Partisan Inconsistency and Partisan Change in Federal States: The Case of Canada

Abstract

Recent research on partisan instability has shown that party identification is endogenous to candidate, issue, and other transient forces in the electoral arena. This paper uses 1974, 1979, and 1980 Canadian national panel data to argue that federalism may enhance tendencies toward partisan change net of issue, candidate, or other effects. By increasing the number of arenas in which interparty conflict occurs, a federal system permits and perhaps encourages voters to develop different party identifications at national and subnational levels of government. Such patterns of party identification, in turn, accentuate the probability of subsequent partisan change at both levels. This finding cautions that orientations toward political parties cannot be properly understood without reference to the structural properties of a polity.