Local autonomy: unconditional elites and conditional publics

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates elite and mass attitudes towards local autonomy. Using surveys of more than 1,200 elected municipal politicians and 5,800 citizens in Canada, we ask three questions: Do citizens agree with their elected representatives about the need for increased power for local authorities? Are predictors of support for expanded local power similar among elites and the public? Finally, do elected politicians understand their constituents’ attitudes on local autonomy? We find that elites and citizens differ substantially in their attitudes towards local autonomy: politicians overwhelmingly support increased power for local governments, while citizens’ preferences are conditional on their support for the current provincial government, level of education, and ideological alignment with their local community. Moreover, politicians display no knowledge of citizens’ preferences regarding local autonomy. We explain the implications of our findings for theoretical debates about citizen support for local autonomy and for practical debates regarding the empowerment of local governments.

KEYWORDS:

• Municipal autonomy
• municipal jurisdiction
• responsiveness
• representation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/03003930.2022.2098722.

Notes

1. Other academic and public policy partners also contribute to the Confederation of tomorrow project: the Canada West Foundation, the Centre D’Analyse Politique – Constitution et Fédéralisme, the Brian Mulroney Institute of Government, and the Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy.

2. Note that, while the interaction term in the model is not statistically discernible from zero at Pr = 0.95, the significance of the interaction term is less important than the marginal effects of the relevant variables at substantively important values (Brambor et al. 2006). We provide these marginal effects in appendix 3.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [890-2018-0019]

Notes on contributors

Charles Breton

Charles Breton is the Executive Director of the Institute for Research on Public Policy’s Centre of Excellence on the Canadian Federation. His research interests include Canadian politics, comparative public policy and public opinion. His most recent publication is entitled “Does International Terrorism affect Public Attitudes toward Refugees? Evidence from a Large-scale Natural Experiment” in the Journal of Politics.

Jack Lucas

Jack Lucas is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Calgary. His research is focused on local democracy and representation in Canada. He is Project Director for the Canadian Municipal Barometer, an annual survey of Canadian mayors and councillors. His co-edited book, Big City Elections in Canada, was published in 2021 by University of Toronto Press.

Zack Taylor

Zack Taylor is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Western University, London, Canada, where he teaches and researches on comparative urban political economy, urban policy and governance, and local public administration. His book Shaping the Metropolis: Institutions and Urbanization in the United States and Canada was published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2019.