Patterns of urban governance: A sequence analysis of long-term institutional change in six Canadian cities

How do the institutional structures of urban policymaking develop over time? To answer this question, scholars have often focused on one of three contexts: the city in which a set of policy institutions exists, the higher-order government with legislative authority over those institutions, or the policy domain in which a policy task is administered. Few studies have compared the relative importance of these contexts for understanding the long-term development of urban policy institutions. In this article, I compare long-term sequences of urban policy institutions, understood as the historical development of the formal institutional structures in which urban policies are developed and administered, across six Canadian cities, three provinces, and five policy domains. I use optimal matching methods to compare the sequences, and I find that patterns of resemblance among the sequences are most clearly sorted by policy domain, with shared province playing an important secondary role. These findings point toward a new research agenda for urban governance scholars, one less focused on individual cities and more attuned to the ways that cities operate as actors and sites within broader policy fields that operate not only across the boundaries of individual cities, but across the boundaries of higher-order governments as well.