Jack Lucas

"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!

Excited to share a new working paper, co-authored with students in my undergraduate course on city politics. As part of the course, we did a field experiment to explore if (a) 311 calls increase issue responsiveness and (b) if this varies by neighbourhood.
lucasjacklucas.github.io/calgary311.pdf

Hot off the heels of yesterday's Canadian federal election Jack Lucas @jacklucas.bsky.social and I have updated our estimate of the size of the urban-rural divide in party support. The punchline: it hasn't gone away!

Answer: No.

Tonight’s most important question: will the anecdote that opens our article on the urban-rural divide survive another election cycle?

Canadian Municipal Barometer online research talk next week. Should be fun! If you'd like to attend, send me an email and I'll share the link.

We do this analysis with more than 40,000 distinct municipal policy attitude responses from the 2025 Canadian Municipal Barometer public opinion survey. If you'd like to explore these responses, you can do so using this app: cmb-bmc-municipal-policy-attitudes.share.connect.posit.cloud

Using 40 municipal policy issues, we show that (a) municipal policy attitudes are strongly related to left-right ideology across lots of different "bread and butter" municipal issues but also that (b) ideological disagreement is dampened when an issue is framed as geographically proximate.

Plenty of recent work has found that left-right ideology predicts municipal voting and policy attitudes. But urban political economy / interest groups / NIMBY / etc. literature suggests that local policy debates often aren't particularly ideological. This paper attempts to integrate these findings.

"Geographic Proximity Dampens Ideological Disagreement on Municipal Policy Issues." New working paper with Martin Horak, Shanaya Vanhooren, and Dave Armstrong. Comments and feedback welcome! A brief description of what we're up to…
osf.io/preprints/os...

Very sad to hear of the passing yesterday of Warren Magnusson. He was a generous scholar, a brilliant political theorist, a captivating speaker, and deep believer in the emancipatory possibilities of the city. @uvic.ca #urbanpoltics

There's also an online app that you can use to explore the data, available here: quantoid.shinyapps.io/cvpa_app/

More detail at Tyler's thread here: bsky.app/profile/tyle...

The remarkable case, as many others have noted, is the NDP. Just massively below historical numbers.

Here's the same plot for the Conservatives. They're actually doing very well relative to historical vote intention.

This new R package makes it easy to extract weighted annual estimates of vote intention for the major parties going back to the 1940s. For instance, here's annual vote intention for the Liberals, with a red line marking where they currently stand in the polls according to the 338 aggregator.

With the federal election approaching, I’m excited to share insights on how Canadians' vote intentions have shifted since 1945. This forthcoming CJPS paper, with @jacklucas.bsky.social, Dave Armstrong, and @eplusgg.bsky.social, features a public dataset, R package, and Shiny app—more details below!

We hope this will be useful for folks in the municipal sector in Canada but also for research and teaching (e.g. I'm already using it for an interactive classroom activity). We'll be adding more issues to the app as well as additional functionality, so if you have feature requests, please email us!

New interactive app: explore Canadians' policy attitudes across many geographic and demographic characteristics on 40 distinct municipal policy statements, including housing, policing, active transportation, social policy, and much more: cmb-bmc-municipal-policy-attitudes.share.connect.posit.cloud

If you'd like to read the paper, which is coauthored with @liorsheffer.bsky.social, Peter Loewen, Stefaan Walgrave, Karolin Soontjens, and many other terrific collaborators, it's available in open access here: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Politicians Think Voters Are Dumb. Are They Right? A striking new study reveals that elected officials have a far more pessimistic view of voter behavior than do citizens themselves.

Really enjoyed this conversation with @jerusalem.bsky.social about our new paper on politicians' theories of voting behaviour. Such a thrill to be a guest on one of my favourite podcasts! www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/arc...

The Swedish historical municipal council database Local political assemblies often perform essential political and governing functions. We introduce the Swedish Municipal Council Database (SMCD), whic…

Swedish historical municipal council database, by Abrar Bawati et al. This is really something. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Great coauthors on this one: Sophie Borwein (@sborwein.bsky.social), Tyler Romualdi (on the market this year - hire him!), Zack Taylor, Dave Armstrong, and Katie McCoy.

New paper on urban-rural policy divides. We use 456 unique issue questions from 1993-present to show (1) large & persistent urban-rural issue divides, (2) especially large divides in cultural policy, and (3) no evidence that divides have grown over time. ejpr.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

The Canadian Municipal Barometer now has a newsletter - if you're interested in occasional (three or four times per year) updates on the academic research and other work we're doing, please sign up at the link below. Thanks!
www.cmb-bmc.ca/newsletter/

Coming up next week in the CMB Online Research series: Very interesting paper by @kaylynjschiff.bsky.social on AI in local government. Email me if you'd like to attend, and I'll share a link!

Another terrific talk coming up on Friday in the Canadian Municipal Barometer online research workshop, featuring @erintolley.bsky.social and
@tariajadi.bsky.social. Send me an email if you'd like to attend and I'll share the link.