Urban home values and multi-level political accountability: Evidence from Calgary, Canada

ABSTRACT

While retrospective economic voting—that is, punishing or rewarding incumbent politicians for the performance of the economy—is well studied, much less is known about the electoral implications of the housing market across levels of government. Which, if any, levels of government are judged on the basis of real estate prices? This piece considers this question, using panel survey data and home assessment data from Calgary, Alberta, a city where housing prices have stagnated in recent years relative to other Canadian cities. We find that support for incumbents at both the local and provincial levels are related to impressions of the direction of the housing market. City councilors, however, are the only politicians who seem to be held accountable for the performance of the housing market. Our results suggest that, at the local level, housing prices are an important consideration for economic voting.

KEYWORDS:

• Economic voting
• housing prices
• accountability

Disclosure statement

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

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/07352166.2022.2101922

Notes

1. See: https://www.crea.ca/housing-market-stats/mls-home-price-index/hpi-tool/. All values presented here are nominal (not inflation adjusted). Here, they reflect the “composite benchmark,” which includes all types of housing. It is important to note that the start of this time period corresponds with the Great Recession. The Canadian housing market was not affected nearly as strongly as the American market was. National prices did drop by 7.6% from a high earlier in 2008, but had recovered to that point by January 2010. The housing price dip caused by the recession lasted just over a year and a half.

2. CBC News (2018), Scott (2019), and Government of British Columbia 2019. The stress test was recently made less stringent, ostensibly since the market had stabilized. The intended effect of this latest change is not, however, to reduce housing prices. In fact, it can be expected to have the opposite effect. See, Evans (2020).

3. Fischel’s homevoter theory is also based on a set of expectations about the distinctive role of homeowners, as opposed to renters, in municipal politics. While these expectations are important for understanding municipal politics, we do not explore them here, for two reasons. First, we are interested in the general relationship between home values and economic perceptions/incumbent satisfaction; in the same way that unemployment rates are thought to be related to retrospection regardless of one’s employment status, we are interested in the general relationship between home values and retrospection regardless of home-ownership. Second, and more practically, we have too few renters in our survey dataset to allow for robust findings (20% of our CMES respondents in Calgary, 325 in total, are renters). We hope to explore the more specific home-owner/renter distinction in future research using a larger survey dataset spanning several cities.

4. Data are available at this link: https://data.calgary.ca/dataset/Property-Assessments/6zp6-pxei. Note that municipalities are strictly constrained in residential property tax “classing,” meaning that owners of different types of residential property pay the same property tax rates.

5. This fieldwork was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

6. See Appendix 3 for full tables summarizing statistical significance from MLE-based models. In MLE-based multinomial logits, all of the home value assessment variables are statistically significant at p < 0.01.

7. Full tables for this figure are available in Appendix 5.

8. This relationship is statistically significant at p < 0.01. See Appendix 4 for full table.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [435-2017-0993].

Notes on contributors

Cameron D. Anderson

Cameron D. Anderson is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Western University. His research interests lie in public opinion, voting behavior, and Canadian politics.

Jack Lucas

Jack Lucas is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Calgary. His research is focused on democracy and representation in Canadian cities.

R. Michael McGregor

R. Michael McGregor is an associate professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at Toronto Metropolitan University. His research interests include political behavior, local democracy, Canadian politics, and political psychology.