Issue Accountability in Non-Partisan Municipalities: A Case Study
Carter McPherson (Simon Fraser University), Jack Lucas (University of Calgary), R. Michael McGregor (Toronto Metropolitan University)
Do voters know what their municipal councillors actually do on council? And if they do know what their councillors are up to, does this knowledge help them keep councillors accountable? Issue accountability – the extent to which elected representatives are rewarded or punished by voters for their legislative actions in office – is fundamental to how we often think about democratic representation, but this form of accountability requires that constituents are aware of their representatives’ actions in office. To what extent do voters have this kind of awareness?
Our article, “Issue Accountability in Non-Partisan Municipalities: A Case Study,” attempts to answer these questions using a quantitative case study in the large Canadian city of Calgary, Alberta. Using a multi-wave survey of municipal residents, along with data from council roll calls, we examine how representatives’ actions on seven high-profile policy issues relates to constituents’ satisfaction with their representative’s performance. We find that over half of residents are either incorrect or unaware of their councillor’s votes, even on the city’s highest-profile policy issues. However, among knowledgeable residents, the issue alignment of respondents and councillors is strongly related to evaluations of councillor performance, resulting in greater satisfaction with one’s councillor. In other words, only a minority of residents in Calgary know how their councillor voted on policy issues, but among those who do know this information, policy alignment between the citizen and the councillor is a very strong predictor of satisfaction.
Overall, our results suggest that issue accountability in non-partisan municipalities is indeed a challenge for many voters – on every issue we study, a majority of Calgarians either don’t know or are wrong about how their elected representative voted. The good news, however, is that issue accountability does work when local residents do know how their councillor voted – and perhaps even a minority of voters is sufficient to motivate elected representatives to incorporate their constituents’ preferences into their own decisions about how to vote on high-profile issues on council. Further research, using similar research designs across multiple cities, will help to clarify when and how well issue accountability really works in non-partisan municipal settings.
Carter McPherson is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at Simon Fraser University.
Jack Lucas is a professor of Political Science at the University of Calgary.
R. Michael McGregor is an associate professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at Toronto Metropolitan University.