Are Municipal Politicians Ideological Moderates?

For more than a century, practitioners and researchers have often argued that municipal politicians are more ideologically moderate than their national counterparts. Testing this claim requires direct comparison of politicians who represent similar constituents but who are elected at different levels of government, but comparative data of this sort are rarely available. Here, I take advantage of new data from surveys of Canadian municipal, provincial, and federal politicians to provide a robust test of the "municipal moderation" thesis. Comparing politicians' symbolic ideological self-understandings (N=3,000) as well as their latent policy ideologies (N=775), I find strong evidence that municipal politicians think of themselves as more ideologically moderate, but are not more moderate in their actual policy preferences. I further show that these differences disappear when non-partisan local politicians are excluded from the analysis. My results reinforce recent research suggesting that municipal politicians may hold non-ideological cultural norms but are embedded within an ideological electoral and policymaking context. My analysis also illustrates the potential for "vertical" rather than "horizontal" comparative research designs to illuminate important debates in local and urban politics.