1. Introduction

Three factors influence a person’s decision to run for office. First, personal characteristics determine one’s predisposition to run for office (Fox and Lawless 2006). Second, there is the political context such as a challenger’s capacity to win against the incumbent (Burden and Snyder 2021). Finally, there are the legal or institutional factors, such as ballot access laws, which are the procedural or administrative constraints faced by any candidate, established or novice.

To get a sense of the administrative barriers to ballot access in Canada, the CMB team asked participating politicians about their perception of the candidate registration process. Many politicians answer that the process is relatively easy, however, we do find some nuances which I address below. These questions are crucial, since, if politically ambitions individuals or established politicians face challenges (e.g. CMB respondents), then how do less politically inclined citizens perceive the process?

2. Data

We asked CMB respondents about their perception of the administrative process to become a municipal election candidate: perceived difficulty, reasons why they thought the process was challenging or straightforward, and which of the proposed administrative rules they thought needed to be reviewed (e.g. signatures, fees, access to information). For this blog post, however, I only focus on perceived difficulty and whether this difficulty varied according to age group and the number of terms served. Notably, how responses vary for the question “On a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 means very easy and 10 means very difficult, how would you rate the administrative process you followed to become a candidate in your most recent municipal election?”

Table 1: Distribution of Respondents

Table 1 overviews the proportion of respondents from the 2025 CMB considered in this blog. First, 51.4% of respondents are elected officials in their first term. This is especially insightful since we can get a sense of first-term candidates, although, we are aware that some first term politicians may have previous experience in another elected office.  Next, 66.88% of our respondents are 55 years of age or older, 30.2% are between twenty-five and forty-four years of age, and less than 3% are under 35 years of age. Finally, on the 0-10 difficulty scale, overall, 70% report low level of difficulty (score of 0-3), 25.2% report medium difficulty (score of 4-7), and 4.58% report high level of difficulty (score of 8 or higher). To consider how perceived difficulty of the registration process varies according to two variables (age and terms in office), I use the three-level difficulty perception (Low, Medium, High), instead of the 0-10 scale.

3. Does candidate registration become easier with time?

Figure 1 summarises perceived registration difficulty according to the number of terms served by respondents. Figure 1 shows that time does not make the election process easier, even for multi term politicians. Apart from five term politicians (last column), of whom 83.2% report that the registration process is easy. Likewise, the proportions of politicians who find the process moderately difficult is stable between 23% and 27%. What is interesting is the 5% of politicians, no matter how many terms served, who find the candidate registration process difficult.

Figure 1: Perceived Difficulty by terms in office

4. Are there differences according to age group?

There are subtle distinctions between age groups. The few 18-24 respondents (see Table 1) found the registration process easy. Also, the proportion of low difficulty is stable across other age groups between 20% and 28%. Finally, as with terms served, the proportion of respondents who thought that the registration process is difficult ranges from 3.3% for 25-34 year-olds and 5.4% for 55-64 year olds.

Figure 2: Perceived level of difficulty within each age group

5. Conclusion

This suggests that the 25.28% of respondents who reported either medium or high  level of difficulty (see Table 1) are somewhat proportionally distributed, regardless of the number of terms served or their age group.

However, several considerations emerge. Notably, regardless of age or terms in office, between 20% and 28% of respondents within each category reports at least moderate level of difficulty. Moreover, I do not address all questions linked to perceived difficulty and I must stress that more than half of respondents (720) reported that no major changes are required. However, respondents could write-in detailed answers and explain what they thought of the candidate registration process, and about 86 took the time to do so. Hence, it will be enlightening to see which candidate registration rules influence perceived difficulty of running for office. Additionally, it will be crucial to consider other indicators, such as respondents’ province and municipality size.

Understanding how the politically ambitious, i.e., those more likely to navigate the institutional apparatus, can tell us a lot about the administrative barriers of entry into the electoral process. If somewhat challenging for elected officials, how is it perceived by regular citizens? Exciting avenues of future research to follow!

6. References

Burden, B. C., & Snyder, R. (2021). Explaining Uncontested Seats in Congress and State Legislatures. American Politics Research, 49(3), 247-258.

Fox, Richard L., and Jennifer L. Lawless. "To run or not to run for office: Explaining nascent political ambition." American journal of political science 49, no. 3 (2005): 642-659.

Stratmann, Thomas. "Ballot access restrictions and candidate entry in elections." European Journal of Political Economy 21, no. 1 (2005): 59-71.