This article was published by Policy Options on April 26, 2024.
By Jared Wesley
Albertans have a distorted view of their political environment right down to what their “typical” fellow citizen is like.
While the origins and persistence of Alberta’s political culture are interesting, its impact on public policy has attracted less attention, even though it shapes voters and influences the type of government they receive.
Our Common Ground team has surveyed thousands of residents and held focus groups throughout the province over the past four years. The first thing we ask group participants is to “draw me an Albertan.” The results of hundreds of drawings are clear: Albertans are more likely than not to picture a cowboy, a farmer or an oil rig worker.
Nearly a dozen of these focus groups consisted of only women. Another in Lethbridge featured a roomful of recent immigrants from Africa. The result was the same. They choose a white, male, middle-aged, blue-collar worker from a rural area. “Joe” is the most common name they applied to him.
Of the dozens of sessions we’ve led, only two groups settled on a woman as a typical Albertan — but even then she is married to an oil and gas worker such as “Joe.”
As ubiquitous as it is, this image doesn’t match with demographics.
Calgary Stampede season aside, an Albertan is far more likely to bump into a teacher or nurse than a cowboy. Indigenous and racialized communities are growing quickly relative to the white population. More than 80 per cent of Albertans live in urban or suburban areas and the largest proportion of them work in the service industry. Yet the cowboy myth persists.
There are many reasons for this. Frontier masculinity has been baked into Alberta’s political DNA through decades of school curriculum, government branding campaigns and election rhetoric. To some extent, many of the people arriving in Alberta in record numbers are attracted to a narrative based on “freedom” or are at least not repelled by it.
This freedom-based political culture masks moderate and progressive tendencies in the electorate. It makes politicians less likely to choose certain policy options and voters less likely to support politicians who advocate for them. It stifles policy innovation or discussion of progressive solutions to big challenges such as climate change, the drug-poisoning crisis and the decline of public education.
The typical Albertan
We’ve paired our Common Ground focus groups with biannual surveys. Led by my colleague, Feodor Snagovsky, these Viewpoint Alberta polls allow us to assess the gap between who Albertans are as individuals versus how they see themselves as a community.
One set of questions asks people to place themselves and the “average Albertan” – whom we can imagine as “Joe” from the focus groups — on a standard political spectrum on which zero means very left wing and 10 means very right wing.
The results have been consistent since we started asking the question in 2021: Albertans are closer to the centre than they imagine “Joe” to be.
There is room to debate the validity of the left-right spectrum to gauge an ideological position. In this instance, however, respondents are using the same spectrum to compare themselves to the person they perceive to be an “average Albertan.” The fact there is a 12-per-cent gap suggests that Albertans are closer to the political centre than they see their province to be.
Indeed, when asked which terms capture their own political identities, more than half of Albertans tick the “moderate” box (56 per cent). This is higher than both “progressive” (50 per cent) and “conservative” (45 per cent). Participants could select more than one description for themselves.
These disparities also show up in policy issues.
Contrary to the image of their province as a conservative bastion, Albertans are relatively progressive on moving the economy away from oil and gas, maintaining access to safe consumption sites and cutting off public funds to private schools. On all three, support outstripped opposition in a January 2024 Viewpoint Alberta survey.
Yet Albertans fail to see the same level of consensus. Whereas 44 per cent of those surveyed said they either strongly or somewhat supported “transitioning Alberta’s economy away from oil and gas,” when asked to estimate the level of popular support for the transition, the average Albertan pegs it at 28 per cent.
The difference is even larger when it comes to “allowing safe consumption sites to continue operating,” with actual support more than double perceived support. Likewise, while more than half of participants favoured “eliminating provincial funding of private schools,” estimated support was 37 per cent.
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