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 municipal democracy and representation, ideology in local and urban politics, and urban-rural divides. I am also interested in “implicit” or “lay” theories of politics, especially among political elites. I’ve written or co-edited three books (all published by University of Toronto Press) and published more than fifty 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 project co-director with Sandra Breux (INRS). The Canadian Municipal Barometer is a large 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 work will expand 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, with an additional round of data collection planned for 2025. 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. In 2024-2025, we will add policy attitudes to this dataset and complete a large “bridging survey” on contempoary policy attitudes. This project is supported by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant.
Finally, I am co-PI (with Zack Taylor) for Cities in Canadian Political Development, a study of urban-rural divides in Canada from 1867-present. Together with David Armstrong, we have constructed a database and shapefiles for every federal electoral district in Canadian history, along with a measure of the urban character of each district, which we used to explore the long-term development of Canada’s urban-rural divide in Canadian and comparative perspective. Earlier in 2024, we conducted a survey of the Canadian public exploring contemporary place identities and urban-rural divides in more detail. This project is supported by a SSHRC Insight Grant.