This research note describes the Canadian Municipal Elections Database (CMED), a new publicly available and actively maintained dataset of more than 24,000 municipal elections in Canada. We describe the need for high-quality election results data for municipal politics research and describe the content, sources and construction of the CMED. To illustrate the value of the CMED, we estimate gender differences in municipal electoral performance for the first time, finding that women are, on average, more likely than men to win municipal elections in Canada.

Incumbent city councillors have an almost insurmountable advantage in Canadian municipal elections. This article aims to improve our understanding of the municipal incumbency advantage by considering the ability of electors to correctly identify the two most competitive candidates in one's ward and the factors associated with being able to do so. Using survey data from the Canadian Municipal Election Study (CMES), we consider the case of the 2018 elections in Mississauga, a city with typically high rates of incumbent re-election. Survey respondents were asked to identify the two most competitive candidates in their local ward races. We find that comparatively few electors are able to recognize which challenger serves as the strongest threat to a sitting councillor, a finding that suggests that coordination problems may help to contribute to high rates of incumbent success. We identify several individual-level and ward-level correlates of correctly identifying the first-place and second-place finishers. We do note, however, that there is a significant amount of variation among the thousands of municipalities in Canada, so findings from this case should be tested in other settings, including larger or smaller cities where levels of information might be different.