics. We conclude with a discussion of the study’s implications for urban political and social theory.

Authors

• Zack Taylor, Western University

• Daniel Silver

• Jan Doering, University of Toronto