Urban Policy Trends: Understanding the Olympic Bid Plebiscite

On November 13, 2018, Calgarians voted 56-44 to terminate the city’s bid for the 2026 Winter Olympics. To understand who supported and opposed the bid, The School of Public Policy partnered with the Canadian Municipal Election Study to survey Calgarians in the weeks that followed the vote. Here’s our first look at the data

Urban Policy Trends: Where Should the City of Calgary Spend its Money?

The day after Calgarians voted to end the city’s bid for the 2026 Olympic Games, city council quietly began work on a much larger project, one whose price tag – $19 billion – dwarfed the cost of the Olympic games several times over. Unlike the Olympics, this project was not widely reported in the national newspapers, and there were no televised debates at the new Central Library. What was this enormous project? The city’s four-year budget

Urban Policy Trends: Mayor and Council Satisfaction in Calgary

How satisfied are Calgarians with their city council? To answer this question, The School of Public Policy partnered with the Canadian Municipal Election Study to survey 2,001 Calgarians at the end of 2018. The survey was carried out by Forum Research between November 14 and December 13, 2018; margins of error for overall satisfaction scores reported here are +/- 2.2% (mayor) and +/-2.3% (council)

Can In-Prison Interventions Affect Post-Release Outcomes? Evidence From Correctional Education Programs Based on an Econometric Analysis of Recidivism

This paper evaluates the impact of in-prison educational and vocational programs on recidivism among former inmates released from prisons in five different states during 1994. It is the first study to consider this particular topic using a subset of nationally representative data. Two sets of microeconometric analyses are performed in order to identify potential program effects. Initially, a basic multivariate framework is considered in which special consideration is given to problems of program heterogeneity; next, a propensity score matching (PSM) approach is used to address the issue of self-selection inherent in observational studies of this kind. The findings of this study are twofold. First, in evaluating correctional education programs, it is important to account for program heterogeneity not only in the form of multiple program types, but also stemming from cross-state differences. All of the regression analyses performed here indicated that the level of association between recidivism and program participation varied according to program type and also across states: participating in educational programs was generally found to significantly reduce the risk of recidivist behavior, whereas vocational programs had a negative but insignificant association with post-release outcomes. Second, this study underscores the importance of addressing issues of self-selection bias when evaluating prison programs and motivates the need for a more rigorous methodology

Which Policy Issues Matter in Canadian Municipalities? A Survey of Municipal Politicians

Whether it’s a big city or a small town, all Canadian municipalities have core issues that their elected politicians are concerned about. Regardless of size, the daily business of a municipality must be managed and policies determined about such bread-and-butter issues as garbage collection, snow removal, wastewater and sewage, fire protection, economic development and fixing potholes. However, when size increases, so do the layers of issues that engage municipal politicians. This paper examines the results of a cross-Canada survey of more than 1,000 mayors and councillors from communities ranging in population size from 5,000 to more than two million. With an increase in population size, the numbers and complexity of issues creep up as well. Tiny municipalities typically aren’t concerned with issues such as immigrant settlement, homelessness and public transit. Those issues are much more pressing for larger municipalities. A focus on some types of issues, such as public transit, grows right alongside population growth. The physical size of large municipalities means they contain a population whose needs are naturally more diverse than they are in smaller cities, towns and villages, thus shifting politicians’ concerns to such things as homelessness and climate change. However, issues such as relations with Indigenous people and climate change also tend to hold regional, not just municipal, importance. They may be extremely important to a small municipality because of its geographic location and less important in a larger municipality located elsewhere. For example, municipal politicians in British Columbia reflect regional concerns with their emphasis in the survey on the importance of tackling homelessness, affordable housing, climate change and Indigenous relations. Yet, next door in Alberta, Indigenous relations and climate change ranked in the survey as being of low importance, along with climate change, despite the presence of two cities in the province with populations hovering around the million mark. The number one issue for municipalities regardless of size is economic development, since job creation and attracting investment are key for a healthy municipality regardless of its location or size. And nearly every politician surveyed listed planning, water supply and transportation infrastructure (roads, highways and bridges) as being of deep importance to their communities. Of almost equal importance in the survey were a second slate of issues including emergency planning, parks and recreation, public health, solid waste removal and policing. The results of this survey are intended to lay the groundwork for future researchers who want to focus on specific problems in the area of urban policy-making. Those who want to study the bread-and-butter issues can do so among a wide range and size of municipalities, knowing that these issues are vital to all. Those with an interest in homelessness and immigrant populations can focus on the big cities while being assured they are not missing out on key points among smaller communities. This survey will be highly beneficial for researchers in urban policy issues as it will help them to decide where to look and exactly what to look for

Urban Policy Trends: What do Calgarians think of their Local, Provincial, and National Economies?

To answer this question, The School of Public Policy partnered with the Canadian Municipal Election Study (CMES) to ask Calgarians a series of questions about the economy. The survey was carried out by Forum Research between November 14 and December 13, 2018, and included 748 individuals who completed both the 2017 CMES survey and the 2018 Calgary Year in Review Survey. Each of the two surveys included an identical set of questions about the economy, providing a valuable look at how opinions about the local economy have changed in Calgary over time

Policy Priorities of Municipal Candidates in the 2014 Local Ontario Elections

This paper reports the results of a survey on the policy priorities of municipal candidates in the 2014 municipal elections in Ontario. As part of a survey of municipal candidates in 47 Ontario municipalities, we asked a series of questions relating to perceived policy priorities, election issues, and electoral success to shed light on the extent to which municipal political candidates are “policy seekers,” and the extent to which their policy priorities vary across municipalities and municipal types, successful and unsuccessful candidates, and urban and rural candidates. We find that reported policy priorities tend to fall into two major categories: fiscal issues and economic development or administration and good governance. The prominence of these fiscal and procedural priorities is steady across a range of local candidate types, including successful and unsuccessful candidates, incumbent and non-incumbent candidates, and even urban and rural candidates. Only in very large municipalities, according to our findings, does the structure of candidate priorities begin to diverge from this standard emphasis on finance and procedure

Policy Responsiveness and Political Accountability in City Politics

Peculiar patterns have emerged in municipal politics in Canada. Unlike at federal and provincial levels of government, party politics is weak or absent in cities. But looking at the entire history of municipal elections of three Western Canadian cities — Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver — also finds that, again unlike politicians at higher levels, municipal representatives are increasingly more likely to win repeated re-elections, facing a much lower threat from any competitive challenge. In addition, the careers of municipal politicians are growing steadily longer, leading to relatively stable, almost static, city governments that tend to see change most commonly when councillors choose to step down, rather than being forced out.Such patterns, of course, run counter to the general presumption in lively democracies, including this one, that the responsiveness of government leaders (that is, following the wishes of their constituents) and their accountability for the actions they take are best served by frequent turnovers in government: The need to throw politicians out every now and again to let new ones try and do things better. Whether the remarkable levels of stability and incumbency on city councils actually do serve the best interests of voters is unclear. More clear is that the lack of a party system at the city level seems to have contributed to this peculiar dynamic, and that city politicians have an interest in keeping it that way.While party affiliations provide a candidate some benefits in the form of campaign co-ordination, they also provide voters with increased clarity about what each candidate stands for policy-wise. That might be helpful to voters, but city politicians might find it more useful to blur their positions, leaving voters uncertain of exactly how to define a specific councillor’s stand, overall. The amount of information required to root through a councillor’s voting record, and the relatively light media coverage of daily council business, leaves most voters inclined to rely on something other than political signals when they decide who to support. Inevitably, a candidate’s personal character and length of experience take on a larger priority in the voting decision. So, the longer a councillor serves, the longer he or she might be likely to keep serving.The natural outcome of this phenomenon is that city councils are less likely to become polarized as councillors have an incentive to seek consensus by limiting obvious policy distinctions between themselves and their fellow representatives, contributing to a dynamic where city council works more like a corporate body and less like a partisan legislature. As long as citizens remain largely unperturbed by the overall actions of their city council, they might judge the risk of replacing them at election time as unnecessarily high compared to sticking with the status quo.This behaviour challenges much of the prevailing theory about how political processes improve political responsiveness and accountability. This is occurring at a time when cities are emerging as important and increasingly powerful nodes in the modern global economy. That the very nature of how they are governed is diverging so markedly from the norm that Canadians have come to expect from other levels of government is not something to be considered lightly

THE ROLE OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN ORGANIZATION DESIGN

This paper introduces a set of information technology variables which can be used in designing organizations. We first look at traditional design variables and then present a series of options enabled by modern information technology. We use these IT design variables to describe four prototypical organizations which are beginning to appear in the workplace: virtual, negotiated, traditional and vertically integrated. It is argued that an organization designer must also consider how structure and technology influence job tasks and people in order to be successful. The paper discusses potential implementation difficulties, particularly in motivating traditional organizations to take advantage of IT design variables. The paper concludes that the design of information technology and the design of organizations is largely becoming the same task.Information Systems Working Papers Serie