Whose Voice Counts? Uncovering Municipal Issue Publics
Shanaya Vanhooren (Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique), Jack Lucas (University of Calgary) and Sandra Breux (Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique)
I recently interviewed a man I’ll call Henry. Henry cares deeply about road safety after his son died in a car accident. He sits on three local committees dedicated to improving road safety in his community, and road safety informs how Henry participates in politics and who he votes for. But is Henry unique? Are other citizens highly informed and engaged on one (or more) specific policy issues?
In a new research note with Jack Lucas and Sandra Breux, we provide the first systematic analysis of “municipal issue publics” using the Canadian Municipal Barometer’s nationally representative 2025 survey of more than 6,000 Canadians.
What we find is that there are a lot of people like Henry who care deeply about a specific local issue, and this matters because these loud local voices are not representative of the broader public.
Our data shows that 45% of Canadians belong to a municipal issue public—an issue they care and think about a lot, pay attention to even when it is not front-page news, and use to decide which municipal candidates to support. Across the issues respondents identified in the open-ended survey question, we found at least 32 distinct issue groups spanning everything from housing to immigrant settlement, to taxation and snow removal.
Our findings challenge research that suggests policy issues play a limited role in individuals’ political judgments. Research from political behaviour suggests voters pay little attention to politics, have low levels of knowledge, and have inconsistent or ever-changing attitudes about policy issues (Converse 2006), and they lean on short cuts such as partisanship or a candidate’s leadership qualities to make political judgments.
Yet, we all know someone like Henry—their deep, personal connection to an issue shapes their political behavior. New research finds evidence of issue publics in national politics (Ryan and Ehlinger 2023), yet virtually no research has examined the presence of municipal issue publics, even though this is where they are most expected to appear. Citizens tend to be more uninformed in general about policymaking at the municipal level (McPherson, Lucas and McGregor 2025), but they are often passionately engaged on specific municipal issues that affect their daily lives (Einstein, Palmer and Glick 2019), and issue-oriented interest groups have been shown to affect local policy outcomes (Anzia 2022).
We show that not only do municipal issue publics exist, but that members have distinct identities and policy attitudes compared to the wider public. We examined the correlates of issue public membership for six issues with more than 60 respondents and found that different kinds of people belong to different issue publics.
Homeowners and older individuals, for instance, are more likely to be members of the “planning” issue public than are renters and younger residents, reinforcing similar findings in the United States (Einstein, Glick and Palmer, 2019; Sahn, 2025). The “housing” issue public, which captures individuals who expressed concern with issues like housing availability and affordability, includes more renters than homeowners. Ideology also matters as we would expect: people on the right being more likely to state they are highly attentive to “policing” and “taxation”.
Issue public members not only identify as more interested in the issue but also hold distinctive policy positions from the wider public. We demonstrate this by examining the relationship between issue public membership and individuals’ attitudes on other policy questions asked on the survey.
Members of the “climate and environment” issue public, for example, are more favorably disposed toward strict environmental standards and serious climate policies than others. Members of the “housing” issue public are more committed to increased density, and more opposed to policies that prioritize single-family zoning, than the wider public.
We also compared municipal issue publics to their provincial and federal counterparts, since our survey asked some respondents about issue public membership at higher levels of government. The same kinds of citizens—ideologues, partisans, long-term homeowners, and renters—are more likely to belong to issue publics, regardless of the level of government under consideration. In other words, what makes someone prone to engage intensely on an issue is the issue itself and not which level of government holds jurisdiction over that issue.
The presence and distinctness of issue publics has normative implications, particularly for political representation. Issue publics differ substantially from the wider public in who belongs to them and their policy opinions. As a result, municipal political representatives likely hear more from the engaged, unrepresentative voices on issues such as housing development, but also climate change, property taxes, LGBTQ inclusion, and less from the wider public.
Our findings raise the question of how municipal councils deal with pressure not from the “average” resident but from small and highly engaged issue publics, such as homeowners mobilized against a rezoning application. Do elected representatives respond to the demands and wishes of issue publics or do they address the wider public’s concerns? More research is needed to discern how elected representatives perceive constituent preferences and how they act, including which policy proposals they champion.
Shanaya Vanhooren is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique with the Canadian municipal barometer partnership. Her research examines local, urban, and provincial politics in Canada. She focuses on the political construction and governance of policy issues, particularly through provincial party policy positions and discourse. She received her PhD from the University of Western Ontario in November 2025.
Jack Lucas is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Calgary. His research focuses on democracy and representation in Canadian local and urban politics, with a particular focus on the beliefs and behaviour of political elites.
Sandra Breux is a Professor at Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique. Her research focuses on the behavior of voters and elected officials at the local level.