Dominant Party Regimes in Canada and Australia: Going the Way of the Dodo Bird?

Abstract

Dominant party regimes – in which one and the same party controls government over an extended period of time, whether alone or as the major player in a coalition – are not as anomalous in Western democracies as it may appear to casual observers, especially if the subnational jurisdictions of federations are considered alongside national party systems. In our paper, we probe the incidence of dominant party regimes in the federally-organized parliamentary democracies of Canada and Australia. Although extant literature indicates that Europe provides a more favorable political environment to single-party dominance than Westminster systems, both countries have experienced phases of regular alternation in government as well as dominant party regimes (for instance, Social Credit and Conservative dominance in Alberta and Ontario, and Country/National Party dominance in Queensland). In the paper, we ask whether single-party dominance is now a phenomenon of the past and, if so, why this is the case. An original dataset comprising all national and subnational election results and government formation outcomes in the two countries since January 1, 1901 (the date of the formation of the Commonwealth of Australia) as well as a dataset of government episodes of varying length – defined by the identity of the sole or largest government party – are the empirical basis of our study. Our data indicate that single-party dominance occurs more often in the Canadian provinces than in the Australian states and that it may flourish under a variety of conditions. We also find that dominant party regimes mostly appear to be a thing of the past. Explaining the increasingly rare occurrence of single-party dominance requires the consideration of a number of structure and agency-related explanatory factors.