Thanks for visiting this site. I am a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Calgary. My research and teaching are in the area of Canadian politics, with a particular focus on political representation, public opinion, and voting behaviour in local and urban politics. I am also interested in “implicit” or “lay” theories of politics, especially among political elites. I’ve written or co-edited four books (all published by University of Toronto Press) and published more than sixty articles in journals including American Political Science Review, Cities, Comparative Political Studies, European Journal of Political Research, Political Behavior, Political Geography, Political Psychology, and Urban Affairs Review. You can email me here.
Current Projects
My main active research project is the Canadian Municipal Barometer, for which I serve as co-director with Sandra Breux (INRS). The Canadian Municipal Barometer is a research partnership focused on municipal democracy and representation, with a particular emphasis on diverse representation (led by Erin Tolley), elections and voting (led by Michael McGregor), multilevel governance (led by Kristin Good), and public policy (led by Martin Horak). Since 2020, the Canadian Municipal Barometer has surveyed elected mayors and councillors in Canada’s 450 largest municipalities; beginning in early 2025, our has expanded to include surveys of mayors and councillors in Canada’s 1,000 largest municipalities, annual public opinion surveys across Canada, qualitative research, and municipal election studies. The Canadian Municipal Barometer is supported by a SSHRC Partnership Grant (2024-2031).
I am also Canadian co-PI, with Peter Loewen, of the Canadian chapter of POLPOP-II, a comparative study of national and regional politicians in thirteen countries. In 2022, the POLPOP-II team completed face-to-face interviews with more than 1,000 politicians, and is now in the field for a new round of data collection. POLPOP-II is led by Stefaan Walgrave (University of Antwerp) and is supported by a European Research Council Advanced Grant (Stefaan Walgrave, PI).
I am also Principal Investigator for the Canadian Voting and Policy Attitudes Project, working with Tyler Romualdi, David Armstrong, and Elizabeth Goodyear-Grant to integrate vote intention, policy attitudes, and demographic variables in more than 500 surveys conducted in Canada from 1945-present. We have completed the first stage of this project, integrating vote intention data from the Canadian Election Study, Environics Canada, Gallup, and Pollara surveys into a survey database with more than 1 million observations. We are now adding policy attitudes to this dataset and completing a large “bridging survey” on contempoary policy attitudes. This project is supported by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant.