Slip, Sliding Away or Le Plus Ça Change…: Canadian and American Partisanship in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

Introduction The 1993 Canadian national election has been characterized as a critical one in which widespread partisan dealignment grounded in the electorate's weak and unstable psychological identification with the three old-line parties, the Liberals, Progressive Conservatives (PC), and New Democratic Party (NDP), led to the emergence of two relatively new parties, Reform and the Bloc Quebecois (BQ) (Clarke, Kornberg, and Wearing, 2000). More specifically, the election resulted in the virtual disappearance of the governing Tories who lost 167 of their 169 parliamentary seats, and the marginalization of the left-of-center New Democrats who lost 34 of their 43 seats. The big winners of 1993 were the Liberals who won the election, the Quebec-only nationalist BQ and the Western-based Reform Party. The Liberals captured 177 seats, the Reform won 52, and the Bloc elected 54 MPs. Thus the Bloc, a party whose raison d'etre was to work for the political independence of Quebec, ironically became Her Majesty's Opposition. Although the Conservatives and New Democrats made modest comebacks in the 1997 and 2000 elections, the Reform Party, which in 2000 morphed into the Canadian Alliance, and the Bloc continued their strong showings. Indeed, Reform/Alliance increased its vote share from 19 percent in 1997 to 26 percent in 2000, solidifying the party's position as the Loyal Opposition. After the 2000 election, the party sent 66 MPs to Parliament while the BQ's seat total fell to 38 MPs. Although the Liberal Party won again in 1997 and 2000, its success rested largely (as it had in 1993) on its dominance of Canada's largest province, Ontario, where it captured 98 of 99 seats in 1993, 101 of 103 seats in 1997 and 100 of 103 seats in 2000. Thus, in less than a decade, Canada's long standing two-party-plus (1) evolved into a genuine multiparty system with both the Alliance and the Bloc as legitimate, major players in electoral politics. Recently, the party system was altered again, this time with the merger of the Alliance and Progressive Conservative Parties into the Conservative Party of Canada. The 2004 Canadian federal election thus will be a contest among the long established Liberals and New Democrats, the separatist BQ, and the new Conservative Party. In our view, a similar systemic change could not have occurred in the United States in part because of structural/institutional factors and, in part, because of differences in the character of partisan identification in that country. As evidence of the latter, we will analyze four dimensions of partisan identification in the two countries: stability, loyalty, intensity, and ideology. Our focus will be the five Canadian parliamentary elections and five American presidential elections held prior to 2004. (2) We will show there are several striking differences in the character of partisanship in the two countries. These, we judge, are likely to persist although they may narrow somewhat in the future if the multiparty system in place since the 1993 election persists. Overview We begin by analyzing the proportions of Canadians and Americans who, over a sixteen-year period, accept a party label. We then compare the distribution of party identifications before and after four of the five Canadian national elections and before and after the 1984 American Presidential election, the only one for which such data are available. We next focus on the relationship between partisan identifications reported by Americans and Canadians before a national election and their reported vote in surveys taken shortly after those elections. (3) The volatility of partisanship in each country is considered, along with the issue of partisan migration. That is, where do people go when they discard their identifications? Is it to another party or simply to non-identification? Our next concern is with the congruence between reported partisan identifications and the direction of the vote. …