Receipt from E.D. Radcliffe, St. Catharines for ice

Receipt from E.D. Radcliffe, St. Catharines for ice, Dec. 5, 1887.

Receipt from McLaren and Co., St. Catharines for pants

Receipt from McLaren and Co., St. Catharines for pants, Dec. 23, 1887.

Receipt from M.Y. Keating, Books, Stationary and Newspapers, St. Catharines for books

Receipt from M.Y. Keating, Books, Stationary and Newspapers, St. Catharines for books, Dec. 23, 1887.

Receipt from St. Catharines and Welland Canal Gas Light Company for gas rent

Receipt from St. Catharines and Welland Canal Gas Light Company for gas rent, Dec. 31, 1887.

Receipt from H. Carlisle and Co., St. Catharines for fabric

Receipt from H. Carlisle and Co., St. Catharines for fabric, Jan. 3, 1888.

Receipt from W.H. Eckhardt, Star Music Store, St. Catharines for rent of machine

Receipt from W.H. Eckhardt, Star Music Store, St. Catharines for rent of machine, Feb. 1, 1888.

Letter to T. H. Wiley from J.J. Nichols and Sons, Mason Contractors and Plasterers, St. Catharines

Letter to T. H. Wiley from J.J. Nichols and Sons, Mason Contractors and Plasterers, St. Catharines regarding tenders for the proposed lily pond, May 12, 1916.

Letter to Mr. Welland D. Woodruff from Thos. Wiley, Architect, St. Catharines

Letter to Mr. Welland D. Woodruff from Thos. Wiley, Architect, St. Catharines regarding tenders for the proposed lily pond, May 17, 1916.

Studying Your Own Country. Social Scientific Knowledge For Our Times and Places; Presidential Address to the Canadian Political Science Association, St Catharines, May 28, 2014

Political science is both a generalizing and an anchored, nationally defined, discipline. Too often, the first perspective tends to crowd out the latter, because it appears more prestigious, objective, or scientific. Behind the international/national dichotomy, there are indeed rival conceptions of social science, and important ontological, epistemological and methodological assumptions. This article discusses these assumptions and stresses the critical contribution of idiographic, single-outcome studies, the importance of producing relevant, usable knowledge, and the distinctive implications of studying one’s own country, where a scholar is also a citizen, involved in more encompassing national conversations. The aim is not to reject the generalizing, international perspective, or even the comparative approach, but rather to reaffirm the importance of maintaining as well, and in fact celebrating, the production of social scientific knowledge directly relevant for our own times and places.

Betting on winner: the effect of local elections on corporate political activity outcomes

How can managers successfully access political rents by way of corporate political strategies (CPA)? Existing research has suggested several endogenous factors that correlate with CPA outcomes. I offer a more robust solution to this problem. Drawing on insights from the perspective of CPA as exchanges between firms and political decision-makers, and from the special interest politics of political economy, I develop and test a causal mechanism that links local elections, legislative bargaining and access to political rents at the national level. I conducted a natural experiment using regression discontinuity design and propensity score matching in municipal elections in Brazil to show that firms enjoy superior access to subsidized financing from the state-owned national development bank (BNDES) when they decide to invest in municipalities whose winning mayoral candidate is coalition-aligned with the national ruler. This effect fades away fades away as the level of competition in the local election decreases. The evidence implies that when managers bet on national coalition-aligned winners in close local elections, they positively affect CPA outcomes. I extend the exchange-based typology of corporate political strategies by offering a novel possibility of targeting voters with financial inducements, which I call a private local development strategy. Finally, these results show that firms exchange their project-execution capabilities for superior access to subsidized financing.

The Political Candidacy of EU Migrants in their European Countries of Residence. The Case of British and Romanians Standing in Spanish Local Elections

What explains the variation in how European citizens of diverse origins are politically incorporated in the member states of residence? This paper argues that immigrant groups’ status in the host society plays an important role in political party responses to immigrants’ political participation. Drawing on the case of Romanian and British candidacies in the Spanish local elections from 2011, the paper finds that the level of competition between parties is the key mechanism for incorporating candidates from a positively/neutrally perceived group. Instead, a greater level of ethnic diversity encourages the incorporation of candidates from the negatively perceived group. To demonstrate this, the paper uses an original data-set with the Romanian and British candidates in a large number of Spanish localities.