Institutional Change as Urban Theory: The Fall of At-Large Politics in Calgary, Alberta

During moments of institutional change, advocates and critics of reform are forced to publicly and privately articulate why their city should consider or avoid a proposed change. These arguments for and against reform rely on assumptions about the character and purpose of municipal politics—the relevant cleavages, the proper purposes to which municipal politics is directed, and the character of municipal political representation. Moments of reform thus reveal the “implicit theories” of urban politics held by the individuals involved—an opportunity to peer behind quotidian policy debates and explore how local political elites think about the character and purposes of municipal politics. To this end, this article explores implicit theories of urban politics in Calgary, Alberta, during the early post-war period in which the city abandoned its proportional representation, partisan, and at-large electoral system and adopted single-member majoritarian ward-based politics. Combining quantitative electoral data with qualitative archival and newspaper material, the author describes how long-term shifts in electoral competition combined with changing conceptions about the purposes of local politics—especially among the labour movement and urban left in Calgary—to produce a period of major reform. The author shows how these changes reflect changing theories of urban politics, originating in particular configurations of local institutions, in Canadian cities in the early post-war era.