Women in Canadian Municipal Politics: Constructing a Database of Gendered Electoral Representation

Abstract

The primary aim of this project is to build on the existing empirical knowledge base by disaggregating gendered data to the municipal level in Vancouver, Winnipeg, and Toronto from 1992-2018. Despite considerable literature on women’s representation in Canada, gendered data on Canadian municipal elections remains fragmented and inconsistently codified. This makes it challenging for researchers to compare results across datasets, ultimately decreasing the overall pace and transparency of research. Therefore, a secondary aim of this project is to construct the skeleton for a relational database to store gendered data on Canadian municipal elections. No comparable database exists in the Canadian context that both disaggregates results to the municipal level and uses a relational model. Ultimately, this project organizes gendered data on 2,676 cases of candidates participating in municipal elections, representing 1,988 individual candidates. Finally, this paper reports basic descriptive and exploratory findings to provide suggestions for future research.