In this article, we argue that rising housing prices increase voter approval of incumbent governments because such a rise increases personal wealth, which leads to greater voter satisfaction. This effect is strongest under right-wing governments because those who benefit from rising prices—homeowners—are more likely to be right-leaning. Non-homeowners, who are more likely to vote for left-leaning parties, will view rising housing prices as a disadvantage and therefore feel the government does not serve them well, which will mitigate the advantage to left-wing governments. We find support for our arguments using both macro-level data (housing prices and government approval ratings in 16 industrialized countries between 1960 and 2017) and micro-level data (housing prices and individuals’ vote choices in the United Kingdom using the British Household Panel Survey). The findings imply that housing booms benefit incumbent governments generally and right-wing ones in particular.

This research note reports on a new effort to track candidate diversity in Canadian elections. The dataset covers 4,516 candidates who ran in the 2008, 2011, 2015 and 2019 federal elections and includes novel data on their race, Indigenous background and age, alongside information on gender, occupation, prior electoral experience and electoral outcome. We outline the process for collecting and systematizing these data, which relied on genealogical methods and the principle of triangulation. The data can be used to track diversity among electoral candidates over time or merged with other sources to answer district-level questions about representational diversity, electoral dynamics, vote choice and political communications. The method could also be replicated and applied to other levels of government.

To enable new research on local ideology and representation in Canada, we construct a latent measure of the policy ideology of 37,500 Canadian Election Study respondents using 56 policy-relevant questions and then use multilevel regression and poststratification to estimate the average ideological position of each of Canada's 338 federal electoral districts and 250 largest municipalities. We use these local ideology estimates to examine ideological representation in Canadian municipal politics. Combining our municipal ideology estimates with elite survey data from more than 900 Canadian municipal politicians, we find evidence of a strong relationship between mass and elite ideology. This relationship is consistent across differing municipal population sizes and institutional structures. We conclude with additional detail on our publicly available individual and aggregate measures and describe their potential uses for future research on ideology and representation in Canadian politics at all levels.

Although Canada's first documented case of COVID-19 appeared in mid-January 2020, it was not until March that messaging about the need to contain the virus heightened. In this research note, we document the use of the media's construction of risk through framing in the early stages of the pandemic. We analyze three dimensions of the health risk narratives related to COVID-19 that dominated Canadians’ concerns about the virus. To capture these narratives, we examine print and online news coverage from two nationally distributed media sources. We assess these frames alongside epidemiological data and find there is a clear link between media coverage, epidemiological data and risk frames in the early stages of the pandemic. It appears that the media relied on health expertise and political sources to guide their coverage and was responsive to the public health data presented to Canadians.

The role of political parties in facilitating authoritarian rule has been the subject of extensive research, but parties vary widely in their institutional strength to perform regime-bolstering functions. This article synthesizes existing literature to develop a general theory that explains the sources of ruling party strength in autocracies. We argue that party strength stems from a strategic calculation by political actors who weigh the benefits of building a strong party against its costs. The relative benefits of strong parties depend on the stage of the authoritarian life cycle and factors specific to the strategic environment. The observable implications of the theory are tested using a dataset that includes all autocratic ruling parties that were in power between 1940 and 2015. Consistent with our argument, parties that originated from revolutions tend to be the strongest, whereas those created to support an incumbent dictator tend to be the weakest. A country's resource endowments and external environment also shape the dynamics for party building.

We perform a survey experiment on the issue of immigration. People are presented with a situation where public opinion is at odds with the election promise. In our control group, no information is given about public opinion. In the treatment groups, respondents are told that 55 per cent or 80 per cent of the people are against the project. When respondents are informed about the election promise but are not told about public opinion, 64 per cent say that the party should fulfill its promise. That percentage drops to 51 per cent when people are informed that a slight majority (55 per cent) are opposed to the project and to 42 per cent when they are told that a strong majority (80 per cent) are opposed. Citizens thus believe that politicians should pay attention not only to the majority view but also to the size of that majority.

These two books draw attention to the role of Canada's oil-producing provinces—“petro-provinces” for Angela Carter and “carbon provinces” for Douglas Macdonald—in the politics of energy, environment and climate change, but they do so in very different ways. Carter's volume examines the erosion of environmental protections in the oil-rich provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Newfoundland and Labrador, while Macdonald's focuses on the way interest-based conflicts rooted in regional energy political economies have driven federal/provincial dynamics around energy and climate policy. Both books are well written (not always a given in academic publishing), and they should interest anyone concerned with the politics of energy, environment and climate change in Canada.

Who runs and is elected is one of the most fundamental questions in political science as it pertains to the issue of descriptive representation. Despite the importance of this issue, until recently there were no longitudinal datasets on candidates in Canadian elections. This article presents two novel datasets including information on all candidates who ran in Canadian federal and Ontario provincial elections from 1867 to 2019. I present how these data were collected and how they can be used to gain new insights. I expect these data will be a valuable resource to Canadian political scientists for both research and teaching purposes.

This research note addresses the ongoing debate over the existence of a “Canadian” International Relations (IR) by interrogating the university setting, the professoriate and important institutions of IR in the Canadian context. We not only contribute an update to the data but also enrol a larger number of Canadian universities and a wider sample of journals and conferences. Our analysis is structured around three existing groupings of institutions: the three most “Americanized” departments (the BMT)—University of British Columbia, McGill University and University of Toronto; the four most “critical” departments (the Four Nodes)—McMaster University, University of Ottawa, University of Victoria and York University; and the four largest French-language institutions (the FLIs)—Université de Montréal, Université du Québec à Montréal, Université Laval and Université de Sherbrooke. The characteristic openness often taken to define IR in Canada is more often found at the Four Nodes, the FLIs or unclassified schools than at the BMT schools, which are not only more Americanized in training but also isolated from other Canadian institutions.

The picture superiority effect suggests that a single photograph can communicate a significant amount of political information to voters. Accordingly, politicians must make strategic choices in their self-presentation, particularly when considering how to respond to gender-based stereotypes. Strategic stereotype theory suggests that politicians will either emphasize or rescind gender-based stereotypes depending on whether they believe them to be advantageous to their political image. While the literature on gendered self-presentation is largely confined to television advertising, there is a growing literature focused on the online environment. In this research note, we develop a methodological framework to assess gender-based stereotypes in a purely visual environment. We test the framework using photographs from the Twitter feeds of the main party leaders in the 2018 Ontario election. The note concludes by reflecting on the methodological challenges of examining gender in visual political content online.