| Abstract: | ABSTRACT: This article supplements and enriches Judd's and Sapotichne, Jones, and Wolfe's controversial diagnosis of a disjuncture between “mainstream” political science and the study of urban politics in the United States by suggesting that Canadian urban political science scholarship is equally isolated. Yet for the most part, the underlying causes of this predicament differ greatly from the U.S. experience. We offer three interpretations—one institutional, one epistemological, and one ontological—to explain the marginality of Canadian urban political science in relation to both mainstream Canadian political science and American urban politics. First, the growth of Canadian urban political science has been inhibited not because there are too few interested scholars, but rather because interested faculty are so thinly dispersed across the country's academic institutions. Second, unlike the American experience, the historical development of Canadian political science as a discipline has led it to focus on national‐level issues at the expense of local and urban politics. Finally, Canadian cities have developed differently from American cities in important respects, again leading Canadian scholars to privilege the national over the local. |
