Identifying Local Identity and its Importance to Contemporary Democracy: Evidence from Canadian Provincial Election Studies

Alexis de Tocqueville famously wrote that local self-government was key to the success of the American democratic experiment. His argument was that local self-government fostered a sense of collective responsibility allowing communities to solve collective action problems without a robust central authority. From this, a neo-Tocquevillian perspective of civil society emerged with work showing that individuals with strong local attachments are also more likely to engage in pro-democratic behaviours (e.g. Anton and Lawrence 2014). In Canada, most research on territorial identity has focussed on region/province/country as the central geographic base of political identity (e.g. Cochrane and Perrella 2012). Research on local attachment as it relates to pro-democratic outcomes in Canada remains scarce and less is known about how local attachment influences one’s political identity. This paper bridges these gaps by leveraging survey responses from the Consortium on Electoral Democracy’s recent Provincial and Territorial Election Studies. We consider three questions: how close do Canadians feel to their local communities?: what are the correlates of attachment to one’s local community?; and what are the consequences of local identification for pro-democratic outcomes? Using a series of multi-level models, our findings reaffirm the neo-Tocquevillian view of civil society by demonstrating the importance of local attachments on Canadian democracy.