Leadership, Representation, & Elections: Essays in Honour of John C. Courtney 9781442684706

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Introduction
Leadership Politics and the Transformation of Canadian Parties
Are Party Leaders Becoming More Important to Vote Choice in Canada?
Declining Political Survival among Parliamentary Party Leaders, 1867–2005
Citizens Speaking for Themselves: New Avenues for Public Involvement
Royal Commissions and the Policy Cycle in Canada: The Case of Health Care
Canada’s New Elections Act and Citizen Access to Opinion Poll Information
The Malaise of Canadian Democracy: What Is It? How Is It to Be Explained? What Can We Do about It?
Institutional Reform: The Grass Isn’t Always Greener on the Other Side
Indigenous Nationalism and the Nation State

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POLITICAL LEADERSHIP AND REPRESENTATION IN CANADA

Political Leadership and Representation in Canada Essays in Honour of John C. Courtney

Edited by HANS J. MICHELMANN, DONALD C. STORY, AND JEFFREY S. STEEVES

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2007 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 978-0-8020-9187-1

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Political leadership and representation in Canada : essays in honour of John C. Courtney / edited by Hans J. Michelmann, Donald C. Story and Jeffrey S. Steeves. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-8020-9187-1 1. Political leadership – Canada. 2. Canada – Politics and government – 1935–. 3. Political participation – Canada. I. Courtney, John C. II. Michelmann, Hans J. III. Story, Donald C. (Donald Clarke), 1947– IV. Steeves, Jeffrey S. JL65.P648 2007

320.971

C2006-905630-7

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Contributors

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Introduction 3 hans j. michelmann Leadership Politics and the Transformation of Canadian Parties r.k. carty

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Are Party Leaders Becoming More Important to Vote Choice in Canada? 39 elisabeth gidengil and andré blai S Declining Political Survival among Parliamentary Party Leaders, 1867–2005 60 cristine de clercy Citizens Speaking for Themselves: New Avenues for Public Involvement 81 f. leslie seidle Royal Commissions and the Policy Cycle in Canada: The Case of Health Care 110 gregory p. marchildon Canada’s New Elections Act and Citizen Access to Opinion Poll Information 133 peter a. ferguson

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Contents

The Malaise of Canadian Democracy: What Is It? How Is It to Be Explained? What Can We Do about It? 154 george perlin Institutional Reform: The Grass Isn’t Always Greener on the Other Side 176 stéphane dion Indigenous Nationalism and the Nation State 194 alan c. cairns

Acknowledgments

Editing a book is a complex task, requiring the cooperation of a large number of persons. The editors have been fortunate that such cooperation was readily forthcoming. We wish to express gratitude, first, to the chapter authors for their ready responses to our requests for their participation, their willingness to make changes when these were requested, and their patience when, for a number of reasons, the project was from time to time delayed. Three anonymous referees gave helpful suggestions for improvements to parts of the manuscript. Virgil Duff, executive editor of the University of Toronto Press, provided prompt advice and continuing encouragement throughout. At the University of Saskatchewan, we wish to thank Lorrie Burlingham who spent many hours wrestling with manuscript formatting and proofing, and Nora Russell, who provided expert technical advice when chapter manuscripts written using disparate programs refused to coexist peacefully. Financial support for publications was provided by the offices of the Dean of the College of Arts and Science, the Vice-President Research, and the Provost and Vice-President Academic.

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Contributors

André Blais is a professor in the Department of Political Science and research fellow with the Centre de recherche et de développement en économique at the Université de Montréal. His research interests include elections and voting behaviour, electoral rules, polls and public opinion, and methodology. He has been a co-investigator with the Canadian Election Study since 1988. His most recent book is To Vote or Not to Vote? The Merits and Limits of Rational Choice Theory (2000). He has published eleven other books and more than one hundred articles in journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, the British Journal of Political Science, the European Journal of Political Research, the Revue française de science politique, and the Canadian Journal of Political Science. He has recently been awarded a Canada Research Chair in Electoral Studies. Alan Cairns is an adjunct professor of political science at the University of Waterloo. His research and publications deal with imperialism in Africa, and various topics in Canadian politics, including the electoral system, federalism, citizenship, constitutional reform, and Aboriginal policy. His two most recent books are Citizens Plus: Aboriginal Peoples and the Canadian State (2000), and First Nations and the Canadian State: In Search of Coexistence (2005). R. Kenneth Carty is a professor of political science at the University of British Columbia and the Brenda & David McLean Chair in Canadian Studies. A past president of the Canadian Political Science Association, his research has centred on the structure, organization, and behaviour of political parties. His most recent books include Rebuilding Canadian Party

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Politics (with W. Cross and L. Young) and Politics Is Local: National Politics at the Grassroots (with M. Eagles). Cristine de Clercy is an associate professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario. Her areas of specialization are political leadership, Canadian politics, and public policy. She studied under John Courtney as a graduate student, and was his colleague in the Department of Political Studies at the University of Saskatchewan from 1998 to 2004. Stéphane Dion has a doctorat d’état from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (1984) and was a professor of political science at the Université de Moncton (1984) and the Université de Montréal (1984–95). A member of Parliament for the riding of Saint-Laurent–Cartierville, he served as a cabinet minister under Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, and was elected leader of the Liberal Party of Canada in December 2006. He is Canada’s 37th leader of the opposition. Peter A. Ferguson is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Western Ontario. He is completing his Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia. His scholarly interests concentrate on the manner in which democratic governments and their citizens communicate with one another. He has presented papers and published articles on subjects ranging from democratic stability in third world countries to compliance with election opinion poll reporting regulations in Canada. Elisabeth Gidengil is a professor of political science at McGill University. She was educated at the London School of Economics, New York University, and McGill University. Her research focuses on voting behaviour and public opinion, with a special interest in gender. She has been a member of the Canadian Election Study team since 1992. She has co-authored Making Representative Democracy Work (1991), The Challenge of Direct Democracy (1996), Unsteady State (2000), Anatomy of a Liberal Victory (2002), and Citizens (2004). Her most recent book (co-edited with Brenda O’Neill) is Gender and Social Capital (2006). Gregory P. Marchildon is currently Canada Research Chair in Public Policy and Economic History at the Graduate School of Public Policy, University of Regina. He is the author of Health Systems in Transition:

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Canada (2006) and Profits and Politics: Beaverbrook and the Gilded Age of Canadian Finance (1996). After receiving his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and Political Science, he taught Canadian studies and economic history at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. He has held the positions of cabinet secretary and deputy minister to the premier in Saskatchewan as well as executive director of the Commission on the Future of Health Care in Canada. Hans J. Michelmann is a professor in the Department of Political Studies at the University of Saskatchewan. He was head of the department from 1991 until 1997, and served as associate dean of social sciences. He has been editor of the Journal of European Integration since 1983, and was director-general of the Canadian Council for European Affairs from 1983 to 2002. He has written extensively on the European Community and European Union, German and comparative politics, and international relations in federal countries. George Perlin is professor emeritus in the School of Policy Studies, Queen’s University, where he was founding director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy. He is director of the Ukraine-Canada Building Democracy Project, funded by the Canadian International Development Agency, which is developing a comprehensive program of professional, post-secondary, and secondary education devoted to promoting democracy and human rights in Ukraine. He is also a fellow in international democratic development with the Institute for Research on Public Policy and is directing a research project for IRPP on international assistance to democratic development. He is co-editor and co-author of Osnovii Demokratii (Fundamentals of Democracy) (2002, 2005). Leslie Seidle is senior research associate at the Institute for Research on Public Policy. He previously held senior positions within the government of Canada and was senior research coordinator for the Royal Commission on Electoral Reform and Party Financing (1990–91). Dr Seidle has published widely on electoral processes, constitutional reform, and public management, and is the editor/co-editor of numerous books on these issues, including Reforming Parliamentary Democracy (2003). Jeffrey S. Steeves is a professor of political studies at the University of Saskatchewan and has known John Courtney for over thirty years. Profes-

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sor Steeves’s research interests and publications focus on leadership, political parties, political strategy, elections, ethnicity, and development in selected developing countries in East Africa and Melanesia. Donald C. Story is an associate professor and head of the Department of Political Studies at the University of Saskatchewan. Currently he is conducting research on a major study of the cancellation of the CF-105 Avro Arrow, and is co-editor of The Diefenbaker Legacy: Politics, Law and Society since 1957.

POLITICAL LEADERSHIP AND REPRESENTATION IN CANADA

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Introduction HANS J. MICHELMANN

This festschrift celebrates the career of John C. Courtney, distinguished scholar, friend, and the editors’ colleague for many years at the University of Saskatchewan. John joined the university in 1965 after a two-year appointment at Brandon University. In his forty-one years as an academic, he excelled in all aspects of a social scientist’s career: teaching; service to his university, profession, and the broader Canadian public; and research and publication, which he continued to pursue after his retirement in 2004. This record of achievement made him a leading Canadian political scientist of his time, and one who richly deserves the tributes his professional colleagues across Canada give in contributing to this volume. John took his teaching very seriously. Both at the University of Saskatchewan and at universities abroad, he taught courses in a number of political science’s sub-disciplines: comparative political (including electoral) processes, political leadership, Canadian and local government, and for many years a section of the Department of Political Studies’ introductory course. As one would expect from an academic heavily engaged in research, he was very active in graduate education, and in addition to his regular teaching assignments, numerous times taught graduate courses on an overload basis. His students rewarded him with the respect that his dedication and his highly developed teaching skills merited. John was known, as well, for the humour that is part of his engaging style. Many were the remarks of students, unsolicited by department heads and colleagues, about how they enjoyed his courses, and many were the students in his junior courses that decided to major in the discipline that he so clearly loves. Often he returned from his classes beaming, laughingly relating an anecdote from what had just transpired

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in his interaction with students. It was no surprise to his colleagues that he received the University of Saskatchewan Students’ Union Teaching Excellence Award in 2002 and was nominated for it on other occasions. And it is no surprise that a considerable number of his students achieved success as graduate students while others are found in senior positions in professions, including government service and the law, for which the discipline of political science provides an excellent preparation. His talents as a teacher and his reputation as scholar led to a number of short-term appointments at universities abroad. Thus John was twice an academic visitor at Nuffield College, Oxford University. He had two appointments at Harvard University, once as visiting fellow at the University’s Centre for International Affairs and once as the William Lyon Mackenzie King Professor of Canadian Studies. For one to six weeks per year he was Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies at Northwestern University from 1978 to 1992. He taught at Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1992, and at the University of Marburg, Germany, in 1995. Although not particularly fond of the university-level administrative work that is part of an academic career, he did his part effectively and faithfully at the departmental, college, and university-wide levels. Typically he attempted to steer the sometimes endless discussions, often about minor matters, into productive channels that would lead to a decision with a minimum of fuss. Because of this talent, he was often asked to chair committees or serve as a member of executive bodies. John’s prominence in political science and, undoubtedly, his effectiveness in academic administration, led to his appointment or election to a number of top positions in national academic organizations. He was member of the board of directors of the Canadian Political Science Association from 1987 to 1989 and the organization’s president in 1987– 89. During his presidency the organization established a trust fund to help stabilize its funding. His service to the profession of political science also includes a term as English language editor of the Canadian Journal of Political Science. He served the wider academic community from 1985 to 1989 as member, and from 1989 to 1991 as vice-president, of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), Canada’s leading granting agency in these fields. He was also active in the social science and humanities committees of the Canada Council before the creation of SSHRC. Internationally, he was and continues to be a member of the Canadian Advisory Committee, Halbert Centre for Canadian Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. John’s contributions to the community beyond the university were

Introduction 5

extensive and varied. Because of his expertise in Canadian politics and government, he was widely consulted by the media to comment on the events of the day. At one point, after a particularly intense flurry of requests for commentary, he only half-jokingly announced that he was considering becoming a member of ACTRA, the organization of Canadian performers working in the English-language recorded media, and requesting a fee to comment – a move certain to screen out all except the most serious requests and ensure a more peaceful life. His contributions to Canadian society extended well beyond media commentary. John has been an expert witness in hearings and committee proceedings in both the House of Commons and the Senate. He acted as consultant to the Government of Canada and expert witness in a number of court cases, and undertook or participated in government-commissioned studies for the federal and for provincial governments. He also served on the Federal Electoral Boundaries Commission for Saskatchewan. He is known not only for his academic work on royal commissions, but put this knowledge to work when he undertook research for the Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Development Prospects for Canada, and became a consultant for the federal Royal Commission on Electoral Reform and Party Finance. In less formal contexts, John was generous with his time in representing the university by giving numerous addresses to service organizations and other community groups. John Courtney’s early scholarly writings presaged the themes of the written work that was to follow. One of his first articles in a professional journal, written with his colleague David E. Smith, examined voting in a provincial general election and a federal by-election in Saskatchewan. The next defended the use by governments of royal commissions and is still widely cited in the literature. There followed a series of articles that established his reputation as an expert on political leadership in Canada. Subsequent articles focused on various aspects of the functioning of Canadian governmental institutions, emphasizing representation and electoral processes. He also wrote on party conventions, work that he subsequently expanded in a book. The topics published in the journal literature were further explored in numerous book chapters that gave testimony of the extent to which fellow academics valued his participation in edited volumes and encyclopedias on Canadian politics and political history. His first book, The Selection of National Party Leaders in Canada, was published in 1973 by Macmillan of Canada. In it, he examines how leaders in the Conservative and Liberal parties have been selected in

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Canada since Confederation, providing chapters as well on the CCF/ NDP, and leadership selection processes in the United Kingdom and the United States. He focuses on such salient features of conventions as the delegate selection processes in the two parties, the characteristics of their delegates, leadership candidates, and leaders, and the extent to which these characteristics make them representative in terms of region, gender, age, language, and religion. He then ponders two questions, and provides his evaluation of the issues involved: Is the convention method of party leadership selection an effective means for coming up with the person best suited for the position? And what features of the selection processes contribute or detract from that goal? A reviewer called his work ‘a very useful, well-researched, eminently readable book.’ Leadership selection is also the theme of a second book. Do Conventions Matter? Choosing National Party Leaders in Canada, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 1995. In the twenty-two years since the publication of his previous book on the subject, there had been numerous changes in selection procedures. Professor Courtney in the book set out to assess the implications of these changes for the functioning of politics and government in Canada, weighing the advantages and disadvantages of the means that had been devised to choose incumbents for party leadership. In the book he focused closely on the internal dynamics of leadership conventions, party procedures, including delegate selection and campaign financing, that precede and strongly influence the outcome of the final selection process. Delegate selection and the resulting composition of the group of party members having the right to vote at leadership conventions were, not surprisingly given his career-long focus on representation, a key focus in the book. He provided strong arguments against changes in the traditional means of running and organizing conventions that provide an important role for local party organizations, thus helping maintain already threatened extra-parliamentary structures and ensuring the role of political experience in leadership selection. A reviewer concluded his assessment of the book with the following appraisal: ‘Courtney has written an eminently readable book that is wonderfully rich in lore, insight and wisdom.’ The theme of his third book, Commissioned Ridings: Designing Canada’s Electoral Districts, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2001, reflects in part his experience as a member of a federal boundaries commission and his enduring interest in representation. The book addresses the role of electoral boundary commissions and emphasizes the importance of their independence from political interference in the

Introduction 7

drawing up of constituency boundaries. He argues that the policy establishing boundary commissions free from political interference is among the most important developments in recent Canadian political history. His discussion of boundaries commissions extends from the assignment of seats to provinces and the intricacies of this process to the anomalies in terms of equal representation that result. The often conflicting considerations that commission members must take into account, for example voter parity as opposed to maintenance of community interests or traditional community patterns, are explored by someone clearly experienced in the challenges they face. This book also received the welldeserved praise of his professional peers. As one reviewer noted, it is ‘painstakingly researched, comprehensive and, above all balanced,’ and it ‘establishes Courtney as the foremost authority in this community ... of political scientists interested in the subject of electoral apportionment.’ His most recent book, Elections (2005), is the first of the Democratic Audit Series published by the University of British Columbia Press and commissioned by the Centre of Canadian Studies at Mount Allison University. Written, as are/will be the other volumes in the series, to inform Canadians about their system of democratic government, it is a thorough overview of the topics necessary for an understanding of the Canadian franchise, including voter registration, electoral districts, new methodologies in tallying the vote, as well as the features of the single member plurality system and how this system varies from those of other methods of elections. It has been praised as a most worthy volume to begin what promises to be an important series on Canadian politics and government. John’s academic contributions also include editing or co-editing six volumes, for three of which he was sole editor. They explore themes similar to those of his articles and books: political leadership, elections, and the drawing of electoral boundaries. Finally, he has read scores of papers, addressed numerous academic meetings and written many book reviews. This record of achievement earned him a number of prestigious awards. In 1977 he was awarded the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Medal. He was recipient of leave fellowships from the Canada Council and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and of a Killam Research Fellowship. His university honoured him with the Distinguished Research Award in 2001, and with a D.Phil. in 2005. In this festschrift, John is honoured by his academic colleagues from across Canada. The authors’ enthusiastic responses to the request for

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contributions testify to their regard for him as a scholar. The editors did not provide guidelines to authors about the subject matter they were to address in their contributions because they felt that authors’ contributions would be strongest if they were to write on subjects of greatest interest to themselves. In the event, and not surprisingly given the breadth of John’s scholarship, these contributions address topics that have received his attention over the years – leadership, representation, and elections. The first set of chapters, those by Kenneth Carty, Elisabeth Gidengil and André Blais, and Cristine de Clercy, examine aspects of political leadership – a subject on which John has written extensively and which was the subject of one of his and the Department of Political Studies’ most popular courses. A second set of chapters, those by Leslie Seidle and Gregory Marchildon, focus on an aspect of political representation – active participation by citizens in the policy process through nonconventional means – that have been the focus of John’s work on royal commissions and that reflect his own interest in representation. Peter Ferguson and George Perlin write about both elections and the need to have voters properly informed to make educated choices in casting their ballots, reflecting John’s work on various aspects of elections and the electoral process. Stéphane Dion and Alan Cairns write about political change, the former about institutional change and getting such change right, while Cairns examines one of the greatest challenges facing Canada – the need to undertake change to accommodate the aspirations of our indigenous fellow citizens. It is time now to provide a more detailed overview of individual chapters. Kenneth Carty examines the effects of party leadership conventions on the organization and functioning of Canada’s Liberal and Conservative parties. He argues that it is useful to divide the period from 1919 until the present into three periods, each of which represents a characteristic party system. Each period saw differences in the organization of conventions, the rules of delegate selection (for example, the introduction of group as opposed to solely constituency representatives), and the number of participants. Concomitantly, the dynamics of conventions changed, so that they varied in degree of competitiveness, and by the nature of the campaigns to gain support of delegates. Carty divides the convention process itself into four stages: the pre-convention stage during which candidates emerge and organize their campaigns; the delegate selection stage; the campaign stage during which the candidates

Introduction 9

and their organizations vie for the support of delegates; and the convention itself. He examines what he calls the traditional convention process in terms of these four stages, and compares this analysis to that of the modern convention process. In each case he draws out the implications for the structure and functioning of the Canadian party system. He concludes his elegant analysis by arguing that party leaders, as always, play a central role in Canadian politics, and shows how the dynamics of the leadership selection process shape the nature of Canadian parties themselves. Elisabeth Gidengil and André Blais address a question that has been the subject of much debate among Canadian political scientists for many years: What is the electoral importance of party leaders? It has been the accepted wisdom that they are crucial for the electoral fortunes of their party, and numerous reasons for this prominence have been suggested: the nature of the traditional Canadian political parties, i.e., their ideological flexibility in the context of shifting partisan ties; extra-parliamentary selection, which provides leaders with a power base outside their caucus; the need of unsophisticated voters to simplify the complex considerations involved in making an electoral choice; the prominence accorded leaders by the press in electoral coverage; televised debates between party leaders; and the weakening of partisan ties. But there have been arguments that the so-called popularity of party leaders in vote choice is not what it is alleged to be, and the authors argue that there is considerable evidence that the impact of leaders has a marginal effect on election outcomes. Because there has been little systematic study of the impact of leaders on individual vote choice and party vote share, to shed some light on the issue, the authors undertake an examination of Canadian election studies data for eight elections held from 1968 to 2000. They use conditional logistic regression to examine the impact of leader evaluations on voter choice. They examine the pattern of individual leaders’ popularity over time, the extent to which the probability of an average voter’s choice of party is affected by the evaluation of a leader, and the net impact on parties’ vote share of the leader effect, given the self-cancelling nature of these effects across parties. They find that, though the net effect of leaders on voter choice is significant, there is little evidence that it has increased over time. Cristine de Clercy’s chapter explores the length of tenure of Canadian parliamentary party leaders and whether, over time, there has been a trend to shorter periods of leadership. She argues that this variable is an

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important one in understanding the functioning of political parties and the House of Commons, given the central role of parties and leaders in that institution. Changes in party leadership, for example, bring with them turnover in other party leadership positions and thus often a decline in experience and expertise as the leader rewards supporters, and incumbents are demoted or leave politics. This clearly holds true both for parties in power and for opposition parties. Professor de Clercy divides the years since 1867 and the establishment of the Canadian House of Commons into different periods, using cutting points based on a number of theoretical considerations, to determine trends in the average length of incumbency of party leaders. She demonstrates that, indeed, the length of incumbency has declined, particularly in recent years. These finding are in and of themselves interesting and call for further analysis to explain the reasons for this trend. Leslie Seidle examines citizen consultation in the political process that goes beyond the traditional consultation conducted by parliamentary committees, task forces, royal commissions, and so on. These methods of citizen consultation have come under criticism because of the largely self-interested or highly specialized nature of such participation, and the small number of citizens who have typically become involved in the consultative process. Opinion polls, while much more representative, are a rather shallow means of consultation because they do not probe deeply or involve an informed dialogue between those consulted and those doing the consulting. Seidle reports on three recent examples of innovative citizen consultation that were conducted in such a manner as to remedy these shortcomings. The first of these was organized by the Romanow Commission, charged with consulting Canadians in order to come up with recommendations to ensure the long-term viability of the Canadian health care system. The second involved online citizen consultation on the Canada Pension Plan Disability Program by a committee of the House of Commons. The third example is the British Columbia Citizens Assembly on Electoral Reform. In each case Seidle provides a comprehensive discussion of the consultation, and analyses the degree to which it was effective in eliciting the desired information, as well as the way and the extent to which it addressed the shortcomings of traditional means of public involvement. Finally, he reports on the assessment by legislators and others of this new way of involving the public in the Canadian political process, and concludes that these are effective methods of augmenting traditional means of political representation.

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Gregory Marchildon in his chapter follows in the footsteps of John Courtney in that he pursues a topic that was the focus of Courtney’s earliest work, royal commissions. He points out that governments are often not particularly effective in dealing with major issues or crises that require innovative solutions because the pressures of ongoing business keep them focused on the here and now and because civil services are conservative organizations whose capacity for innovation is limited. Under such circumstances, governments often choose to ‘outsource’ the study and the investigations that are required to ensure that policy, particularly innovative policy, is based on solid research. Of the three types of instruments governments can use for policy reviews – permanent external advisory bodies, ministerial task forces, and royal commissions – royal commissions have two advantages: they have legal autonomy from government and hence are seen as more independent and objective than the other two, and they are given sufficient resources and have the time to undertake their tasks. There are also disadvantages: they may exceed their mandates and they are often very costly. They are also not as knowledgeable as the civil service (which must implement their recommendations), about the functioning of government, and hence their advice may not always be practical. Marchildon examines two royal commissions established to provide analysis and advice about health care – the Hall Commission of the early 1960s, and the Romanow Commission of 2001–02, for which he was director of research. The first, operating in a climate of great controversy and undertaking a very thorough study, came up with a series of recommendations, many of which were implemented over time to become Canada’s present health care system, based on the principles of comprehensiveness, universality, portability, and public administration. The Romanow Commission was established by the Chrétien government at a time when some of the assumptions behind Canada’s health care system were being challenged. Romanow concluded that the basic principles of the system had almost universal support among Canadians. He made forty-seven recommendations which were widely discussed and some of which became the basis of policy action. Marchildon concludes that both commissions discharged their mandates by providing advice and direction to governments in highly charged political environments. They cannot absolve governments of their responsibilities for making policy decisions or replace the civil service advisory role, but they can provide invaluable advice that informs government decisions on matters of great public import. Marchildon’s findings, therefore,

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square with and reinforce those of John Courtney more than three decades ago. Peter Ferguson’s chapter examines the provision in the media of adequate contextual information in the reporting of opinion poll results during election campaigns, an important issue because such information is crucial for the accurate interpretation of opinion poll data. Specifically, Ferguson sheds light on the question of which type of regulatory regime – government-mandated or industry self-regulation – is most effective in inducing media reporting of the required information. To do so, he examines the extent to which the regulatory regime enacted in 2000 through changes in Canada’s Election Act brought about an improvement in the reporting of such information in the Toronto Globe and Mail. He examines the extent to which the newspaper’s reporting on opinion poll results in the month prior to each of the 1993 and 1997 elections, when industry self-regulation was in effect, compared with that provided before the 2000 and 2004 elections after the new regulatory regime was enacted. Ferguson finds that there was an improvement in the reporting of contextual information in articles published in the month before the 2000 election just after the new legislation was passed over that in articles published before the two previous elections, but that the extent of such reporting on opinion poll data preceding the 2004 election reverted to the levels found during the period of industry self-regulation. Ferguson concludes, therefore, that his findings provide no evidence that a mandatory regime is more effective than industry self-regulation, and that the regulations enacted in 2000 did not have the intended effect of giving readers of opinion poll data better information about how these polls were conducted. George Perlin is concerned about the growing disenchantment of Canadians with their political leaders and government as evidenced by declines in both their trust in government and their participation in elections. Public opinion polls provide evidence of the former and voter turnout figures of the latter. Perlin cites various explanations for these phenomena: uncertainty over job losses caused by technological change and globalization; the retreat of government from society, the decline in social capital engendered by a general withdrawal from social networks, a decline in feelings of trust toward others and institutions, the content of television reporting, and a general decline in support for ‘existing political arrangements.’

Introduction

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Explanations for the decline in voter turnout include the feeling that one’s vote is not effective, the decline in social capital, and a weakening in networks that engender political participation. There has always been lower participation by less educated people, and though there has been a general trend towards higher levels of education generally, that does not equip students with the skills and knowledge to participate effectively in the political process. But the most significant variable in explaining voter turnout is age. Perlin notes there is strong evidence that voter turnout no longer increases with age as in the past, leading to the conclusion that there is a long-term generational change in voter turnout. Perlin argues that there is insufficient emphasis on civic education and that provided is of poor quality. He ends with the plea that this neglect be ended. The subject of Stéphane Dion’s contribution is political change, and more precisely the changes to Canada’s governmental institutions that have been mooted in recent years. His views and insights are informed not only by his experience as a cabinet minister but also by his career as an academic political scientist. His central argument is that political reform ought to be undertaken, if at all, with great care and with the recognition that any reform brings not only the changes that its advocates propose, but also corollary ones whose effects may do more harm than good for the whole political system. And he warns against accepting widely accepted but unproven assertions that may lead to unwarranted prescriptions for change. Within this frame of reference, Dion examines such issues as reform of parliamentary procedures, Senate reform, and electoral reform. He points out, for example, that Senate reform is not a simple matter because of the potential it would have for engendering conflict among provinces, and fundamentally altering the Canadian system of parliamentary government. Equally important is the lack of agreement among Canadians about the various reform measures that have been suggested: distribution of seats, method of selection, tenure of senators, and so on. Similarly with electoral reform: the features of the various systems that have been mooted for Canada must be assessed in terms of the advantages and disadvantages of the first-past-the-post system, and though he sees some advantages in the German system, which combines features of Canada’s present system with proportional representation, he warns that the implementation of such a system here would not necessarily lead to the electoral outcomes found in Germany. In another vein, he con-

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cludes by arguing that one of the most worrisome developments in recent Canadian history is the decline of participation by young people in politics, arguing with Perlin that this problem deserves urgent attention. Alan Cairns addresses the role of Canada’s indigenous peoples in the Canadian political community, an issue that has troubled the country since before its birth, and has still to be resolved. His analysis is built around a set of apt, powerful concepts, such as empire, colonization, and especially decolonization that serve effectively to identify and highlight the major dimensions of the complex set of factors needed to confront this issue. His analysis begins with a discussion of the essential features of what he calls landed empires and overseas colonial realms. For both types, he discusses relationship of the rulers to the ruled, an oppressive relationship that dehumanizes both parties. Decolonization of the colonial realms, while a process fraught with great difficulties, leads to independence and the creation of a new nation that then takes its place in the international community and develops a relationship with its former colonial masters that corresponds to the rules and structures of the pre-existing international system. The decolonization of the indigenous subjects of landed empires (including Canada), who find themselves as small dispersed minorities in political systems from which they cannot detach geographically, is quite another matter because it leads to a situation in which accommodation with the dominant society has to be undertaken in a relationship of proximity in which the rules are set by that dominant society. Cairns argues that government policies adopted for Canada’s indigenous peoples for over a hundred years were derived from and justified with reference to the same assumptions underlying the policies of colonial powers towards their overseas subjects. When it became abundantly clear that such policies could no longer be justified, the process of developing a new and equal relationship between indigenous peoples and other Canadians began. In tracing this process, he uses the concepts of empire and decolonization to provide often surprising, always enlightening, insights. He points out, for example, that Canada’s indigenous peoples are at present using the language and concepts of nation-tonation relations in setting the frame of reference for their approach to the dialogue with non-indigenous society, an analogue of the postcolonial relations between formerly subject nations and their former colonial masters. Cairns points out the difficulties in conceptualizing, let

Introduction

15

alone structuring relations among citizens of the same country in this manner. What the future will bring is at present unclear, but Cairns presents an insightful interpretation of how we have come this far. The chapters in this book highlight major features of the Canadian political system and advance our understanding of contentious and procedural issues in Canadian politics. These are precisely the pursuits that have characterized John Courtney’s work from the outset. Taken together, the chapters provide a fitting tribute to his academic career.

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R.K. Carty

Leadership Politics and the Transformation of Canadian Parties R.K. CARTY

In a perceptive essay written in 1968, Donald Smiley suggested that the party leadership conventions of 1967 and 1968 marked the emergence of a ‘new kind of institution’ in Canadian politics. Given the longstanding importance of leaders in Canadian party life, such a significant development led him to think that more than leadership politics was at stake and hence to conclude that ‘profound changes in the structure and functioning of the major Canadian parties’ (p. 396) were taking place. It was not the use of delegate conventions to choose party leaders that was new, for they had long been taken for granted. Rather it was the transformation of the convention itself into a competitive, decisionmaking institution that was unprecedented. Leadership selection conventions emerged in Canada with the demise of the first party system (1867–1921), a period in which party leadership had been the preserve of the parliamentary caucus (Carty 1988a). The conventions of the second Canadian party system (1921–62) had generally been modest events involving limited numbers of (often carefully picked) party activists in which the outcome was largely preordained (Courtney 1973). Suddenly the 1960s version of the Canadian leadership convention appeared to open itself, and the party, to the wider polity. These new convention processes heralded a whole new approach to party politics. In his magisterial study of leadership politics in Canada, John Courtney (1995) provides a comprehensive account of what he calls these ‘two generations’ of leadership conventions although he hints at differences within the conventions of the post-1960 period that suggests they were not fully of a piece (see, e.g., p. 280). In this essay I explore the changing nature of those new conventions, and the competitive leadership processes they engendered, to discover what implications they had for the

Leadership Politics and Canadian Parties

17

structure and practices of the country’s major parties and why they were ultimately abandoned at the end of the third party system for a new form of leadership choice, the every-member vote. In particular, I draw on the experience of the Progressive Conservative and Liberal parties, the two serious contenders for public office. As the only political parties with a genuinely national organizational presence, their practices defined a widely understood Canadian norm in the years of the third party system (1962–93). Each had national leadership contests in the 1960s, 1980s, and 1990s and, along with the record of the conventions themselves, there is a set of convention delegate surveys which allows us to explore the changing pattern of the two party’s internal politics.1 The first leadership convention system institutionalized after 1919 quickly developed a regular, settled pattern. I argue that the second did not, and it was the reality of continuing change that had such considerable implications for many areas of party organization and activity. The logic and competitive dynamic of the ‘second generation’ convention process ensured that it would be self-transforming as politicians adapted their organizations and behaviour from contest to contest. The result was eventually to create a situation in which the convention proper would once again appear to have become one of the ‘dignified’ rather than ‘working’ parts of the parties’ constitution and life. This evolution had a considerable impact on many aspects of party activity but perhaps none as important as the fashion in which it led to the mobilization of ordinary party members. The outcome led to the emergence of a new leadership politics, a new approach to party membership, and the beginnings of fundamental reconceptualization of the nature and role of political parties in Canada. The New Conventions It is not entirely obvious why the politics of Canadian leadership conventions suddenly changed in the 1960s, although it seems likely that the changing attitudes towards traditional practice and authority which marked that decade had a good deal to do with it. More particularly, the developments undoubtedly reflected a general response to the decay of the second party system (Carty 1988a). Certainly some were an immediate consequence of the bitter internal conflict in the Conservative party which saw the extraparliamentary organization use a party convention to force John Diefenbaker from the leadership (Perlin 1980). But whatever the causes, it is clear that the leadership conventions changed in two

18

R.K. Carty

5

1

4

0.8

0.6

2

0.4

1

0.2

0

0

First Ballot Fragmentation

Numbers Voting (000)

Figure 1 Liberal and Conservative Party Leadership Contests

93 19 90 19 84 19 83 19 76 19 68 19 67 19 58 19 56 19 48 19 42 19 38

27

19

19

19

19

Liberal

Conservative

Bars indicate convention size (in 000s); lines indicate competitiveness as measured by first ballot fragmentation (Rae's Index of fractionalization).

significant and interrelated ways that had far-reaching consequences for the parties: they became larger and they became more competitive. Figure 1 indicates the extent of both these changes.2 After decades in which the basic size and structure had stayed relatively constant, leadership conventions in both parties virtually doubled in size in the 1960s and for the next three decades every convention in each party was larger than the last. This was no mere mechanical inflation of the existing convention size simply to involve more individuals. Rather it was a process that saw the internal structure of the convention transformed, which in turn produced a significant change in the composition of the leadership electorate – the constituency to which leadership candidates had to appeal. The result was an immediate change in the politics of party leadership. Conventions grew in two ways. On the one hand, the number of delegates chosen by the parties’ basic electoral organizations – the local constituency associations – sharply increased; on the other, there was a proliferation of identifiable interests admitted to convention politics so

Leadership Politics and Canadian Parties

19

Table 1 The Changing Composition of Party Leadership Conventions Liberal

Voting delegates Delegates per const. % Const. delegates % New members1 % Young2 % Women 1 New

Conservative

1958

1968

1984

1990

1956

1967

1983

1993

1,380 3 52

2,366 6 64 18 13 18

3,435 7 54 22 23 40

4,658 12 69 30 27 47

1,284 3 54 11 11 19

2,231 5 55 26 30 24

2,991 6 53 14 22 33

3,550 9 74

members are those who have joined with the previous five years. delegates are those 25 years old or younger.

2 Young

that, among others, students, youth, women, Aboriginals, and provincial groups all found themselves eligible to send increasing numbers of voting delegates. Very often this led to some individual party members being able to vote for several delegates (Courtney 1986: 96), a kind of restoration of the plural franchise long abolished for general elections. This fragmentation of the internal structure and homogeneity of the convention was compounded by rules governing the gender and age requirements imposed on individual constituency associations’ convention delegations. Constituted differently, the conventions almost immediately began to look and act differently. No longer were they so obviously gatherings of individuals who had long worked in local party organizations. Increasingly they included many new people, often freshly mobilized into the party just to support a particular leadership candidate. As Table 1 indicates, this meant that increasing proportions of the delegates could have had little experience of electoral politics and presumably little knowledge of the history and practice of the party whose leader they were choosing. By 1990, for example, fully 30 per cent of the delegates to the Liberal leadership convention reported that they had been members of the party for five years or less. Half that proportion (15 per cent) said that they had never worked for the party in an election campaign. While the ratio of new members did drop for Conservatives in 1993, it still remained the case that 16 per cent of all its delegates reported never having worked for the party in an election. To the extent that conventions are responsible for choosing a leader capable of managing a party caucus, and leading its national electoral organization and campaign, delegates like these would not seem to be particularly well suited to that

20

R.K. Carty

task. In fact, as we shall see below, many of them were not representative of the party membership in any meaningful sense. They were recruited into the party not to make any independent political judgments but simply to support a particular candidate in a specific leadership contest. New members are likely to be younger, and Table 1 reveals that the proportion of convention delegates twenty-five years or less grew significantly over the four decades. Such individuals, whether they come into the party through constituency associations, youth groups, or campus clubs, were bound to have few political memories and comparatively limited experience. This made them ideal fodder for the campaigns of leadership candidates seeking to conquer the party from outside. Thus the very high proportion of young people at the Conservative convention of 1983 worked to the distinct advantage of Brian Mulroney in his successful effort to supplant Joe Clark (Martin et al. 1983: 102). They also provided a good deal of the personnel and support base of Paul Martin campaign’s doomed attempt to forestall the Chrétien Liberal victory of 1990.3 Each of these leadership conventions was also marked by an increasing proportion of women delegates. That development reflected the parties’ response to the demands of women members to play a full and active role in the life and decision-making of the parties. It is probably no accident that it was only after there had been several leadership cycles in which the proportion of women had steadily expanded that a woman was finally able to win the leadership of a major party. As significant as each of these changes in size and composition were in differentiating the new leadership conventions that emerged in the 1960s from those which had gone before, it is equally important to note they did not just involve establishing a new equilibrium. The conventions continued to grow and change over the years, none being a simple replica of its predecessor as had generally been the case during the 1919–58 period. And this reality of continual change and transformation became a significant factor in the competitive dynamic that soon developed. A critical aspect of the changing shape and size of the leadership conventions was the increased points of access they provided to candidates’ campaigns. More diversified constituency delegations led (more) candidates to believe that they could have supporters elected as local delegates. Local associations in electorally weak constituencies became just as important sites of competition and mobilization as were electoral districts in which the party had long-established and active memberships

Leadership Politics and Canadian Parties

21

(Carty 1991: 120–30). Moreover, the ease with which groups like campus clubs could be started (see, e.g., Martin et al. 1983: 109–10) soon prompted ambitious leadership candidates to devote a good deal of their campaign energy to party-building activities in order to manufacture new delegate positions and the votes that went with them. All this, in turn, strengthened the forces that were working to produce larger and more internally complex conventions. Convention size and structure were not the only things that changed in the leadership contests of the 1960s that produced Robert Stanfield and Pierre Trudeau in the Progressive Conservative and Liberal parties respectively. There was also a dramatic increase in the competitiveness of the leadership contests. This can be measured (using Rae’s index of fractionalization) by the fragmentation of the convention vote on the first ballot: a high score represents a more internally divided party. As Figure 1 demonstrates, the leadership contests of both parties (especially in the governing Liberals) had systematically become less competitive over the life of the second party system. The clear pattern of steadily shrinking competition after the parties’ initial leadership conventions is evidence of the degree of control that party elites quickly established over the process, even after the formal leadership choice was removed from the parliamentary caucus (Courtney 1995: 12–13). Most of the conventions of the first half-century were largely symbolic affairs, designed to add an aura of democratic legitimacy to a leader whose identity had long before been determined in the privacy of some party back rooms.4 Chubby Power (1966: 371–72) provided a frank enough assessment of the process in his memoirs, claiming that through MPs’ control of constituency delegates the convention system simply ‘perpetuate[d] the old custom of selecting the party leader by members of the parliamentary caucus.’ Then, in the 1960s, the suddenly larger conventions fostered a new competitive dynamic: in one turn of the leadership cycle Conservative fragmentation grew by 64 per cent, and leapt by 150 per cent in the Liberal party. However, despite what Smiley (1968: 396) called a move towards ‘openness’ – more serious candidates, elaborate pre-convention campaigns, extensive mass media coverage, intense efforts at mobilizing the party rank-and-file, and the expectation of multiple-ballot decisionmaking – the degree of competition in the major parties’ leadership contests once again went into decline. Rather like the experience of the second party system, leadership competition in the major national political parties appears to have shrunk steadily over the over the life of the

22

R.K. Carty

third party system. By the time the parties came to select new leaders in the early 1990s, it appeared that the conventions had once again become occasions for coronations rather than decisive battle sites. Jean Chrétien easily won the Liberal leadership in 1990 with the first oneballot victory since the 1950s, and it took a late prime ministerial intervention to assure Progressive Conservatives that a serious candidate would even run against Kim Campbell in 1993. To an outside observer, this development appeared to leave the parties with the same non-competitive leadership politics that had characterized the period to the 1960s. However, this pattern was not the result of the parliamentary caucus and party elites imposing, even indirectly, their control over the leadership selection as they had in the earlier period. Instead it was the logical outcome of the competitive processes that were stimulated by the very openness that Smiley described in the 1960s. Tracing the evolution of leadership competition over the decades of the third party system to its culmination in 1993 illustrates and explains this dynamic. The Leadership Convention Process The delegate convention leadership selection process used by Canadian parties flowed out over four analytically distinct stages. The first, precontest, stage has no clearly defined beginning. It involves the informal processes by which candidates emerge, at the urging of others or in response to their own ambitions, and begin to plan their assault on their party’s leadership. At this stage candidates will seek to collect undertakings of support and endorsements from senior party members and parliamentarians, will identify and recruit key personnel for a campaign organization, and will move to arrange for campaign financing. Candidates do not necessarily start their campaigns at the same time; no two candidates are likely to go about mounting a leadership bid in quite the same way. However, once committed, these preliminary decisions come quickly to shape their political life.5 During this stage, which is conducted almost entirely in private, it is not always clear who really will be in the contest when a leadership convention is finally called. With the decision and announcement that the party will hold a leadership convention the second, delegate selection, stage of the process begins. Constituency associations all across the country, as well as the growing number of other party units entitled to send delegates, begin to choose their representatives. In that process they come to define the size and

Leadership Politics and Canadian Parties

23

character of the convention. They also create a leadership electorate that quickly becomes the real target of the candidates. From the point at which delegates are chosen, until the convening of the convention, candidates and their supporters engage in a third, highly focused campaign designed to win as much support as possible from the delegates themselves. The fourth stage of the leadership selection process is the convention itself with its final-day balloting to decide who the new leader will be (Figure 2a). Of course, real leadership contests do not proceed in four such clearly distinct and separate periods, one taking up only after the previous one has finished. Candidates engage in their own preparations differently and enter the race at quite different times to conduct their campaigns among targeted elements of the party. Campaigns do not await the final selection of delegates but almost certainly start earlier, though perhaps with not the same intensity in all parts of the party, or all parts of the country. Our task here is to sort out how this process really worked during the second party system and then to analyse what happened to it in the decades of the shifting third party system. The Traditional Convention Process, 1919–58 After the parties’ initial experiences with competitive contests, at which Mackenzie King’s and R.B. Bennett’s leaderships were decided on a convention floor, the process was short-circuited. The parties’ elites quickly learned to manage the process: they effectively decided on their preferred leader in the pre-contest stage and then worked to assure a first ballot ratification of their choice at the convention. This was done in the Liberal party by making sure that the delegates were, to recall Chubby Power’s memorable phrase, ‘the choice of the federal member of Parliament and reflect[ed] his views and vote[d] as he directs’ (371). The classic case of this was the party’s 1948 choice of Louis St Laurent at a convention that Power himself contested in what he knew to be a futile gesture. Though there could have been little doubt among party members about who was to win, Mackenzie King drove the message home by having a quarter of his cabinet nominated only to then stand down in favour of the chosen one. Liberal delegates got the message and St Laurent won easily with 69 per cent of the vote. At the following Liberal convention in 1958 Lester Pearson won an even easier, and bigger, victory (Courtney 1995: 14–16). Conservative leadership conventions were not managed in quite this

24

R.K. Carty

fashion for, during this period, the electorate failed to provide the party with enough Tory MPs to guarantee control of a majority of the local riding delegates. Not able to manage the convention indirectly through the caucus, the party establishment compensated by providing for a large number of appointed delegates-at-large – on average, a quarter of those voting in the four Conservative contests from 1938 to 1956 came to the convention in this way (Courtney 1973: 116–17).6 Thus, when the party came to have its 1948 leadership convention, just four months after the Liberals crowned St Laurent, party officials apparently ensured that their choice of George Drew would prevail by the simple expedient of appointing three hundred of his supporters to delegate-at-large positions (Stewart 1988: 149). The one exception to the Conservative elites’ easy dominance of their conventions was in 1956 when John Diefenbaker skirted them and appealed directly to local delegates (Courtney 1995: 13–14). His subsequent rejection by the membership in a convention was a harbinger of changes to come in the parties’ politics and processes over the succeeding decades. This short-circuiting of the nominally four-stage process worked to ensure that the real decision as to who would be party leader was made in party back rooms during the first, pre-contest period (Figure 2b). As this became obvious, and the parties became more skilled at managing the leadership transitions, the inevitable consequence was a steady reduction in the amount of open (democratic) convention competition (Figure 1). The conventions of the 1960s did not just produce a new leadership process to neatly replace that of the second party system. Instead they launched the politics of party leadership through a series of shifts that would transform the parties’ organizations and ultimately challenge the very existence of the party leadership convention. The Evolution of Leadership Selection Politics, 1967–93 By suddenly expanding the size of their conventions by over 70 per cent, while also changing the type of individuals chosen as delegates, the parties ensured that their proven techniques of elite management were bound to come under severe challenge. As it happened, the leadership conflict in the Conservative party over the removal of Diefenbaker which provoked their convention in 1967, and the absence of any chosen successor to the Liberal’s Pearson in 1968, stimulated unprecedented numbers of candidates in both parties during this round of leadership politics. The combination of a new, enlarged, and therefore unknown

Leadership Politics and Canadian Parties

25

Figure 2 The Leadership Convention Selection Process a:

The four-stage leadership convention selection process

Pre-contest

b:

> Delegate selection >

Campaign

> Convention

The traditional convention process

Pre-contest

> Delegate selection >

e.g. St Laurent c:

Campaign

> Convention

Drew

The evolution of modern leadership selection politics

Pre-contest

1990s Campbell

> Delegate selection >

Chrétien

1980s Mulroney Turner

Campaign

> Convention

1970s 1960s Stanfield Trudeau Clark

leadership electorate, along with a relatively large cast of competitors, many with equally good claims to the leadership, together worked to increase dramatically the level of uncertainty. It was this uncertainty that stimulated the most competitive leadership conventions in Canadian party history. It took the Conservatives five ballots to elect Stanfield, while the Liberals went four ballots before choosing Trudeau: by comparison, their predecessors had both been easily chosen on the first ballot. Those two leadership contests were settled at a convention by the delegates, the ‘vast majority vot[ing] their true preference’ (LeDuc 1971: 100) and most casting a ballot for more than one candidate before the balloting was finally over. The delegates decided who the new leader was to be, but only at the very end of the convention (Figure 2c). There was a vigorous pre-convention campaign in both parties but it was hardly the decisive stage of those contests. In the Conservative party only about 60 per cent of the delegates reported that any candidate had approached them during the campaign. The largest number had been contacted by the Stanfield organization, though it only managed to reach just over one-third (36 per cent) of them (Table 2). The Liberal campaign the

26

R.K. Carty

Table 2 The Changing Leadership Campaign (percentage of convention delegates) Delegates

1967 (PC)

1968 (L)

1983 (PC)

1984 (L)

1990 (L)

1993 (PC)

Chosen in big meetings* Approached by winning campaign Committed support Tried to persuade others

36 45 72

77 60 79

42 88 79 87

37 92 78 79

73 86

17 96

71

78

* Constituency delegates only. Big delegate selection meetings are those with over two hundred attending.

following year was less uneven but the eventual winner, Trudeau, did not get into the contest until relatively late in the process while another senior cabinet minister, with the support of over 10 per cent of the delegates, withdrew on the eve of the convention. But it was also the case that Trudeau’s pre-convention campaign organization was the most successful of all in 1968, reaching over three-quarters (77 per cent) of the delegates. The demonstration effect of the winning Stanfield campaign had an immediate influence on the Liberals’ leadership politics. Their candidates’ campaign organizations moved speedily to learn from and emulate the successes of the Conservative winner (Courtney 1995: 204–5, 363–66). The Trudeau campaign may have marked a significant advance in the ability of a candidate’s organization to reach and lobby convention voters, but that was generally true of all the Liberal contestants: almost 90 per cent of the delegates had been contacted by at least one campaign team, and all of the candidates’ organizations reached more convention voters than Stanfield’s had in the Conservative party only the year before. The result of this new activity was a marked increase in the proportion of delegates who came to the convention having made a commitment to vote for a particular candidate. It jumped from 45 per cent among Conservatives to 60 per cent of the Liberals (Table 2). In both cases the lesson was clear – the two campaigns that were the most successful in penetrating their party, and reaching individual delegates, were the ones that then elected their candidate. Thus, by the second modern leadership contest – the Liberals’ in 1968 – the process was already beginning to change. The uncertainty as to who the convention would choose that resulted from the party elites’ loss of control over the process created a new opportunity for candidates to win the leadership by their own organizational and campaign efforts. For the first time delegate selection meetings began to be genuinely

Leadership Politics and Canadian Parties

27

competitive, although instances of packing them with committed supporters, soon to become a regular tactic, were relatively rare in this first round of the new conventions (Courtney 1973: 92–93; Perlin 1980: 136). That said, over one-third (37.8 per cent) of the 1968 locally selected Liberal delegates had made a vote commitment to their constituency association’s members, a clear indication that leadership decision-making could be pushed back from the convention and down into the party organization. While we do not have data that describe the range and extent of the leadership campaigns of 1976 in the Conservative party, it is almost certain that they were more extensive than those of the Liberals in 1968. As Figure 1 indicates, the party’s convention in that year did not grow in size, competition remained as keen as it had been in 1967, and for the first time a woman (Flora MacDonald) felt able to mount a serious challenge for the leadership. The ultimate victory of Joe Clark, who had been in third place on the first ballot, made it clear that a skilful campaign could lay the groundwork for a set of convention alliances that could eventually prevail over candidates with more initial support. In this sense the dramatic shifts in ballot support during the convention voting obscured the importance of the campaign period that preceded it. But the most important effect of Clark’s surprising win was to increase sharply the uncertainty that had become a central feature of the whole leadership selection process. Never before had a candidate who had not led on the first ballot won a national leadership convention. During the leadership cycle of the early 1980s serious candidates determined to manage the process, or at least reduce its costly uncertainty, by controlling the electorate. Unable to do so by effectively naming delegates, as elites had done in the earlier period, they began to mount elaborate campaigns ‘in the trenches’ of individual riding associations in order to have individuals who were committed to supporting them selected as delegates. This sort of campaigning had first emerged in a few scattered local organizations in the 1960s but in the 1983 and 1984 leadership battles a large majority (75 per cent) of the constituency delegates in both parties found they had to win a real contest for their position. Considerable numbers (45 per cent) did so by identifying themselves as a supporter of a particular leadership hopeful, running on a slate with other would-be delegates (40 per cent) – many (25 per cent) on a committed slate, while some (10 per cent) were participants in pitched, trench warfare, battles between at least two slates of potential delegates which were tied to different national candidates’ organiza-

28

R.K. Carty

Figure 3 Leadership Contests in the Ridings, 1983–93

% constituency delegates

100 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123

80

60

40

20

0

1234 1234 1234 1234 1234 1234 1234 1234 1234 1234 1234 1234 1234 1234 1234 1234 1234 1234 1234 1234 1234 1234 1234 1234

1234 1234 1234 1234 1234 1234 1234 1234 1234 1234 1234 1234 1234 1234 1234 1234 1234 1234 1234 1234 1234

123 123 123 123 123 123 123

C 1983

12 12 12 12 12 12

123

L 1984

123 Contested 123 Identified

Slate

12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12

L 1990 12 12Identified slate

123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123

12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12

C 1993

Trench warfare

tions (Figure 3). These local contests stimulated by the candidates’ organizations led to large numbers of Canadians being mobilized and involved directly in the parties’ leadership politics. About 60 per cent of the delegates reported that they had recruited others to come to the delegate selection meetings to help elect them. Many of those individuals were local activists, or at least known partisans, but many others simply men and women (and in a few notorious cases children) willing to come out to a meeting to support a particular would-be delegate or leadership candidate. This influx meant that about 40 per cent of the delegates were chosen in large, open public meetings of more than two hundred, and that a large majority of them (80 per cent) came to the convention already committed to a particular candidate (Table 2). In effect, party leaderships in the 1980s were won in the delegate selection period of the process (Figure 2c). Shifting the decisive moment of the leadership campaign back into the delegate selection stage would prove to have significant consequences. For a serious candidate it meant that it was necessary to build a personal organization capable of reaching into hundreds of party units across the country. To do that required a lot of money. The costs of conducting a serious leadership campaign rose dramatically compared to the earlier

Leadership Politics and Canadian Parties

29

Table 3 The Costs of Winning Party Leadership Campaigns, 1967–93 (expenditures in 1993 dollars)*

1967 – PC 1968 – Lib 1983 – PC 1984 – Lib 1990 – Lib 1993 – PC

Stanfield Trudeau Mulroney Turner Chrétien Campbell

Campaign expenditure

Expenditure / delegate

Expenditure / Expenditure / 1st ballot winning votes votes

642,000 1,240,000 2,550,000 2,077,000 2,556,000 3,000,000

288 524 853 605 549 865

1,237 1,649 2,918 1,304 964 1,803

558 1,031 1,610 1,115 964 1,651

*Expenditure estimates from Courtney, 1995: Table 4-3, 315–16.

period (Wearing 1988: 73) leaving the per-vote costs obscenely beyond the reach of individuals without easy access to major financial reserves (Table 3). Few candidates were able to overcome these new obstacles to a serious leadership bid and the competitiveness of the leadership process once again began to drop (Figure 1); despite the numbers of candidates in the contests of the 1980s, there were really only two major competitors in each (Carty 1988b). Those two leadership contests had found the parties in very different political situations. The Conservatives, back in opposition after a brief ten-month taste of power, were once again badly divided over their leadership and holding a convention only because many in the party had conspired to remove Joe Clark as leader against his will. The governing Liberals, by contrast, were celebrating Trudeau’s voluntary retirement after his successful leadership as the third-longest serving prime minister in Canadian history. Yet despite these sharp differences between the parties, the extent and pattern of their leadership contests’ penetration down into the riding level organizations was virtually identical (Figure 3). Candidates had learned how to operate a new leadership system which was driven by the logic of the same competitive dynamic, rather than any distinctive characteristics of their individual parties. With up to seventy thousand Canadians participating in each of these two sets of contests, the leadership campaigns redefined party democracy in Canada. The 1990 Liberal contest saw an acceleration of this competitive dynamic overwhelm and consume the party’s leadership process. As Figure 3 vividly illustrates, local competition for delegate places exploded – trench warfare grew by almost 300 per cent (Hanson 1992: 428) – as the Chrétien and Martin campaigns battled for the leadership.

30

R.K. Carty

More people than ever were mobilized to participate in local constituency meetings as the proportion of large delegate- selection conventions doubled (to 73 per cent) of the number held in 1984. At this point the convention surveys stopped asking delegates whether they had come to the convention committed to a candidate. The answer was obvious: the vast majority had. For all intents and purposes the leadership contest was over and decided once the dynamic and pattern of the delegate-selection phase was obvious. The convention itself was, again, just a formality. Its contestedness dropped sharply below the level in 1984 and, for the first time since the 1950s, the winner had an easy first-ballot victory. To build organizations capable of mobilizing so many partisans was, however, expensive. One senior Liberal MP dropped out of the contest in its early stages because he was unable to raise sufficient funds to conduct a competitive campaign. By the time the contest was over, the two leading candidates admitted to spending well over $2 million each, while the total spent by all the candidates, chasing the votes of some forty-five hundred delegates, may well have approached the amount the Canada Elections Act allowed the Liberal party to conduct its entire 1988 national general election campaign. On its surface, the 1990 Liberal leadership contest had been one of the widest-ranging and most inclusive exercises of participatory democracy ever in any Canadian party.7 Chrétien’s assured win left the convention itself an anticlimax, so much so that several hundred eligible delegates did not even bother to attend. But Liberal conventioneers themselves believed that the process was flawed. They recognized that the campaigns had been marked by too many excesses and three-quarters declared they believed that the process was partially responsible for ‘creating the low levels of public confidence in the integrity of politicians.’ Over 90 per cent indicated that there should be spending limits imposed on leadership candidates’ campaigns, and over half thought the whole leadership convention process should be replaced by ‘a direct vote of all party members’ (Perlin 1991: 69, 77, 80). Chrétien’s victory may have been settled in the delegate-selection phase but it was largely created in the pre-contest period. His organization had been preparing for the campaign over several long years and its success was rarely in doubt. The lessons of that Liberal race were not lost on the Conservatives when, in the aftermath of Mulroney’s resignation, they prepared to choose a new leader in the spring of 1993. As potential Conservative candidates considered whether or not to enter the contest they recognized that they would have to be prepared to engage in trench

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warfare all across the party. And the Liberal contest had just demonstrated how expensive in terms of personal, organizational, and financial costs such a campaign was. Several obvious candidates, many who had long harboured leadership ambitions, soon discovered that the media had helped make Kim Campbell the favourite of many in the party’s establishment as well as large numbers of local activists. They realistically concluded that they could not afford to mount a serious national campaign and one by one announced they would not run, several even before Campbell had arranged to declare her own candidacy (McLaughlin 1994: 74–80). By the time the delegate-selection stage of the leadership started, it appeared that only a few relatively unknown backbenchers would enter the contest against Campbell. To prevent the party’s contest from too obviously appearing to be the coronation it had quickly become, a number of prominent Conservatives, including the prime minister, finally prevailed on Jean Charest, the youngest member of the cabinet, to enter the race. While Charest ultimately gathered behind him those who, for one reason or another, opposed Campbell (and so reduced her convention support to a minimum winning coalition), there never really was a significant contest for the leadership waged throughout the party organization. Thus, compared to the Liberals only three years earlier, the Conservative contest saw the number of large and competitive delegate-selection meetings drop significantly (Table 2 and Figure 3). These two leadership contests of the 1980s were fundamentally similar, for both were fought out at the same delegate-selection stage of the process. This was not true by the 1990s and so the profiles of those two contests are sharply different. As Figure 3 indicates, the Liberal contest in 1990 was fiercely competitive, for it was clear to all as the campaigns started that the real decision would be made at the delegate-selection stage by the party’s membership in hundreds of local meetings. But then, in 1993, the lessons of the Liberal contest dried up competition in the Conservative party and effectively pushed its decision as to who would be the new party leader back into the pre-contest stage (Figure 2c). As a result, by the end of this period, ordinary local party members were shut out of their own leadership selection process. Leadership Politics and the Transformation of Canadian Parties Successive leadership contests over the decades of the third party system saw the candidates learn from previous rounds and move quickly to adapt their organizations and behaviours. As a consequence, the effec-

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tive decision-making point was continually pushed further back in the process, and deeper into the party. Ironically, the final resting point of this developmental path was the parties’ back rooms where the leadership had been decided before the new, open conventions of the 1960s made Canadian leadership politics both an agent and an outcome of internal party democracy. But this did not simply restore the status quo ante. As Smiley had predicted, it produced profound changes to the organization and life of the parties. The contests that were increasingly waged in hundreds of local party associations, both in the ridings and other units, led to the mobilization of large numbers of individuals into the party. In 1990, for example, over 70 per cent of the Liberal constituency delegates reported having recruited others to come to a local selection meeting to support them, and the party’s national membership doubled during the year (Carty 1991: 37). Many of these newly mobilized individuals may have had only a passing interest in the ongoing work of the parties but they were interested in the opportunity to participate in the choice of their political leaders and were quite prepared to join and use the parties, if that is what was necessary, to do so. From their point of view, the parties were not unchanged by all this activity. The movement of large numbers of instant, one-meeting members into their local units often disrupted their planning and work, displaced long-serving loyal activists, but brought considerable new revenues into the local constituency associations’ coffers. It also ensured that riding associations, long preoccupied with parochial concerns, became enmeshed in the national networks that swirled around leading party figures. With critical dimensions of the parties’ leadership politics being played out increasingly earlier in the process, ambitious politicians had to establish and maintain nation-wide networks of supporters whose loyalties were as much personal as partisan.8 One of the costs of winning a leadership were the rewards that had to be distributed to supporters. That meant that new leaders were driven to populate the party organization with their own supporters, driving the loyalists of their opponents into a kind of internal exile. Deprived of influence in the party, members of excluded networks had every incentive to conspire against the party leader and work to take over the organization by installing their own champion in the leadership. Thus while Chrétien’s organization undermined Turner and eventually put him in office, the same organizational incentives created and sustained the Martin faction which eventually turned Chrétien out. In important ways this oganizational fractionaliza-

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tion of the party was quite dysfunctional. However, from another perspective, the nurturing of personalized networks was highly integrative. They shrink the distance between party centre and periphery for those involved. Riding-level contests over the leadership also worked to redefine the norms of internal party democracy. They legitimated increased participation in a range of other local and national party processes concerned with both policy and personnel. No longer were most party decisions left to the preserve of a small group of local activists. Ordinary party members claimed, and exercised, the right to intervene and to be heard. Nearly one-third of the constituency associations now had contests over who would represent them at regular (i.e., not leadership) national party conventions (Carty 1991: Table 3.19). At the same time, nomination contests for parliamentary candidates took on a vigour and life not seen since before the First World War as their style and character mirrored the leadership battles. But as this expansion of internal party conflict over local nominations was integrated into the parties’ national strategies, party leaders came under widespread pressure to control their mix of candidates. They were able to do that only by overriding the longestablished practice of allowing local constituency associations to make their own popular decisions. That worked to shrink the space traditionally left to local autonomy. Smiley noted that the new kinds of political mobilization around leadership campaigns were focused on personalities rather than ideologies. Though this had always been true of Canadian parties, the scale on which it was practised in the contests of the 1980s and 1990s made transparent just how instrumental the parties’ idea of membership had become. Individuals became party members to support a particular candidate in a particular contest and were not assumed to have made any other commitment. Leadership candidates wished as few restrictions on membership as possible in order to increase their potential support base and even signed up supporters of other parties where they thought it would help. Party membership became tantamount to a party franchise, to be taken up casually whenever a contest is declared. The effect was to shrink the meaning and value attributed to party membership. Canadians came to think that they were entitled to play a significant part in the selection of their political leaders through the parties but, by the end of the third party system, it was also the case that many believed that the convention process no longer worked. In a perceptive comparative analysis with American leadership selection processes, Brady and

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Johnston (1988: 259–60) had noted that the great virtue of the Canadian convention system was that it ‘facilitate[d] the postponement of commitment’ and did not make voters (i.e., delegates) decide before they were ready. However, the 1993 Progressive Conservative convention confirmed that this was no longer true. The competitive dynamic which had driven the leadership decision back into the pre-contest stage had done so by forcing early commitment. The Conservative party ended up with a leader ill-prepared to conduct a national election campaign and suffered the worst defeat in its, or any major party’s, history. However, there had been growing criticism of the parties’ leadership politics even before the Conservative’s 1993 contest demonstrated its limitations. The concerns focused on two, interrelated, dimensions of the process (see Perlin 1991: Table 2.8). First, there was a widespread recognition within the parties, and reflected in media coverage, that the delegate selection process was subject to too many unacceptable abuses. Plural voting, instant members, the mobilization of questionable groups, the establishment of phony party units, and high-pressure tactics of all sorts convinced many that the personal factions produced ugly machinestyle politics rather than democratic competition in genuinely participatory organizations. The second problem was the money this process consumed. The recognition that it took millions to wage a national leadership campaign could only keep good candidates out of the contests and threatened to corrupt the parties. As a result, the convention selection process lost its capacity to legitimate new leadership and led a majority of the parties’ organizational core to believe it had to be changed (Carty 1991: Table 5.9). The End of Leadership Conventions Several decades of mobilizing local partisans, reinforced by widespread support for the idea that (almost) anyone ought to be able to vote for a party leader, meant that a reform of their leadership politics could not involve a return to narrower, caucus-based selection processes. Indeed, the examples of a number of provincial parties pushed the national organizations to adopt every-member vote systems (Courtney 1995: ch. 12; Cross 1996, 2004). And in leadership contests since the mid-1990s, the Liberals and Conservatives (as well as the Reform/Alliance9 and New Democrats) have continued to experiment with different versions of such systems without yet having fixed on a generally acceptable model. In his influential analysis of party organization Peter Mair (1994: 16)

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suggested that a shift to direct membership votes might decrease the democratic character of contemporary political parties. It could do so by enhancing the capacity of leaders to appeal directly to an easily manipulated grassroots membership at the expense of the regular party machinery and processes. However, Canadian parties lack the permanence and stability of the mass membership structure characteristic of most European parties and their stratarchical organization continues to inhibit any such easy ascendancy by national leaders over much party activity and life. In the face of the parties’ widespread rush to abandon traditional delegate-style convention leadership processes, Courtney (1995: 285–93) expressed real doubts that a change towards a primary-style leadership politics would solve many of the problems created by the dynamic transformation of the process in the third party system. He argued persuasively that it might well just add a number of new ones. While the balance sheet is not yet in on the effects of these new processes, the lessons learned and then applied in the brutal leadership politics that installed then unseated Stockwell Day in the Alliance, and took Paul Martin to the leadership of the Liberals, suggest that this has been the case. As ever, leaders remain at the centre of national political competition in Canada. This ensures that the evolving logic and dynamics of leadership competition will continue to reshape the very character and organization of the political parties that give it life.

NOTES A rough draft of this argument was first presented to the Atlantic Provinces Political Studies Association meeting in 1994. At the time I received helpful comments from Stephen Eggleston, David Stewart, Ian Stewart, and Stephen Clarkson. As an account of how the transformation of the parties was driven by the leadership selection process, I am particularly pleased that it now appears as part of a tribute to John Courtney from whom we have all learned much. 1 Data on convention delegates are taken from the valuable set of six national convention surveys conducted by George Perlin of Queen’s University. I am grateful to Perlin for making these available. There was a Conservative leadership convention in 1976 (but no matching Liberal convention in the decade), but the survey of that convention is unfortunately not fully comparable to the others.

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2 The figure, and some of the discussion around it, is taken from Blake, Carty, and Erickson (1996). 3 Martin actually had more campus club delegates voting for him than did Chrétien, despite the latter’s 2.25:1 overall vote advantage. Student delegates made up 10 per cent of Martin’s vote but only 5 per cent of Chrétien’s. This pattern should not be too surprising. Students are attracted to campaigns that can offer them the most opportunity to play a big role. Candidates like Mulroney in 1983 or Martin in 1990, running against individuals with wellestablished machines, inevitably have more such positions to offer new activists. 4 The obvious exception was the 1956 convention which chose Diefenbaker who was not the preferred candidate of the party elites. See Courtney (1995, 13). 5 For a glimpse into the decision-making of two candidates during the precontest phase of the 1983 Conservative party leadership contest, many months before it was clear there would be a leadership convention in that year, see Appendix A of Martin et al. (1983). For the preparations of the 1993 Campbell candidacy, see McLaughlin (1994, 67–74). 6 This type of delegate position survived in the Progressive Conservative party’s new larger conventions, although in much reduced proportion (under 5 per cent in 1993). 7 The 1990 Liberal convention survey data suggest that about 150,000 individuals probably took part in the party’s leadership campaign in one way or another. The best estimates are that there may have been about 317,000 party members that year, many who joined just to vote in the leadership contest (Carty 1991: 36–39, 122–23). 8 See Carty (2002, 740–42) for a discussion of the place of these leadershipdriven structures in the context of Canadian party organization. 9 Reform’s original constitution provided for a traditional delegate-style leadership convention. The party changed it after it became clear that everymember vote processes had become the new standard.

REFERENCES Blake, D.E., R.K. Carty, and L. Erickson. 1996. ‘Coming and Going: Leadership Selection and Removal in Canada,’ in Canadian Parties in Transition, ed. A. Brian Tanguay and Alain-G. Gagnon. Toronto: Nelson. Brady, H.E., and R. Johnston. 1988. ‘Conventions versus Primaries: A CanadianAmerican Comparison,’ in Party Democracy in Canada: The Politics of National

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Party Convention, ed. George Perlin. Scarborough: Prentice-Hall. Carty, R.K. 1988a. ‘Three Canadian Party Systems: An Interpretation of the Development of National Politics,’ in Party Democracy in Canada: The Politics of National Party Conventions, ed. George Perlin. Scarborough: Prentice-Hall. – 1988b. ‘Campaigning in the Trenches: The Transformation of Constituency Politics,’ in Party Democracy in Canada: The Politics of National Party Conventions, ed. George Perlin. Scarborough: Prentice-Hall. – 1991. Canadian Political Parties in the Constituencies. Vol. 23 of the research studies of the Royal Commission on Electoral Reform and Party Financing. Ottawa: RCERPF. – 2002. ‘The Politics of Tecumseh Corners: Canadian Political Parties as Franchise Organizations.’ Canadian Journal of Political Science 35 (4). Carty, R.K., and W. Cross (forthcoming). ‘Can Stratarchically Organized Parties Be Democratic? the Canadian case.’ Journal of Elections, Public Opinion, and Parties. Courtney, J. 1973. The Selection of National Party Leaders in Canada. Toronto: Macmillan of Canada. – 1986. ‘Leadership Conventions and the Development of the National Political Community in Canada,’ in National Politics and Community in Canada, ed. R.K. Carty and W.P. Ward. Vancouver: UBC Press. – 1995. Do Conventions Matter? Choosing National Party Leaders in Canada. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Cross, W. 1996. ‘Direct Election of Provincial Party Leaders in Canada: 1985–95: The End of the Leadership Convention?’ Canadian Journal of Political Science 29 (2). – 2004. Political Parties. Vancouver: UBC Press. Hanson, L. 1993. ‘Contesting the Leadership at the Grassroots: The Liberals 1990,’ in Canadian Political Party Systems, ed. R.K. Carty. Peterborough: Broadview Press. LeDuc, L. 1971. ‘Party Decision-making: Some Empirical Observations on the Leadership Selection Process.’ Canadian Journal of Political Science 4 (1). Mair, P. 1994. ‘Party Organizations: From Civil Society to the State,’ in How Parties Organize: Change and Adaptation in Party Organizations in Western Democracies, ed. R. Katz and P. Mair. London: Sage. Martin, P., A. Gregg, and G. Perlin. 1983. Contenders. Scarborough: PrenticeHall. McLaughlin, D. 1994. Poisoned Chalice: The Last Campaign of the Progressive Conservative Party? Toronto: Dundurn Press. Perlin, G.C. 1980. The Tory Syndrome: Leadership Politics in the Progressive Conservative Party. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

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– 1991. ‘Attitudes of Liberal Convention Delegates Towards Proposals for Reform of the Process of Leadership Selection’ in Canadian Political Parties: Leaders, Candidates and Organization, ed. Herman Bakvis. Vol. 13 of the research studies of the Royal Commission on Electoral Reform and Party Financing. Ottawa: RCERPF. Power, C.G. 1966. A Party Politician: The Memoirs of Chubby Power, ed. Norman Ward. Toronto: Macmillan of Canada. Smiley, D.V. 1968. ‘The National Party Leadership Convention in Canada: A Preliminary Analysis.’ Canadian Journal of Political Science 1 (4). Stewart, I. 1988. ‘The Brass Versus the Grass: Party Insiders and Outsiders at Canadian Leadership Conventions,’ in Party Democracy in Canada: The Politics of National Party Conventions, ed. George Perlin. Scarborough: Prentice-Hall. Wearing, J. 1988. ‘The High Cost of High Tech: Financing the Modern Leadership Campaign,’ in Party Democracy in Canada: The Politics of National Party Conventions, ed. George Perlin. Scarborough: Prentice-Hall.

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Are Party Leaders Becoming More Important to Vote Choice in Canada? ELISABETH GIDENGIL and ANDRÉ BLAIS

Party leaders have aptly been called ‘the superstars of Canadian politics’ (Clarke et al. 1991: 89). They occupied a central place even in early interpretations of Canadian elections and electoral behaviour. According to James Mallory (1949), for example, the key to a party’s electoral success was its leader’s ability to capture ‘the national mood.’ The centrality of leaders was also reflected in the title of the first full-length, survey-based study of voting behaviour in Canada. It took its name from Diefenbaker, the prime minister who dominated the elections in question (Regenstreif 1965). Despite their centrality to electoral politics, however, there has been surprisingly little systematic study of the impact of party leaders on vote choice in Canada. The electoral importance of party leaders has typically been linked to the nature of Canada’s major political parties and the weakness of social background characteristics in structuring vote choice (Clarke et al. 1991). The postwar party system was a two-plus-one system. The two major parties, the Liberals and the Progressive Conservatives, were typically characterized as ‘brokerage parties’ who stayed close to the centre, competing for the median voter in classic Downsian fashion. Their ideological flexibility was reflected in their shifting electoral coalitions. This type of party system was seen as being a functional necessity given Canada’s deep regional, linguistic, and ethnic cleavages. Indeed, the ‘national question’ was effectively organized out of electoral politics (Johnston et al. 1992) until the 1993 election when two new parties – the separatist Bloc Québécois and the western-based Reform Party – smashed through the brokerage system. Brokerage politics made for flexible partisan ties and relatively weak associations between vote choice and social background characteristics (Alford 1963; Clarke et al. 1980; Dalton 1996; Nevitte et al. 2000). According to Harold Clarke and his colleagues

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(1991: 89), ‘brokerage parties offer a particularly prominent position to the party leader.’ In the absence of a well-defined ideological appeal, it is very much up to the leader to construct a winning coalition by mobilizing a loyal core of partisans and attracting floating voters. In a similar vein, Richard Johnston (2002: 159) observes that brokerage politics ‘creates a vacuum that leadership might fill.’ There are also institutional features that enhance the importance of leadership in Canada’s electoral politics. As John Courtney (1995) has observed, compared with other Westminster-style political systems, Canadian party leaders enjoy more independence from their parliamentary parties. This is due to the extra-parliamentary manner of selection, whether by convention delegates or a vote of the parties’ members: ‘Leadership conventions brought Canadian leaders a measure of authoritative independence from their parliamentary caucus unknown to their counterparts in the British Conservative and Australian parties’ (Courtney 1995: 276). According to Johnston (2002: 159), this encourages voters to evaluate leaders independently of the parties they lead. Consistent with this argument, Brian Graetz and Ian McAllister (1987) found that the effects of leader evaluations were a little stronger in Canada than in three other Westminster-style parliamentary systems. Leaders can also be important in helping people to figure out how to vote. As Downs argued in 1957, citizens are rationally ignorant about politics. Becoming informed about politics requires an expenditure of time and energy. Accordingly, voters will fall back on a variety of information shortcuts to help compensate for their lack of knowledge about politics. Leaders’ personality traits or their conduct of the campaign can serve as guides as to how they might perform as prime minister. Even something as simple as the leaders’ social background can help guide people’s vote choice. Voters may use the leaders’ background as a basis for inferring their issue positions or ideological tendencies. Or they may fall back on the ‘simplest shortcut of all’ (Cutler 2002), namely whether a leader comes from their region of the country, shares their mother tongue, practises the same religion, or is simply of the same sex. For example, Brenda O’Neill (1998) has shown that even in the midst of an electoral meltdown, Kim Campbell was able to attract women to the Progressive Conservative Party (see also Banducci and Karp 2000). The same was true of the New Democratic Party’s leader, Audrey McLaughlin. It used to be thought that basing one’s vote on evaluations of the leaders was a hallmark of an unsophisticated voter. It turns out, though, that even well-informed and highly educated voters factor leaders’ per-

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sonal qualities into their vote calculus. Fred Cutler (2002), for example, reports that informed voters were just as likely as the uninformed to take account of demographic (dis)similarity between themselves and the party leaders. Steven Brown and his colleagues (1988) found that many Canadian voters possessed a prototypical leader schema, or mental representation of what a leader should be like. This schema was widely shared and remained unchanged in its essentials across elections. The prominence of leaders has been reinforced by the way in which the media cover elections. Studies of television news coverage of the 1988 and 1993 campaigns, for example, show that leadership and the horse-race supplied the dominant news frames (Mendelsohn 1993, 1996b). The two frames were almost interchangeable. Matthew Mendelsohn (1993: 156) suggests that this is because the horse-race frame ‘provides a simple, though questionable, metaphor: how well a leader can run the campaign indicates how well he or she will be able to run the government.’ The leader frame was even applied to issues. Indeed, such was the focus on leaders that if the leader took a day off, his or her party typically received no coverage on that night’s newscast. Televised debates between the party leaders also encourage this focus on the leaders. The first televised debate was held during the 1968 election and the next one in the 1979 election. None was held in the 1980 election, but since 1984 there have been televised debates in both official languages in every election. Leaders’ debates can have a significant effect on vote choice (Blais and Boyer 1996), but we should not overstate their importance. The 1988, 1997, and 2000 Canadian elections all provide salutary reminders that a leader can win the debates, but lose the election (Johnston et al. 1992; Blais et al. 1999; Nevitte et al. 2000; Blais et al. 2002). Indeed, leader-centred coverage may not necessarily translate into a leader-centred vote. While Mendelsohn (1994; 1996a) found that exposure to the media during the 1988 election campaign primed1 evaluations of the leaders’ trustworthiness, the impact of overall leader evaluations on vote choice did not increase among those who watched more news (Gidengil et al. 2002). The extent of leader priming varies from election to election, depending on the electoral context. In 1988, for example, the attention focused on a new and dramatic issue – the Canada–US Free Trade Agreement – meant that leadership did not get primed. In 1993 and 1997, by contrast, leader-centred campaigns enhanced the salience of leader evaluations for media-attentive voters. Similarly, Harold Clarke and his colleagues (1991) found that the strength

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of party leader effects varies from one election to another. Their tests are based on respondents’ reports as to whether the party, the party leader, or the local candidate was the ‘most important’ factor in their vote. They draw a similar conclusion from an examination of the relationship between leader images (based on responses to open-ended like/dislike questions) and vote choice. More recently, Jon Pammett (1997) has suggested that the impact of party leaders on vote choice may have waned. He looked at voters’ selfreports of the most important factor in their vote choice in every federal election held between 1974 and 1997. The percentage naming the party leaders (as opposed to the local candidates or the parties taken as a whole) has fallen from its high point in 1979 and 1980, the last two elections of the Trudeau years. This runs counter to what is becoming the conventional wisdom in Anglo-American democracies, namely that ‘Election outcomes are now, more than at any time in the past, determined by voters’ assessments of party leaders’ (Hayes and McAllister 1997: 3). This increase in the electoral importance of leaders is attributed, above all, to changing patterns of media coverage: as television coverage becomes more and more focused on the leaders, Westminster-style elections are coming to resemble contests for the presidency in the United States. This ‘presidentialization of politics’ (Mughan 1993) in Westminster-style systems is seen as mirroring the ‘rise of candidate-centred politics’ (Wattenberg 1991) in the United States.2 The increasing salience of party leaders has also been attributed to the weakening of partisan ties. Russell Dalton and his colleagues (2000: 49), in particular, have explicitly linked the rise of leader-centred politics to the process of partisan de-alignment: ‘As partisanship in the electorate has weakened, it stands to reason that voters would have to substitute other factors in their decision-making process. One such factor that has drawn considerable scholarly attention is the role of the politicians themselves in affecting electoral outcomes.’ The notion that leader effects will grow stronger as partisan ties grow weaker is certainly plausible. Identifying with a political party can serve as a useful shortcut when it comes to figuring out how to vote. If people can no longer rely on a sense of identification with a particular political party, they will look for other cues to guide their vote choice. Feelings about the party leaders can substitute for partisan ties. But do party leaders really matter more to voters than in the past? Are parties’ electoral fortunes determined by the relative popularity of their

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leaders? Pammett’s (1997) findings suggest that the answer to the first question may be ‘no’, but they rest on self-reports that may not be altogether accurate. As for the second question, there is only scattered evidence (Clarke, Kornberg, and Wearing 2000; Nevitte et al. 2000; Blais et al. 2002; Johnston 2002). On balance, that evidence suggests that the impact of leaders on election outcomes is typically rather less than is commonly assumed. In fact, based on the net impact of leaders’ personality traits on party fortunes, Johnston (2002: 173) concludes that, ‘personality is not the mainspring of Canadian electoral choice, but is a factor at the margin.’ Data and Methods In this chapter, we use data from the Canadian Election Studies to examine the effects of leaders on individual vote choice and party vote shares in eight federal elections held between 1968 and 2000. One difficulty in evaluating leader effects is disentangling the impact of leaders from that of the parties they lead. We address this difficulty by including a control for people’s ratings of the political parties. We are thus estimating the specific effect of leader evaluations, net of the impact of party evaluations. As a consequence, our estimate of leader effects is a conservative one. One drawback of this strategy is that we have to omit the 1984 election. The 1984 Canadian Election Study only solicited ratings of the leaders. With this one exception, every study has asked survey respondents to provide ratings of both the political parties and their leaders.3 The precise wording of the questions has not been entirely consistent across time (see Appendix A). The most important difference4 from the perspective of our assessment of leader effects is that the 1968, 1974, 1979, and 1980 studies explicitly linked the leader to his party. From 1988 onward, however, respondents were simply presented with the leaders’ names (in randomized order) with no party affiliation indicated. The other potentially pertinent change is the use of a filter in both 1988 and 1993 to exclude respondents who indicated that they knew ‘nothing at all’ (1988) or were ‘not at all’ well informed (1993) about a particular leader. It seems that many such respondents actually do have meaningful views about the party leaders, but these views probably have a much weaker effect on their vote choice (Blais et al 2000). Their exclusion may thus strengthen the observed relationship between leader evaluations and vote choice. Both the decoupling of leaders and

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parties and the use of a filter could potentially affect our estimates of the relative importance of leaders across time. Any such bias will be in favour of the proposition that the independent effects of leaders have strengthened. Respondents who refused to provide a rating or who replied with a ‘don’t know’ are treated as missing data and omitted from the analyses.5 Conditional logistic regression is used to estimate the impact of leader evaluations on vote choice. This estimation technique makes it possible to model the choice among three or more parties simultaneously, allowing for both individual-specific and choice-specific effects. We treat leader evaluations as choice-specific variables. The assumption is that the effects of any given leader’s evaluations will be the same for all choices. This makes sense: the more negatively the leader is rated, the lower the odds of choosing his or her party over another. However, our specification does allow for some leaders to have consistently stronger effects than others. The salience of leadership is thus viewed as a characteristic of the party. As Alvarez and Nagler (1998: 56) put it, ‘conditional logit is “conditional on the characteristics of the choices.”’ The analyses all control for the effects of social background characteristics that have consistently been related to vote choice in Canada (Clarke et al. 1980; Nevitte et al. 2000; Blais et al. 2002). The relevant background characteristics are region (Gidengil et al. 1999), religion (Irvine 1974; Johnston 1985), union membership (Archer 1985), gender (Blais et al. 2002), and age (Johnston 1992).6 Age was entered as a continuous variable, while the other characteristics were represented by a series of dummy variables. Social background characteristics are all individualspecific variables, while party ratings are treated as choice-specific variables. For the elections that took place from 1968 to 1988, we analyse the choice among the three parties that ran candidates across the country in all five of the elections under study, namely, the Liberal Party, the Progressive Conservative Party, and the New Democratic Party (NDP). For the 1993, 1997, and 2000 elections, we run separate analyses for Quebec and for Canada outside Quebec. With the advent of the Reform Party and the Bloc Québécois in the 1993 election, the choice set was no longer the same across the country. The Bloc Québécois only runs candidates in Quebec, while the Reform Party and later the Alliance were never competitive in Quebec. Accordingly, from 1993 onward, we focus on the choice among the Liberal Party, the Progressive Conservative Party, the NDP, and Reform/Alliance outside Quebec, and we restrict the analysis to the Liberal Party, the Bloc Québécois, and the Progressive Conservative Party in Quebec.7

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The coefficients estimated by conditional logistic regression lack a straightforward interpretation. They represent the predicted marginal impact of a given independent variable on the log-odds of choosing a given party relative to a baseline party. Their meaning depends on the values of the other variables included in the model. However, they enable us to estimate the independent impact of leaders on both the probability of voting for any given party and party vote shares, using ‘what if?’ simulations.8 The most logical counterfactual for assessing how much leaders matter is to ask how vote choice would differ if leaders did not matter at all. On the basis of the estimations, we can calculate how much the predicted probability of voting for a party increases or decreases for the average voter when leader ratings are assumed to have no effect on voters’ choice of party.9 Changes in predicted vote probabilities, however, risk overstating the importance of leaders. Some people will vote for a party despite the fact that they do not like the leader. In other words, were it not for the leader, they would be even more likely to vote for the party. Under our counterfactual scenario, their choice of party would remain the same. Changes in vote probabilities are only consequential if they cause people to switch parties. Accordingly, a more meaningful test of leader effects is to ask how many voters would actually vote for a different party if they did not take leader evaluations into account.10 Leadership effects can be quite powerful at the individual level and yet have only modest effects on parties’ electoral fortunes. This can happen if the effects of leaders are offsetting: for every vote a party loses due to negative perceptions of its leader, it may gain a vote from those who view the leader favourably. Johnston illustrates this for the 1988, 1993, and 1997 elections, using voters’ perceptions of the leaders’ character and competence. A similar pattern was evident in the 2000 election when leader evaluations were used to assess the impact of leaders (Blais et al. 2002: chapter 12). Accordingly, we also calculate the net impact of leader ratings on party vote shares. This involves estimating how many more (or fewer) votes each party would have obtained if leader ratings had had no effect on the vote.11 Findings Trends in Leader and Party Ratings We begin by simply tracking trends in leader ratings and party ratings across time (see Figure 1). The ratings have been centred around the

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Figure 1 Trends in Average Leader and Party Ratings, 1968–2000 10 Leaders

8

Parties

6 4 2 0 –2 –4 –6 1968

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Source: Canadian Election Studies, 1968–2000. Note that the rating scales have been re-scaled to run from –50 to +50, with zero indicating neutrality.

neutral point. It is clear that leaders and parties alike are less popular, on average, than they were in the late 1960s. Party ratings have declined consistently across the entire period, going from lukewarm in the late 1960s to negative in the 1990s. The overall decline is over ten points. The decline in leader ratings has been less consistent. The time series begins at the high point of Trudeaumania in the 1968 election. This effect had clearly dissipated by the time of the 1974 election and, if we set the 1968 figure aside, the overall decline in average leader ratings has been quite modest. Figure 2 shows why the overall trend in leader ratings has been much less consistent. This figure tracks the average leader ratings for each of the leaders who contested two elections or more during the period under study. There is a strikingly consistent pattern. Almost every leader has suffered a decline in popularity. This ‘fallen heroes’ pattern (Clarke et al. 1991; Turcotte 2001) holds regardless of party and regardless of how popular (or not) the leader was in his or her first election as party leader. The advent of a new – and popular – leader may temporarily raise average leader ratings, but then the effect wears off. The only exceptions

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Figure 2 Trends in Leader and Ratings by Leader, 1968–2000 20 15 Trudeau

10 Broadbent

Mulroney Chrétien

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2000

Source: Canadian Election Studies, 1968–2000. Note that the rating scales have been re-scaled to run from -50 to +50, with zero indicating neutrality.

are Ed Broadbent who led the NDP in four elections between 1979 and 1988, Alexa McDonough who led the same party in the 1997 and 2000 elections, and Gilles Duceppe, the leader of the Bloc Québécois in the same two elections. The Impact of Leaders on Voters’ Choice of Party Leader ratings clearly have a significant independent effect on the probability of voting for a given party (see Figure 3). Across the eight elections, the mean effect is 8.2 percentage points. In other words, for the average voter, the probability of voting for a party would typically change by about eight points if evaluations of the leaders had no bearing on vote choice. The effect varies from election to election, and while there is some hint of an upward trend, it is not statistically significant.12 The estimated impact of leader ratings on vote probabilities was only one point higher in 2000 than it was in 1968. True, the 1968 election marked the high point of Trudeaumania, but the leader effect was stronger in both the 1979 and 1980 elections than it was in 1997. The

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Figure 3 The Estimated Impact of Leaders on Vote Probability 14.0% 12.0%

vote probability

10.0% 8.0% 6.0% 4.0% 2.0% 0.0% 1968

1974

1979

1980

1988

1993

1997

2000

election year Note: There was no election study in 1972. The 1984 Canadian Election Study did not include party ratings.

one pattern that emerges is for the impact of leaders on vote probabilities to be strongest in elections that featured new party leaders. The only exception to this pattern is 1997 when the effect was relatively weak.13 Predictably, when we examine how many voters would actually change their vote, the leader effects are not quite as strong (see Figure 4). The average impact across the eight elections is 6.3 percentage points. In other words, in a typical election, just over 6 per cent of voters would probably have voted differently were it not for the party leaders. Again, there is no evidence of a significant upward trend in the impact of leaders. The estimated impact varies from one election to the next. Leader effects do seem to have been stronger in the 1993 and 2000 elections. Johnston (2002) suggests that times of electoral volatility may be particularly susceptible to strong leader effects because voters have more need of the cues that leaders can provide. Looking at the impact of voters’ perceptions of leaders’ competence and character in the 1988, 1993 and 1997 elections, he found that leadership had particularly powerful effects on individual vote choice in Canada’s electoral earthquake of 1993.

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Figure 4 The Gross Impact of Leaders on Vote Choice 10.0% 9.0% 8.0% 7.0% 6.0% 5.0% 4.0% 3.0% 2.0% 1.0% 0.0% 1968

1974

1979

1980

1988

1993

1997

2000

election year Note: There was no election study in 1972. The 1984 Canadian Election Study did not include party ratings.

The Impact of Leaders on Vote Shares As Johnston cautions, strong leader effects at the individual level do not necessarily translate into equally powerful effects on parties’ vote shares (see Figure 5). If leaders did not matter, some people would certainly vote differently, but if the resulting shifts are self-cancelling, the net impact may be minimal. For the eight elections under study, the average net impact is 3 percentage points. The disjuncture between the gross impact and the net impact is most evident in the 2000 election. Under the counterfactual scenario of no leader effects, 7.7 per cent of voters would have voted for a different party, and yet the net impact on party vote shares would have been only 1.3 points. By contrast, in 1993 the strong leader effects observed at the individual level are paralleled by a powerful net effect.14 Our simulation suggests that the Liberals’ vote share would have fallen by almost six points if leaders had not mattered,

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Figure 5 The Net Effect of Leaders on Vote Choice 7.0% 6.0% 5.0% 4.0% 3.0% 2.0% 1.0% 0.0% 1968

1974

1979

1980

1988

1993

1997

2000

election year Note: There was no election study in 1972. The 1984 Canadian Election Study did not include party ratings.

while the Progressive Conservative vote would have been almost four points higher and the NDP would have picked up two points. The impact of leader evaluations on vote shares in the 1993 election was twice as strong as the average across the eight elections. Contrary to the ‘presidentialization’ thesis, the impact of leaders on their parties’ electoral fortunes seems to have been diminishing. If we set aside the 1993 election, there is a significant downward trend in the net effects of leaders.15 This result is all the more striking given that our test was biased in favour of the proposition that leaders have become more important to the vote (see above). As the popularity of party leaders in general has declined, it seems, they have come to matter less to electoral outcomes. Typically, it is the party with the most popular leader that would stand to lose the most if leaders did not matter. This was true of all six of the elections from 1968 to 1993. In all of those elections, the party with the most popular leader was the winning party. In the 1997 and 2000 elections, however, it was the party that was fighting for its electoral survival

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that would have suffered the most if voters had not taken their evaluations of the leaders into account. This is further evidence of the role of first Jean Charest and then Joe Clark in saving the former Progressive Conservative Party from electoral annihilation (Nevitte et al. 2000; Blais et al. 2002). It is also a salutary reminder that even a small net leader effect can be consequential. Discussion Leaders clearly do have a significant independent impact on vote choice in Canada. There is little evidence, though, to suggest that party leaders have become more important to vote choice over the past thirty years. This non-finding holds whether we examine the impact of leaders on individual vote choice or their impact on vote shares. Indeed, if anything, the net effect of leaders on the outcome has diminished over the past thirty years. Of course, it is possible that the increase in the salience of leaders had already occurred before the start of the period covered by the Canadian election studies. After all, Canada’s first ‘television election’ took place in 1957. Unfortunately, there is little systematic cross-time data on the content of campaign coverage. However, a study of Canadian newspaper coverage shows that the attention paid to party leaders (compared to the parties themselves) did increase between the 1957 and 1968 elections (Gordon 1999).16 On the other hand, the ratio of leader mentions to party mentions was no higher in the 1997 election than it had been in the 1968 election. In fact, Gordon’s figures show considerable fluctuation from election to election, ranging from a low of 1.1 in 1984 to a high of 2.0 in 1974. This could help to explain the lack of a consistent increase in the impact of leader evaluations on individual vote choice: the amount of media attention paid to leaders varies from election to election, and so does the importance of leaders to vote choice. There are other reasons why the presidentialization thesis does not hold in Canada, at least with respect to voting and elections. First, we should not overstate the impact of television. If television has encouraged the personalization of electoral politics, we would expect leader evaluations to carry the most weight with voters who watch the most news. However, research in Canada and elsewhere provides very mixed support for this assumption. While Scott Keeter (1987) showed that presidential candidates’ personal qualities did come to matter more during the 1960s to voters who depended on television for their news,

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Anthony Mughan (1995) found that leaders actually mattered least to television-dependent voters in both the 1987 Australian federal election and the 1984 US House of Representatives election. A cross-time study of voter characteristics and leader effects in seven countries, including Canada, found only a single instance (the 2000 Spanish election) where leaders mattered most to voters who watched the most news on television (Gidengil, forthcoming). The second assumption underlying the presidentialization thesis rests on equally shaky empirical foundations. This is the notion that partisan de-alignment has opened the way for party leaders to exercise more influence on vote choice and thereby determine their parties’ fortunes. If so, we would expect leader evaluations to carry the most weight with non-partisans. However, in his study of six US presidential elections, Larry Bartels (2002) found that strong partisans and independents accorded much the same weight to the candidates’ personality traits. And Frank Brettschneider and Oscar Gabriel (2002) showed that candidate effects were actually a little stronger, if anything, among party identifiers than among non-identifiers in the 1998 German election. Similarly, a comparative study of voter characteristics and leader effects in nine countries, including Canada, found that leaders either matter as much to partisans as to non-partisans or actually matter more to partisans. Moreover, in Canada at least, it is not at all clear that partisanship has been waning (see Gidengil et al. 2002). Certainly, the trends in the impact of leaders over the past thirty years support those who have questioned whether the ‘rise of candidatecentred politics’ applies to voting in Canadian elections. As scholars of Canadian politics have long supposed, leaders are important to vote choice in Canada, but there is little to suggest that they have become more important in recent years.

APPENDIX A QUESTION WORDING: LEADER AND PARTY RATING 1968 There are many aspects of political parties which strike Canadians in different ways. We would like to get your feelings towards those aspects of our parties. We are interested to see how you like the leaders ... and the party as a whole. You’ll see here a drawing of a thermometer. It’s been called a ‘feeling thermometer’

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because it helps measure one’s feelings towards various things. Here’s how it works. If you don’t particularly like or dislike the person ... we are asking about, place them at the 50 degree mark. If your feelings are very warm, then you would give a score between 50 and 100, the warmer your feelings, the higher the score. On the other hand, if you don’t like the person ... you would place them somewhere between 0 and 50. The cooler your feelings, the closer the number will be to 0. If you don’t know too much ... just say so, and we’ll go on to the next one. Let’s start with the Liberals ... 1974, 1979, and 1980 There are many aspects of political parties which strike Canadians in different ways. We would like to get your feelings towards some of these aspects of our parties. We are interested to see how you liked the leaders, the party’s candidates in your riding in the last election, and the party as a whole. We will use the feeling thermometer again for these questions [hand card]. Let’s start with the Liberals, how much do you like their leader, Mr. Trudeau? Where would you place him on the thermometer? ... And, finally, how would you rate the Liberal Party, taken as a whole? Now the Progressive Conservatives, how much do you like their leader, Mr. Stanfield? etc. 1988 Now let’s talk about your feelings towards the political parties, their leaders and their candidates. I’ll read a name and ask you to rate a person or a party on a thermometer that runs from 0 to 100 degrees. Ratings between 50 and 100 degrees mean that you feel favourable toward that person. Ratings between 0 and 50 degrees mean that you feel unfavourable toward that person. You may use any number from 0 to 100. How would you rate [randomized name of leader] [randomized name of party]? A filter was used to exclude those who said they knew ‘nothing at all’ about a given leader. 1993 Now, I’ll ask you to rate each leader on a scale that runs from 0 to 100. Ratings between 0 and 50 mean that you rate that person unfavourably. Ratings between 50 and 100 mean that you rate that person favourably. You may use any number from 0 to 100. How would you rate [randomized name of leader] [randomized name of party]? A filter was used to exclude those who said they were ‘not at all well’ informed about a given leader.

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1997 and 2000 Now we’re going to ask you how you feel about the party leaders using a scale from 0 to 100. 0 means you really dislike the leader and 100 means you really like the leader. You can use any number from 0 to 100. How do you feel about [randomized name of leader]?

NOTES The research on which this paper was based was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under its Major Collaborative Research Initiatives program. The authors would like to thank Cameron Anderson and Jason Roy for their research assistance. 1 Priming refers to the process whereby extensive media coverage causes a voter to attach more importance to a given consideration when deciding how to vote. 2 Wattenberg himself is much more cautious about generalizing his thesis to parliamentary systems (Dalton, McAllister, and Wattenberg 2000; see also McAllister 1996). He and his colleagues suggest that the mere fact that the party leaders’ names do not appear on the ballot helps to ensure that the political parties themselves remain more salient in parliamentary systems. 3 No election study was conducted in 1972. 4 Until 1993 the questions asked respondents to rate the parties and their leaders on a hypothetical thermometer, while the 1993, 1997, and 2000 studies simply asked for ratings on a 0 to 100 scale. The 1968, 1974, 1979, 1980, 1997, and 2000 studies all asked respondents how much they liked or disliked the parties and their leaders, whereas the 1988 study asked how favourable or unfavourable they felt and the 1993 study asked them to rate the parties and their leaders. 5 The 1968 to 1980 Canadian Election Studies were all post-election studies. Accordingly, for comparability, we use the post-election waves of the 1988 to 2000 Canadian Election Studies. It should be noted that post-election surveys tend to overstate liking of the leader of the winning party, probability due to a ‘honeymoon effect.’ 6 Ethnicity is the other relevant social cleavage in Canada, but the overlap between Quebec residence, Catholic religion, and French ancestry creates statistical (multicollinearity) problems if region, religion and ethnicity are all included in the same equation.

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7 The NDP never attracted more than 2 per cent of the Quebec vote in these three elections and is therefore excluded from the analysis. 8 From 1993 onward, the simulations are performed separately for Quebec and the rest of the country, and the results are then combined to give figures for Canada as a whole. 9 To do this, we first calculate the absolute change in predicted vote probability for each party between the full model and the counterfactual ‘no effect’ scenario for each voter. For each voter, we sum these absolute changes and divide by two. Finally, we obtain the average effect by dividing the sum of the values obtained at step two for all voters by the number of voters. 10 This involves comparing the predicted vote choice for each voter under the full model and the counterfactual ‘no effect’ model, counting the number of voters whose predicted vote would change, and dividing this number by the total number of voters in order to obtain the percentage of voters who would have voted differently but for their evaluations of the leaders. 11 To do this, we simply count how many more (or fewer) votes each party would be predicted to receive under the counterfactual ‘no effect’ model, divide the sum of these numbers by two, and then divide by the total number of voters to obtain the net percentage point change. 12 This is determined on the basis of a regression analysis that attempted to fit a linear trend term to the data reported in Figure 3. 13 It could be that the new leader effect only applies to leaders of competitive parties. In 1997 both the Progressive Conservative Party and the NDP had new leaders, but both parties were fighting for survival. The leader effect was much stronger in Quebec. This was Gilles Duceppe’s first election as leader of the Bloc Québécois, but he was leading a party that was very competitive within the province. 14 This is at odds with Johnston’s (2002) conclusion, but he was looking at the impact of personality traits, not overall evaluations. 15 The linear trend term is statistically significant at the p