Jack Lucas

Final CMB Online Research Workshop of 2025, coming up on Thursday! Allison Verrilli (UT Austin) will be presenting research on gentrification and political participation, with Matt Nelsen (Miami) as discussant. Will be great; email me for the link!

Will ask!

Happening TODAY! The latest CMB Online Research Workshop event, featuring the great Tyler Simko. Email me if you'd like to attend and I'll share the link!

The CMB Online Speakers Series is back! Jérémy Gilbert on Multilevel Climate Governance, Friday October 31st from 11:00am to 12:00pm (MT)/1:00pm to 2:00pm (ET). Email me or @nicolemcmahon.bsky.social for the link if you'd like to join!

Congratulations to our winner, Alex Middleton (@alexyyc.bsky.social)! Twelve correct calls, plus a remarkably low 11.5% overall error in the tiebreaker. Well done!

Political Gossip with Friends Alberta’s 2025 municipal elections are looking different this year. Join Nonprofits Vote on October 23rd for nonprofit focused debrief!

Alberta Voted: Now What?
I'll be moderating this Nonprofits Vote event with panelists Matt Solberg, @markusoff.bsky.social, Rachel Swendseid & @jacklucas.bsky.social discussing the election that was.
Join us at 10 a.m. on Oct. 23. No cost and online, register here: www.eventbrite.ca/e/political-...

No, but we have a post-election survey going into the field today in Calgary (and six other AB muns), and it includes a good issue question. More soon!

Remarkably, because of the low turnout and the number of competitive mayoral candidates, it looks like Jeromy Farkas will win the 2025 mayoral election with 25,000 *fewer* votes than he received in 2021.

OK, that's it for now. Much more to come. Big thanks to the Canadian Municipal Barometer and the UofC Faculty of Arts for supporting this research. Thanks also to our partnership coordinator / survey programmer extraordinaire Reed Merrill, and to any Calgarians out there who completed our survey!

...and here are the feeling scores from the same survey respondents for the provincial parties. The averages are similar to the municipal parties, but notice the polarization in the distributions. Far fewer choose the middle option (5), and more (around one fifth) choose (0) for "strongly dislike."

...here are the feeling thermometer scores for the municipal parties, with the averages at the top, and then the full distribution down below. Notice that many, many respondents choose five on this scale, which in this setting is a bit like the survey-response equivalent of the shrug emoji (🤷).

Feeling thermometer (like/dislike) scales are a common way to measure how people feel about political parties. In Calgary, average feeling thermometer scores for the municipal parties were similar to average scores for provincial parties. But the distributions are very different...

Finally, municipal political parties. Calgarians have mixed views. Overwhelming majorities prefer independent candidates (the questions in the top row). But many also recognize the benefits of municipal parties, especially in the information they provide to voters (bottom centre and bottom right).

(Important note: these policy items were co-developed with my TERRIFIC students in an undergraduate seminar on public opinion and political representation at the University of Calgary; stay tuned for their very cool and much more in-depth analysis of these policy attitudes!)

OK, OK, I hear you saying — enough about ideology! Fine. How about some data on policy? Here's support for nine policy statements among Calgarians (in blue) and among supporters of each mayoral candidate (in black). Clear polarization on some issues. Striking ambivalence across the housing items.

Here's the proportion of Calgarians who supported each mayoral candidate, by their provincial party identity. Gondek and Sharp look like mirror images of each other in terms of NDP/UCP support, whereas Farkas enjoys at least *some* support among all of the partisan identities.

While we're on the subject of ideology, here's the probability of support for each candidate, conditional on Calgarians' own ideological self-placements. There's a strong relationship between ideology and support. But notice the higher support for Farkas on the left, in contrast to Davison/Sharp.

How have these perceptions shifted? This has been an important question in this election, especially for Farkas, and we can use 2021 CMES data to compare. According to Calgarians, Farkas has shifted dramatically to the centre, Davison has moved rightward, and Gondek has moved leftward.

Here's the average left-right placement for each candidate. Remember: these are Calgarians' perceptions; they may not align with how the candidates think of themselves. On average, Calgarians put Sharp, Davison, and Farkas on the right, Thiessen left of centre, and Gondek on the far left.

Now some results related to ideology. Here's how Calgarians placed each major mayoral candidate on the left-right spectrum. The most striking result to me: more than one fifth of Calgarians now place Jyoti Gondek at the most extreme left-wing position on the scale.

We'll know soon enough (I hope!) who Calgarians voted for in the mayoral race. But what about the candidates who Calgarians would NOT vote for? Here are the patterns of "negative voting" — the people for whom Calgarians would NOT vote — organized by supporters of each major mayoral candidate.

For the past year, I've been doing an embedded "ethnographic" study of Calgary's election. As a consequence, I've mostly kept quiet about it. It'll still be months before I have qualitative results to share, but in the meantime, here are some results from our pre-election survey. #yyccc #yycvote

Nerds: it's time for our Calgary municipal election forecasting contest! The winner gets a free copy of my forthcoming co-edited book, City Politics in Canada. Please share widely! #yyccc

survey.ucalgary.ca/jfe/form/SV_...

Nerds: it's time for our Calgary municipal election forecasting contest! The winner gets a free copy of my forthcoming co-edited book, City Politics in Canada. Please share widely! #yyccc

survey.ucalgary.ca/jfe/form/SV_...

We have a cover layout...blurbs and all! Very excited about this book: 320 pages of pure urban politics goodness. Coming in December. Co-edited with Martin Horak and @bigcitypolitics.bsky.social. utppublishing.com/doi/book/10....

Meinung über Wähler: Verachten Politiker uns? Womöglich gar: zu Recht? Egoistisch, schlecht informiert, unsozial: So sehen Politiker laut einer Studie ihre Wähler.

The @zeit.de has 3 pages on one of our PolPop articles, led by @jacklucas.bsky.social, where politicians reflect on our finding that they perceive voters differently than voters perceive themselves. Would love to see this more often, where the subjects get a chance to reflect on the findings.

"Place Types." Excited that this paper with @sborwein.bsky.social is now available. We develop a new typology of place types in Canada at a fairly fine-grained level of geography, and then show how these place types relate to Canadian politics. doi.org/10.1017/S000...

Logo of CJPS-RCSP with the hashtag "OpenAccess" on a blue background.

#OpenAccess from @cjps-rcsp.bsky.social -

Place Types - cup.org/44cNqVq

"...we propose a new typology of geographic places for use in advancing Canadian politics research on the political effects of place..."

- @sborwein.bsky.social & @jacklucas.bsky.social

#FirstView

Happy to report that this article is now available: doi.org/10.1017/S000.... See Tyler's thread below for more detail on the associated R package and interactive online app.

Really proud of my amazing students for their great work on this. Also very grateful to the 75 students in the course; not all of them chose to participate in the extracurricular writing-up-the-results phase, but all of them were critical to the data collection - and willing to try something new!