How Race and Neighborhood Shape Voting in Chicago and Toronto City Councils

Why Urban Divides Matter

Cities are often described as divided by race and socioeconomic status, but how those social and spatial divisions shape municipal politics is disputed. Zack Taylor and David A. Armstrong investigate whether city council conflicts are short-lived, issue-based disagreements or reflect enduring cleavages rooted in segregation and neighborhood inequality.

What Taylor and Armstrong Ask

Do ward-level social and place characteristics predict durable patterns of roll-call voting by city councilors, and do the sources of division differ across two large North American cities?

Data and New Technique

• The authors analyze recorded roll-call votes from city councils in Chicago and Toronto across multiple decades.
• They apply a new technique for measuring the dimensionality of roll-call votes to detect persistent, coordinated voting blocs among ward councilors and then correlate those voting dimensions with ward characteristics.

Key Findings

• Both cities exhibit durable coordination among ward representatives: councilors do not vote idiosyncratically but form stable patterns.
• The content of those divisions differs by city: in Chicago, aldermen’s voting dimensions are strongly associated with racial composition of wards; in Toronto, the primary divides align with place-based ward characteristics and, to a lesser extent, socioeconomic status.

What This Means for Urban Politics

These results show that the socio-spatial structure of a city—how neighborhoods are organized by race, class, and place—shapes the terrain of municipal legislative conflict. The contrast between Chicago and Toronto suggests the causes of urban political division are contingent on local histories and geographies, cautioning against one-size-fits-all assumptions about city governance and representation.