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"Everywhere we turn in Canadian local politics--from policing to transit, education to public health, planning to utilities--we encounter a peculiar institutional animal: the special purpose body. These "ABCs" of local government--library boards, school boards, transit authorities, and many others--provide vital public services, spend large sums of public money, and raise important questions about local democratic accountability. In Fields of Authority, Jack Lucas provides the first systematic exploration of local special purpose bodies in Ontario. Drawing on extensive research in local and provincial archives, Lucas uses a "policy fields" approach to explain how these local bodies in Ontario have developed from the nineteenth century to the present. A lively and accessible study, Fields of Authority, will appeal to readers interested in Canadian political history, urban politics, and urban public policy."--

"Everywhere we turn in Canadian local politics--from policing to transit, education to public health, planning to utilities--we encounter a peculiar institutional animal: the special purpose body. These "ABCs" of local government--library boards, school boards, transit authorities, and many others--provide vital public services, spend large sums of public money, and raise important questions about local democratic accountability. In Fields of Authority, Jack Lucas provides the first systematic exploration of local special purpose bodies in Ontario. Drawing on extensive research in local and provincial archives, Lucas uses a "policy fields" approach to explain how these local bodies in Ontario have developed from the nineteenth century to the present. A lively and accessible study, Fields of Authority, will appeal to readers interested in Canadian political history, urban politics, and urban public policy."--

This paper explores the structure of elite disagreement about the ideological or nonideological character of municipal politics. I propose two possible relationships between a representative's own ideology and their beliefs about the character of municipal politics: an "ends-against-the-middle" pattern, in which ideologues on the left and right embrace an ideological vision of municipal politics, whereas moderates insist that municipal politics is not ideological; and an "asymmetric visions" pattern, in which individuals on the left endorse an ideological view of municipal politics and those on the right oppose it. I use new survey data from more than 800 mayors and councillors in Canada to assess these possible relationships. While both are supported by the data, the asymmetric visions pattern is the stronger of the two: the nonideological view of municipal politics is most firmly embraced by municipal politicians of the moderate right, while the ideological vision is most common among representatives on the left. This pattern, I argue, is in keeping with a century of municipal political history and should be incorporated into our theories of municipal elections, representation, and policy disagreement.

Recent research in the United States has found that municipal governments are responsive to the ideological complexion of their cities even in the absence of partisan elections. In this paper, I test for the presence of party match—a match between the partisan character of a district and the partisanship of its municipal representative—in Canada, where municipal elections are distinctively non-partisan. Using new data on district-level party support and the partisanship of Canadian municipal politicians, I find clear evidence for party match. This match is equally likely in at-large and ward elections, partisan and non-partisan elections, and large and small cities. I thus argue that partisan and ideological representation is an important and widespread feature of Canadian municipal politics. I discuss the implications of these findings for theories of municipal representation and the role of ideology in municipal politics.

This article uses a new dataset of nearly 2,000 municipal elections from 1874 to 2018 to estimate the size of municipal incumbency advantage in Canada for the first time. Incumbency increases the probability that a candidate will win the next election by more than 30 percentage points and accounts for well over half of overall incumbent success. Incumbency advantage varies modestly by institutional context but varies substantially over time, with a distinct decrease during a period of partisan elections in the mid-twentieth century. These findings represent one of the first estimates of municipal incumbency advantage in an advanced democracy outside the United States and provide a new approach to estimating and comparing incumbency advantage in multi-member and single-member districts. The findings suggest important similarities between Canadian and American municipal elections, demonstrate that incumbency advantage has varied significantly at the municipal level over time, and illustrate the value of historical election data for scholars of urban electoral politics.

Many of Calgary's most pressing municipal policy issues, from economic development to infrastructure to business recruitment, involve close relatons between municipal government and the local business community. To understand the preferences and priorites of the Calgary business community, the School of Public Policy partnered with the Calgary Chamber of Commerce to ask local businesses a series of questons identcal to those in a simultaneous public opinion survey undertaken by Forum Research. We received a total of 214 responses to the survey of local businesses, along with 2,001 complete responses to the public opinion survey

Abstract:Scholars of social policy development in the United States and elsewhere have recently focused on the historical and contemporary importance of complex, delegated welfare state governance. In this article, I outline the emergence of a coordinated urban welfare state in the city of Toronto between 1870 and 1929, describing the creation of both public and private forms of coordination and centralization. I argue that we must understand social policy development in this period as resulting from the interaction of three policy coalitions: municipal traditionalists, municipal progressives, and social work professionals, and that social policy centralization occurred as a result of an alliance between municipal progressives and social work professionals. To explain the long-term development of social policy in Canada and elsewhere, I argue, we must understand the interaction among these internal coalitions in the social policy field and the ways that broader fiscal and cultural changes strengthened or weakened each coalition over time.

This article outlines the value of the American Political Development (APD) approach for scholars of urban governance. Despite recent enthusiasm for APD, I argue that the tools of the APD approach have not yet been clearly articulated or demonstrated for urban scholars. By combining the concept of "intercurrence" with a methodological focus on shifts in urban political authority, APD allows us to capture the dynamics of urban governance in tractable ways. This approach focuses on the historical construction of urban governance and the patterns of political authority that are embodied by those governance structures—long a key theme in the study of urban politics. I illustrate the promise of the APD approach in urban governance using a study of policy institutions in six Canadian cities and five policy domains from the nineteenth century to the present. I then discuss four specific areas of research to which an APD approach to urban governance will be especially well equipped to contribute.