How Campaigns Matter in Canada: Priming and Learning as Explanations for the Reform Party's 1993 Campaign Success

Abstract

The 1993 Canadian election campaign clearly mattered; the fortunes of the Conservative and Reform parties underwent a fundamental re-orientation during the campaign. Previous research has indicated that Reform's success in 1993 was related to the activation of people who were opposed to the welfare state, but this represents only one dimension of Reform's appeal. This article examines the effect of issues on Reform support during the campaign and considers the actual process by which issues affect party support. While it is sometimes said that a candidate primed or made important certain issues for voters, it may be that some of what is labeled priming is actually something else. This article makes a conceptual and empirical distinction between campaign learning and priming. If voters do not know where a party stands on an issue, they cannot adequately use it in their overall evaluation. The evidence demonstrates that the increased importance of attitudes toward the welfare state was largely a function of the distribution of new information or learning, while the increased importance of cultural questions represented priming.