The Local Diversity Gap: Assessing the Scope and Causes of Visible Minority Under-Representation in Municipal Elections

This paper assesses the scope and seeks to understand the causes of disparities in descriptive representation in municipal politics in some of Canada’s largest cities. It shows first that visible minorities are extremely under-represented in city councils in Ontario, relative to the representation of other groups at that level, and relative to minority representation in provincial and federal politics. It shows that the extreme representational deficit is not due to an unusual shortage of minority candidates at this level. The paper then explores voter bias as a potential explanation. Using a novel experiment involving a hypothetical candidate whose identity is systematically varied, and employing a diverse sample of respondents, it examines whether variations in vote choice and evaluations of the candidate may be a result of voter bias. Overall, the results point to a positive ethnic affinity effect, in which voters assess same-ethnic candidates more positively and different-ethnic candidates more negatively, and a negative sex affinity effect. However, there are distinctive patterns of vote choice, resulting from different ethnic and sex configurations among candidate and voter. The discussion links the two sets of findings, and speculates that the low information context of municipal elections may contribute to an activation of voter biases, that could be more readily over-ridden in the richer informational context of elections at the national and provincial level.