Canadian Politics

A13(b) - Local governance and territorial political cleavages

Date: Jun 4 | Time: 01:45pm to 03:15pm | Location:

Chair/Président/Présidente : Evelyne Brie (Université de Montréal)

Discussant/Commentateur/Commentatrice : Evelyne Brie (Université de Montréal)

Do appeals to benefits overcome NIMBY-ISM?: Simon Kiss (Wilfrid Laurier University), Rafael Campos-Gottardo (McGill University), Anthony Piscitelli (Conestoga College)
Abstract: Canada is in the midst of a profound housing crisis and there is an emerging consensus that it is essential to increase housing supply to address affordability. And yet, this is difficult because of widespread local opposition to housing (NIMBY-ISM). In this paper, we present results from a survey experiment embedded in the 2022 Ontario Provincial Election Survey fielded by the Laurier Institute for the Study of Public Opinion and Policy that focussed specifically on attitudes to housing. Respondents were randomly treated with an appeal to different levels of benefits (to themselves, to their local neighbourhood or to the nation as a whole) and then asked to support different types of housing. Our findings show that appeals to benefits do not increase support for local developments; but the physical characteristics of developments do. Local policymakers cannot count on appeals to self-interest or community benefits to increase support for housing.

Rethinking Political Attitudes in Rural Canada: Clark Banack (University of Alberta), Dionne Pohler (University of Saskatchewan), Laticia Chapman (University of Alberta)
Abstract: Responding to the significant body of recent political science research investigating social and political attitudes across rural regions in North America and Europe, this paper draws from our ongoing project that employs ethnographic methods, including periods of intense, short-term immersion, interviews, and participant-observation at local events in seven selected communities across rural Canada, to explore the roots of political, social, and economic attitudes of rural citizens. With a particular focus on the social element of meaning-making and the role of the community itself as a space where people “make sense” of – that is, develop opinions and attitudes about – events in and beyond their communities, we offer a more nuanced exploration of the diversity of social and political attitudes that exist in rural communities across Canada. This paper will highlight our initial analysis of the data collected and will close with some thoughts on the relationship between these finding and those expressed in more positivist, rural-focussed public opinion scholarship that has emerged in the past 5 years as well as what it means for understanding “rural Canada” more generally within our discipline.

The Representation of the Urban and the Rural in Canada: A Comparison: Katharine McCoy (Western University)
Abstract: Since the 1990s, urban and rural Canadians have become increasingly divided in their vote choice (Armstrong, Lucas, and Taylor 2021; Taylor et al. 2023). This division implies that voters think there is a meaningful difference in how parties and candidates will represent them in Parliament, and the geographic nature of this pattern indicates that there may be a relationship between the type of district a Member of Parliament (MP) represents and how they behave as a representative. In this paper, I interrogate this relationship by asking whether there is a difference in parliamentary behaviour along urban-rural lines. I use Hansard data from 1997 and transformers architecture (machine learning) to determine whether there is a substantive difference in what MPs from rural constituencies and MPs from urban constituencies speak about in the House of Commons. This is done while controlling for party membership and position, to explore the role that place-type might play in Canadian legislative behaviour. This project connects several areas of research. First, it applies research on legislative behaviour in Latin America to Canada (Alemán, Micozzi, and Vallejo Vera 2023) allowing for easier comparison between these cases. It also extends the existing literature on rural Canadian politics, which has focused largely on the “demand” side of the urban/rural division, to the “supply” side by seeing whether the division seen in citizens’ behaviour also exists in political elites.