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The Importance of Local Party Activity in Understanding Canadian Politics: Winning from the Ground Up in the 2015 Federal Election
Abstract
Political parties have long been identified as critical players in Canadian democracy. In this address I focus on the activities of parties at the constituency level arguing that this is crucial to fully understanding many important questions in Canadian political science. By way of example, using data relating to the 2015 federal election, I argue that examining the relative vitality of local party associations in the period between election campaigns assists in a fuller understanding of election outcomes and that examining local party nomination dynamics is key to understanding the underrepresentation of women in the candidate pool and ultimately in the House of Commons.
... Much of the analyses on the rise of the NDP have focused on national-level factors such as the relative popularity of party leaders, the extent to which NDP policies and values matched those of voters, and the professionalization of the party (Clarke et al., 2017;Fournier et al., 2013;McGrane, 2019). Cross (2016), however, shows that revitalization of Liberal local organizations and campaigns played an important role in the party's 2015 resurgence. Cross's finding raises a question as to whether there is a similar correlation between NDP local campaign strength and NDP success. ...
... The intuitive conclusion from Cross's (2016) work is that if local organization revitalization helped the Liberals' rise from third to first in 2015, the NDP should have been hurt by its relative organizational weakness. Further, that Liberal local organizations needed revitalization in the lead-up to 2015 implies that the NDP may have benefited from a local organization advantage in elections between 2006 and 2015. ...
... These fluctuations have often been attributed to national-level factors such as the NDP's shift toward the centre (Delacourt, 2016;McGrane, 2019), the popularity of leaders such as Jack Layton and Justin Trudeau (Fournier et al., 2013;Clark et al., 2017) and the NDP's reaction to Stephen Harper's commitment to ban niqabs from citizenship ceremonies (Stephenson et al., 2019). Cross (2016), however, argues that the revitalization of Liberal local organizations was central to the party's 2015 resurgence. This raises the question as to whether local spending affected NDP success. ...
The Canadian party system experienced a period of remarkable transition between 2006 and 2015, with the New Democratic Party (NDP) and Liberals trading places as the main competitor to the Conservatives. While national-level explanations are often used to explain this volatility, William Cross's research has shown that local association revitalization played a central role in the Liberals’ 2015 resurgence. This article examines the relationship between NDP local spending and success between 2006 and 2015. It shows that the NDP was consistently outspent by its opponents overall but that it often had a spending advantage in marginal ridings. As a result, this article finds little evidence that the NDP's local spending disadvantage cost the NDP seats, even though it finds a positive correlation between NDP local spending and NDP vote share.
... However, the possibility of a woman being chosen as the general election candidate is dependent on a number of factors, including whether a woman sought the nomination. Research suggests that when women seek party nominations, they perform quite well-generally, on par with men (see, for example, Erickson, 1991;Cross 2016a). The real deficit appears to be in the number of women seeking nominations. ...
... In addition to a formal candidate search, informal means of local recruitment and encouragement are likely important as well. Recent research suggests that women are significantly more likely to be (successfully) nominated in districts where a woman serves as president of the local constituency executive (Cheng and Tavits, 2011;Cross, 2016a). A similar finding is shown cross-nationally by , who find that parties with more women on the party's national executive also nominate more women candidates. ...
... The later contests saw twice the growth in membership numbers than did those with no women contestants. This may reflect the fact that women nomination candidates are more likely to be challenged when seeking a nomination and thus the need to mobilize support (Cross, 2016a). 12 The remaining question is how all of these factors fit together. ...
It is well established that political parties play a key role as gatekeepers to elected office. This article explores the local determinants of a diverse candidate pool. In particular, we seek to uncover the district- or riding-specific party factors that are related to women's participation in the parties’ candidate nomination stages. That is, why do some nomination races in a party have no women contestants, while others have many? Using data from an original survey of party constituency association presidents, as well as extensive nomination data from Elections Canada, we demonstrate that a number of local factors are related to the presence of women contesting a party's nomination. Local party associations with a woman serving as president, as well as associations that hold earlier and longer nominations, are significantly more likely to see a woman enter the contest. The results are important since they call attention to what parties do at the grassroots level, as well as highlight practical solutions for parties seeking to have more diversity in their candidate pool.
... For over a century, the expectation in Canadian parties has been that party delegates, members or supporters in each riding should pick candidates at local nominating conventions (Carty, 2002;Farney and Koop, 2018;Siegfried, 1906). However, there is mounting evidence that both central party actors (such as party leaders, their staff, or party executive directors) and local party actors (such as riding association executives) exert influence over candidate selection behind the scenes (Cheng and Tavits, 2011;Cross, 2006Cross, , 2016Cross and Prusyers, 2019;Koop and Bittner, 2011;Marland and DeCillia, 2020;Pruysers and Cross, 2016;Thomas and Morden, 2019;Tolley, 2019). Given the evidence that central and local actors can influence the outcomes of candidate selection, Cross (2018) reconceptualizes candidate selection as an area of shared authority rather than local autonomy. ...
... Due to their experience and social ties, they are typically capable of constructing local campaign organizations. These organizations play an important part in general election outcomes (Carty and Eagles, 2005;Cross, 2016). However, they also allow incumbents to fend off nomination challenges. ...
Under what circumstances do central and local party actors engage in gatekeeping to influence the outcomes of local nomination races? In this article, I develop a theory of gatekeeping in Canadian parties by synthesizing past work on candidate selection with a multi-method field study of New Brunswick provincial nominations (2017–2018). I present evidence in favour of this theory from participant-observation of 25 nominating conventions, 93 elite interviews, and an original dataset of major party nominations for the 2018 New Brunswick election. The theory and evidence show how gatekeeping by central party actors helps explain how nominations can go uncontested, even in competitive and safe seats. The theory also generates several testable claims for future studies of candidate selection in other places, time periods and levels of government in Canada.
... The majoritarian electoral system and regionalized electorate are notorious for distorting election results (Cairns, 1968;Young and Archer, 2002;Johnston, 2017). By concentrating exclusively on campaign tasks in their own riding, local party organizations attempt to withstand (or harness) modest swings in party vote share at the regional or national level in pursuit of electing their own candidate (Sayers, 1999;Cross, 2016). Constituency campaigning effectively becomes "a parochial contest managed by local partisans designed to recruit a candidate and mobilize the votes" (Carty, 2002: 724). ...
... Candidates, who are typically nominated by party members through the EDA (Thomas and Bodet, 2013;Cross, 2016;Tolley, 2019), make up the second entity of local party organizations. Once nominated, candidates take control of electoral district association resources for the constituency campaign. ...
Reforms to campaign finance laws at the beginning of the twenty-first century led to concerns that Canadian political parties would become more centralized, thereby altering the stratarchical arrangement between local party organizations and the national party office. This article extends the period of analysis to 2008 and 2011. Although concerns were not unfounded, data reported in this article reveal that horizontal linkages developed between constituency associations in the Conservative Party of Canada, instead of downward money transfers from the national office. The article compares the Conservative party to its major competitors and explores three regional cases where these linkages are prevalent. Tobit regression is used to examine whether monetary transfers are coordinated by the central office or initiated by local constituency associations. Given weak evidence for the latter, the findings demonstrate that parties with a reliable base of support can leverage their campaign resources from one region into a national presence.
... Equally, on October 19th 2015 an election took place and the Liberal party won an additional 148 seats, with a total of 184 seats forming a majority government led by Justin Trudeau. Prior to 2015, the Liberal party was divided and however during this election things changed and literature shows the unified campaign at a local level from different members of parliament across the country [13]. Table 5 summarizes the empirical performances of LAD and its comparison to alternative methods. ...
Dynamic and temporal graphs are rich data structures that are used to model complex relationships between entities over time. In particular, anomaly detection in temporal graphs is crucial for many real world applications such as intrusion identification in network systems, detection of ecosystem disturbances and detection of epidemic outbreaks. In this paper, we focus on change point detection in dynamic graphs and address two main challenges associated with this problem: I) how to compare graph snapshots across time, II) how to capture temporal dependencies. To solve the above challenges, we propose Laplacian Anomaly Detection (LAD) which uses the spectrum of the Laplacian matrix of the graph structure at each snapshot to obtain low dimensional embeddings. LAD explicitly models short term and long term dependencies by applying two sliding windows. In synthetic experiments, LAD outperforms the state-of-the-art method. We also evaluate our method on three real dynamic networks: UCI message network, US senate co-sponsorship network and Canadian bill voting network. In all three datasets, we demonstrate that our method can more effectively identify anomalous time points according to significant real world events.
... Party programs are a lifeline to political parties. They help boost the political legitimacy of the party by showing that the party is rooted in the concerns of the people and instil the profound understanding among the locals that the party exists and functions in the area (Cross, 2016). Meanwhile, party activists that organize party programs consist of loyal, committed, and faithful party members (Blake, Carty, & Erickson, 1991). ...
Purpose of the study: This study explored how party activists retain their high activism with the party through their involvement with party activities. It also attempted to explore party programs at the grassroots level that helps maintain continuous grassroots support for the party. The strong symbiosis between party activists and party programs at the grassroots level was a secret formula to win elections. Methodology: Being qualitative in nature, this study conducted in-depth interviews with thirty - two party activists. The PAS and UMNO party activists in Terengganu were selected as units of analysis using the purposive sampling technique. The interview data were thematically analysed through the content analysis method. Main Findings: This study yielded that Community and Welfare programs, and Electoral Works were two impactful party programs to fish votes and maintain voters’ support at the grassroots level. On party efforts to maintain the motivation of its activists, this study found four main party programs namely internal programs, political training, involvement outside party, and joining special programs. Applications of this study: This study concludes that ensuring party activists at their highest level of motivation by designing various programs are equally important with organizing party programs with the voters at local levels. When party activists are highly motivated, party programs at local levels would be successfully run, while organizing party programs at the local level without the presence of highly motivated party activists would be worthless. Novelty/Originality of this study: Party activists are often neglected by party leaders, as much focus has been given to party manifesto, choosing winnable candidates, and encountering electoral issues. Neglecting party activists often leads to frustration, thus party programs cannot be properly organized without committed party activists.
... The emphasis in this model is on economic conditions, party identification and party leaders, framed in a national perspective. 1 However, some scholars have argued that the local level needs to be examined more thoroughly (Blidook 2012;Cross 2016) and a stream of research has developed on what happens at the district level. For example, Marsh (2004) shows evidence that contact with a candidate has a significant positive impact on vote choice. ...
The existing literature on the local level assumes that citizens care about what happens in their district but that assumption has never been tested. We tackle this question using the Making Electoral Democracy Work data covering 11 elections in Germany, Spain, Canada and France to show that many citizens have strong attachments to their local community and care about the outcome of the election in their local district. Moreover, we specify for whom the local level matters the most (and least). We find that those who are more integrated into their community are more strongly attached to their municipality and attribute greater importance to electoral outcomes in their district.
Federal elections between 2008 and 2019 saw a great of volatility in Quebec, with important consequences for election outcomes. The surge in New Democratic Party (NDP) support in Quebec led the party to official opposition, while Liberal gains in 2011 led the party to a majority government, and Bloc Québécois gains in 2019 helped to reduce the Liberals to a minority. To what extent was this volatility driven by voters switching parties and to what degree was it driven by voters entering and exiting the electorate? This article uses ecological inference based on riding-level data to examine the dynamics of party competition in Quebec from 2008 to 2019. We show that while voter mobilization mattered to volatility, vote switching was the important driver of changing party fortunes during this period.
Detecting anomalies from a series of temporal networks has many applications, including road accidents in transport networks and suspicious events in social networks. While there are many methods for network anomaly detection, statistical methods are under utilised in this space even though they have a long history and proven capability in handling temporal dependencies. In this paper, we introduce \textit{oddnet}, a feature-based network anomaly detection method that uses time series methods to model temporal dependencies. We demonstrate the effectiveness of oddnet on synthetic and real-world datasets. The R package oddnet implements this algorithm.
Canadians have several reasons for wanting to become elected representatives. The most common motivations are the opportunity to influence government decision making, make a contribution to their com- munities, and promote their values. Interviews with Canadians who have run, or who might run, for elected office further reveal that individuals are attracted to a political career at a specific level of government because of an interest in that government’s policy domains and/or a rejection of politics at another level of government. Analysis of candidate biographies published during the federal election in 2021 demonstrates that motivations to run can vary by gender and race. Get the chapter (and entire book) here: http://www.ubcpress.ca/inside-the-local-campaign-open-access-edition
Do elites exhibit gender bias when responding to political aspirants? Drawing on theories of gender bias, group attachment, and partisan identity, I conduct the first audit experiment outside the United States to examine the presence of gender bias in the earliest phases of the political recruitment process. Based on responses from 1,774 Canadian legislators, I find evidence of an overall gender bias in favor of female political aspirants. Specifically, legislators are more responsive to female political aspirants and more likely to provide them with helpful advice when they ask how to get involved in politics. This pro-women bias, which exists at all levels of government, is stronger among female legislators and those associated with left-leaning parties. These results suggest that political elites in Canada are open to increasing female political representation and thus should serve as welcome encouragement for women to pursue their political ambitions.
Many scholars suggest that candidates are increasingly personalizing their campaign efforts, local organizations, and even their messaging. A variety of temporal factors have been identified as fueling this personalization of politics, including the decline of partisanship, evolving media norms, and changes in party organization such as the adoption of primaries. The personalization of politics is linked to spatial, or geographic, factors, as well. Research suggests that in geographically defined electoral systems, personalized campaigning most often involves a focus on district-level issues and that this translates into parliamentarians prioritizing local interests in the legislature. One potentially important factor that has been relatively understudied in explaining personalization is money, especially its geographic source. Using an innovative dataset that pairs candidate survey responses with administrative financial data, we test whether candidates are less likely to run personalized campaigns when their local party organization receives a higher proportion of its total income from the party at the centre. Our findings suggest that the degree to which campaign funds are raised locally or transferred from the central party office helps shape the message that local candidates convey to voters, although not how they get their message out.
The Importance of local party activity in understanding Canadian politics: Winning from the ground up in the 2015 federal election – CORRIGENDUM - Volume 52 Issue 3 - William Cross
A notable gender gap in candidate selection still exists in Canada. While the five major political parties all used a similar decentralized candidate selection process in the 2015 Canadian federal election, the proportion of women candidates varied significantly by party. Placing the authority for selection with constituency-level party organizations limits the ability of parties to impose top-down gender parity policies and also, in principle, makes the process sensitive to demographic and political differences among constituencies. However, the results of mixed-methods analyses show limited influence of traditional local political and demographic variables, but a strong effect of party. The findings also show significant spatial clustering, suggesting that factors such as local social networks may help explain the variation in the nomination of women candidates. We conclude by discussing how party cultures and social networks might reflect supply and demand obstacles for potential women candidates, and how these factors might present challenges to achieving gender parity among federal candidates in Canada.
Political socialisation plays a crucial but complex role in determining how immigrants adjust to the political environment of their host country. This study examines the effects of initial political socialisation and resocialisation on immigrants’ electoral participation in Canada. It addresses three questions: To what extent does the outlooks that develop from earlier political experiences in the country of origin shape immigrants’ subsequent electoral participation in Canada? To what extent, and how, does subsequent experience with politics in Canada affect electoral participation? And finally, how does initial socialisation in the country of origin condition resocialisation in Canada? The results indicate that not only does resocialisation leave a unique and lasting imprint on immigrant electoral participation in the host country, but also that the nature of resocialisation process in the host country is conditioned by the distinctive political outlooks immigrants acquire under different political regimes in their respective countries of origin.
Drawing upon the ‘satisfaction with democracy’ and ‘divisive primary’ literatures, this article examines how losers of intra-party elections respond to defeat and the consequences that these choices have on party organization and strength. In other words, do losers of intra-party elections continue to support the party or do they, like losers of general elections, feel less satisfied with democracy and withdraw their support (or even ‘exit’ the party)? Exploring rates of membership activism and satisfaction from a recent study of Canadian party members, this article demonstrates that losers of intra-party elections are more likely to exit the party, significantly less likely to remain active and engaged in party politics, and significantly more likely to report dissatisfaction with party membership. These findings suggest that parties must find a way of keeping losers engaged with the party.
We address two questions: How many voters particularly like a candidate from another party? And do these voters vote for their preferred party or their preferred candidate? We use the Making Electoral Democracy Work data for the 2015 Canadian federal election in three provinces (British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec). We find that one voter out of ten particularly liked a candidate from a party other than the one he or she preferred. For two out of five of such voters, the preference for the local candidate trumped the party preference.
In this research note we test the argument that centralised and exclusive nomination methods result in more diverse lists of candidates than do those organised with a more inclusive, decentralised selectorate. We do so using a database of candidate information compiled for the 2010 and 2013 Australian federal elections and an analysis of the House of Representatives selection rules for every state and territory branch of the Labor and Liberal parties. The Australian parties provide an excellent opportunity to examine this proposition as there is significant diversity in the types of selection methods used, both within and between the major parties. Our findings reveal significant differences between the two parties, even when similar methods of selection are used. We show that methods of preselection where authority is shared between local members and the central party are more likely to select female candidates, but only when this is supported by a willing party culture.
In one of his last publications, Peter Mair documented how party membership had declined substantially in virtually all European democracies. As his collaborators on this piece, it seems pertinent that we take these findings as a point of departure and discuss what they mean for our understanding of party democracy. After all, the collapse of membership figures calls into question one of the central elements of our conceptualization of representative democracy, namely that it is based on voluntary political participation within political parties. All authoritative typologies of political parties consider the role of members to be one of their defining elements, although the cartel party most clearly envisages the marginalization of party members by professional party politicians. The traditional organizational allies of political parties (e.g. trade unions, organized religion) are subject to similar processes of erosion. In this article, we review the evidence of the social anchorage of political parties and discuss how political parties and party democracy can survive in an age where amateur politicians are becoming an increasingly rare species and parties are being transformed into organizational vehicles for those to whom politics is a profession rather than a vocation.
Like parties elsewhere, the Australian parties have witnessed a decline in membership activism in recent years and some have suggested that near memberless parties may become the norm. Drawing on elite interviews, party documents and examination of recent organisational reforms, we argue that parties continue to need members and view their involvement as essential to achieving their objectives. In response to declining rates of activism parties have begun to experiment with different forms of membership, such as policy branches, and to expand the traditional notion of membership to include ‘supporters’. We show that membership is a flexible concept that is used by parties to fulfil their institutional functions and electoral objectives, and is defined in unique ways in each sphere of activity. We suggest that accounts of party decline relying on formal membership numbers may be inaccurate.
Many legislative recruitment scholars seek to explain why women, visible minorities and other social groups are underrepresented in the world's legislatures. Researchers in this area often use a supply and demand metaphor to frame their work, but cannot agree whether underrepresentation is mainly a supply-or demand-side problem. With an eye to moving this debate forward, this article offers a new approach to operationalizing sup-ply and demand and shows how reverse-flow diagnostic testing, supply-first analysis and an improved testing regime can pinpoint when and why underrepresentation begins to occur in any political system. The new diagnostic approach is applied to data from a pro-vincial election in British Columbia, Canada. The article uses the new diagnostic and BC case to demonstrate how underrepresentation in any political system is attributable to demand-side discrimination by gatekeepers and not an undersupply of political aspirants from any particular social group.
Parties vary substantially in the proportion of women they send to parliament. I examine how party characteristics affect women's representation in the parliamentary parties of 12 advanced industrial nations over time. Four party-level factors have some explanatory power: organizational structure, ideology, women party activists and gender-related candidate rules. A temporal sequence is proposed in which these factors and electoral rules directly and indirectly affect women's representation. Women party activists and gender-related rules are the more direct mechanisms affecting women's legislative representation. Further, New Left values and high levels of women activists within the party both enhance the likelihood that gender-related candidate rules will be implemented.
span style="font-size: 100%; font-family: Arial; color: #000000;" data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"At least since the beginning of the 1980s, much of the writing on the strategies, tactics, and policies of parties has explicitly cautioned against the treatment of party as a \u201cunitary actor\u201d\u0094 (e.g., Daalder 1983; Laver and Schofield 1990). Party leaders, it is now argued, may differ from one another and from party followers with regard to the ends which they pursue and the resources which they employ; even within the leadership itself, it is suggested, the conflict between factions may be such as to militate against any theories taking the party as a whole as the relevant unit of analysis. Nonetheless, there is a striking lack of consensus regarding the number and type of different units into which a party may be disaggregated, and the extent to which this disaggregation may be applied to an understanding of processes of organizational change."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":2111744,"11":0,"14":{"1":2,"2":0},"15":"arial,sans,sans-serif","16":10,"24":{"1":0,"2":3,"3":0,"4":3}}">At least since the beginning of the 1980s, much of the writing on the strategies, tactics, and policies of parties has explicitly cautioned against the treatment of party as a “unitary actor” (e.g., Daalder 1983; Laver and Schofield 1990). Party leaders, it is now argued, may differ from one another and from party followers with regard to the ends which they pursue and the resources which they employ; even within the leadership itself, it is suggested, the conflict between factions may be such as to militate against any theories taking the party as a whole as the relevant unit of analysis. Nonetheless, there is a striking lack of consensus regarding the number and type of different units into which a party may be disaggregated, and the extent to which this disaggregation may be applied to an understanding of processes of organizational change.</span
In a familiar observation, members of the British House of Commons are demographically unrepresentative of the British population in terms of gender, race, education and class. This article takes a fresh look at the reasons why this is the case, based on data from the British Candidate Study, 1992. This study analyses the background, experience and attitudes of MPs, candidates, applicants, party members and voters. By comparing strata we can see whether the outcome of the selection process reflects the supply of those willing to stand for Parliament or the demands of local party activists when adopting candidates for local constituencies.
The decline of party activism and membership in European democracies has been well documented, but not effectively explained. This article examines the state of party membership and activism across a wide spectrum of democratic countries and shows that membership is in decline in most of them. It tests two rival explanations of the decline using a cross-sectional multi-level analysis of data from the ISSP Citizenship survey of 2004. One hypothesis is that the decline is due to 'state capture', or excessive state regulation brought about by an ever-closer relationship between parties and the state which has the effect of stifling voluntary activity at the grassroots level. A second suggests that parties are being undermined by the growth of relatively new forms of participation, notably cheque book participation, and consumer and Internet participation. These provide alternative outlets for political action outside traditional forms of participation such as party involvement. There is evidence to support the first of these hypotheses, but not the second.
It Takes a Candidate serves as the first systematic, nationwide empirical account of the manner in which gender affects political ambition. Based on data from the Citizen Political Ambition Study, a national survey conducted on almost 3,800 'potential candidates', we find that women, even in the highest tiers of professional accomplishment, are substantially less likely than men to demonstrate ambition to seek elected office. Women are less likely than men to be recruited to run for office. They are less likely than men to think they are 'qualified' to run for office. And they are less likely than men to express a willingness to run for office in the future. This gender gap in political ambition persists across generations. Despite cultural evolution and society's changing attitudes toward women in politics, running for public office remains a much less attractive and feasible endeavor for women than men.
Recent literature has renewed interest in the stratarchical model of intraparty decision-making. In this version of party organization, the functions performed by parties are distributed among their discrete levels. The result is a power-sharing arrangement in which no group has control over all aspects of party life. Thus, the model potentially provides an antidote to the hierarchical version of organization. This article examines the principal parties in Australia, Canada, Ireland and New Zealand to test whether there is empirical evidence of stratarchy. An examination of candidate nomination, leadership selection and policy development finds strong evidence of shared authority between both levels of the party in key areas of intraparty democracy. Both levels accept that they cannot achieve their goals without the support of the other and so a fine balancing act ensues, resulting in constant recalibration of power relations. There is, however, little evidence of the commonly presented model of stratarchy as mutual autonomy for each level within discrete areas of competency. Instead, both the party on the ground and in the centre share authority within all three areas, resulting in a pattern of mutual interdependence rather than mutual autonomy.
This article examines how political parties choose their candidates in Canada’s decentralized multilevel setting. We examine the selection practices of the leading federal parties, focusing on the formal and informal rules relating to the eligibility and mobilization of voters and candidates, the distribution of power within the party, and representational outcomes. In doing so, we highlight how Canadian parties have approached the trade-off between competing democratic norms as each party attempts to find a delicate balance between grassroots authority and central party involvement. Despite typically being considered a local affair, the selection of candidates is highly influenced by the central party apparatus—both formally and informally. This central party authority, however, often results in considerable tension that erupts in public conflict. We suggest that while centralization may undermine membership participation, grassroots autonomy, and responsiveness, central party involvement may also enhance the democratic values of fairness, representation, and in some instances even participation.
Among the most well documented and long-standing gender gaps in political behavior are those relating to political ambition as men have consistently been shown to express a significantly higher level of political ambition than women. Although this gap is well established, the reasons for the differences between men and women remain largely unknown. One possible explanation is that negative stereotypes about women’s political ability are responsible. Stereotype threat, as it is referred to in the psychology literature, is a phenomenon where individuals of a social group suffer cognitive burdens and anxiety after being exposed to negative stereotypes that relate to their identity. These disruptions have been shown to alter attitudes and behavior. In order to test this possibility, we employed an experimental design whereby we randomly assigned 501 undergraduate students into threat and non-threat conditions. While men exhibited higher levels of political ambition in both conditions, women in the non-threat condition expressed significantly higher levels of political ambition than those women who were exposed to negative stereotypes. The results of this study therefore suggest that the gender gap in political ambition may be partly explained by negative stereotypes about women in politics.
The purpose of this article is twofold. First, using survey data from Canadian constituency associations, the article explores the extent to which federal and provincial parties engage in cross-jurisdictional coordination. In doing so, this study builds on and empirically tests findings that have been derived from earlier case studies (i.e. Koop, 2011). Far from inhabiting ‘two political worlds’ the data reveal that parties are much more connected than previously thought. Second, the article seeks to uncover why some parties and associations are more integrated than others. Examining organizational design, the article concludes that vertical party integration is not simply an organizational phenomenon, as organizationally truncated parties still engage in modest levels of informal integration. In addition, constituency level factors are also considered. The results of a multinomial logistic regression demonstrate that parties are significantly more integrated in districts where they are electorally viable compared to those where they are weak.
This paper considers how the quality of the local candidate affects vote choice. Specifically, we address three questions: Does the quality of the local candidate influence vote choice? What impact do individual-level differences have on the relationship between vote choice and local candidates? Finally, what is the potential magnitude of candidate effects in terms of change in vote support? To answer these questions, we analyze data gathered from an online voting experiment. Our findings suggest that a local candidate can influence vote choice significantly, but that such effects are tempered by political awareness and partisanship.
The authors argue that the gender composition of party gatekeepers—those responsible for candidate recruitment— plays a crucial role in either encouraging or discouraging women candidates to run for office. Using an original data set that includes constituency-level information for all parties and candidates in the 2004 and 2006 Canadian national elections, the authors find support for this proposition. Women candidates are more likely to be nominated when the gatekeeper—the local party president—is a woman rather than a man. The results underline the importance of informal factors for understanding women’s political underrepresentation.
This article analyses data from the 2000 Study of Canadian Political Party Members to address the question of why individuals join political parties in Canada and to trace their paths to activism. Because Canadian parties are essentially brokerage parties charactensed by ideological flexibility and limited substantive roles for their members, membership in a party islikely to be motivated less by ideological concerns than by membership in a social network mobilised in support of a particular individual. As a consequence, most accounts assume that individuals are mobilised into party membership by family, friends, and neighbors in order to support candidates for the leadership or local nomination. In contrast to this expectation, we find that for all five major Canadian political parties, it is the members' ideological or policy-related commitment to the party that is by far the most important motivation for joining. Although parties do, to varying degrees, rely on social networks for recruitment into party life, ideological concurrence between member and party acts as a constraint on recruitment. The data also indicate considerable differences between the two traditional brokerage parties and the newer, more ideologically oriented parties.
In recent years, membership in established political parties has been shrinking, but at the same time members of some parties have received increased powers to help select candidates, leaders and party policies. These twin trends make it important to reexamine who is joining today's smaller parties. As parties shrink, do they attract a changed mixture of members, possibly with different political priorities? Using data from two sets of European surveys, our study investigates this question to study longitudinal change in party membership. The data show a growing gap between the age of party members and the general population. In most other respects, however, party members seem to be becoming more, not less, like their fellow citizens. This suggests that today's smaller but more powerful memberships still have the potential to help link their parties to a wider electoral base.
This article argues that the relative significance of party candidate selection processes in influencing representational and policy outcomes varies across countries and parties. Five variables are identified that influence this relationship: the electoral system, the degree of inter-party general election competition, the openness of the system to the election of independent candidates, whether representational demands are accommodated within or among parties, and the role of elected representatives in determining policy outcomes. From this, a normative argument is made that the strength of the case for democratically organized candidate nomination contests varies depending on the relative importance of these contests in determining policy and representational outcomes.
This overview of political party membership in Canada begins with an examination of the norms of party membership in the new Canadian party system and then considers who belongs to Canada's parties, what activities members engage in and how active they are in party affairs. Data from a survey of members of the five major federal parties demon-strate that few Canadians belong to political parties, and those who do belong are not representative of voters generally. The findings also suggest that members are primarily engaged in low-intensity activity and generally contribute little time to party affairs. We conclude that the parties' inability to engage a significant number of voters as members, particularly younger Canadians, presents an ongoing challenge to their vitality as democratic institutions.
The article begins by identifying a number of apparently dissonant characteristics of modern party organization, suggesting that they define patterns of internal organizational relationship that are more stratarchi- cal than hierarchical. To provide a framework for analysing the structure and activities of stratarchical parties, the article develops a franchise model of party organization. After identifying the essential elements of the franchise party, and particularly the contract that defines it, the article points to how the model elucidates the distinctive character of factionalism, membership and leadership in modern political parties. KEY WORDSfranchise systemparty membershipparty organization � stratarchy How do modern parties organize? This simple question has become one of the important puzzles for students of democratic politics. Recent analyses point to a series of changes that appear to characterize the parties of the classic Western systems. The puzzle is that the most dramatic of these changes point in contradictory directions. Thus, most parties in developed systems are facing sharply declining memberships while individual party members are winning increased decision-making power, especially on crucial personnel choices. At the same time, party leaders, especially those of the party in public office, have enhanced their power and autonomy though only by increasing their dependence on outside professionals such as pollsters and media experts. Peter Mair (1994: 16) recognized the 'apparent paradox' in these developments when he asked 'How can parties democratize while at the same time affording more autonomy and power to the party in public office?' Two other important patterns characterize the change syndrome, although they seem to be mutually reinforcing. Party identifications are in
Many recent discussions of the decline of party are predicated on the assumption that the Duverger/socialist mass-party model is the only model for parties. We contend that this assumption is misconceived, that the mass-party model is only one, temporally limited and contingent model, and that it is necessary to differentiate notions of adaptation and change from notions of decline or failure. Following an analysis of how various models of party can be located in terms of the relationship between civil society and the state, we contend that the recent period has witnessed the emergence of a new model of party, the cartel party, in which colluding parties become agents of the state and employ the resources of the state (the party state) to ensure their own collective survival. Finally, we suggest that the recent challenge to party is in fact a challenge to the cartel that the established parties have created for themselves.
Studies of the local organizations of Canadian political parties often neglect those organizations' small leadership groups, the local executives. This article explores and develops a classification of constituency association executives. Interviews and participant observation in the Liberal party's constituency associations reveal that executives differ in their personnel, internal relations, organization, leadership and permeability. The result of this analysis is the development of two distinct types of executives: professional and sociable. Preliminary analysis suggests that political factors—local electoral strength and the presence of members of Parliament—play a crucial role in determining the development of professional executives.
Résumé. L'étude des organisations locales des partis politiques canadiens tend à négliger le leadership de ces petites organisations, soit les comités exécutifs de comté. Cet article explore le sujet et établit une classification de ces comités. La conduite d'entrevues et une observation participative au sein des associations de circonscription du Parti libéral révèlent que les comités exécutifs diffèrent dans leur gestion des ressources humaines, leurs relations internes, leur organisation, leur leadership et leur perméabilité. Les résultats de ces analyses permettent de dégager deux types de comité exécutif de comté, soit le type social et le type professionnel. Des analyses préliminaires permettent aussi de suggérer que des facteurs politiques – la force du parti dans la circonscription et la présence d'un élu au Parlement – jouent un rôle crucial dans la formation d'un comité exécutif de type professionnel.
When women run in general elections for the U.S. House of Representatives, they win at approximately the same rates as their male counterparts. With the exception of studies of selected congressional districts in particular years, however, scholars have virtually ignored the gender dynamics of the congressional primary process. In this paper, we fill this void, analyzing data from 1958 to 2004 to test hypotheses about women's victory rates and levels of primary competition. Our analysis results in an additional explanation for women's underrepresentation: the congressional primary process. Although women generally do not win primaries at lower rates than their male counterparts, women in both parties face more primary competition than do men. Gender neutral victory rates, then, are not the result of a gender neutral primary process. Women have to be “better” than their male counterparts in order to fare equally well.
This article ascertains the impact of local candidates on vote choice in the 2000 Canadian election. The authors show that 44 per cent of Canadian voters formed a preference for a local candidate and that this preference had an effect on vote choice independent of how people felt about the parties and the leaders. The findings suggest that the local candidate was a decisive consideration for 5 per cent of Canadian voters, 6 per cent outside Quebec and 2 per cent in Quebec. Although preference for a local candidate had a similar effect on urban and rural voters, as well as on voters of varying degrees of sophistication, the findings revealed that rural voters and more sophisticated voters were more likely to have formed a preference for their local candidate. As a consequence, the local candidate was more likely to be a decisive consideration for more sophisticated rural voters.
Canadian political parties are charged with aggregating the interests of a diverse and changing electorate in order to balance particularistic local demands with general national interests. This article asks what kind of organizations have they adopted to do this? How does their organizational character shape their capacities and their practices? The argument outlines a franchise organization model and explores the extent to which it can be used to explain Canadian party behaviour. The article exploits this model to analyze questions of party membership, the place of incumbents, leadership and electoral organization as they are played out in Canadian politics.
This article assesses the value of local parties. It asks why political parties value their local sections. It also considers the ways in which local parties can benefit society. Local parties act as a democratic training ground for party members, are a conduit for political communication and provide parties with a range of resources. They also act as problem solving agencies; they ensure that policy is responsive to local needs; they provide an additional channel of communication and accountability; and they link citizens with the state. The article ends with an appeal to party scholars to refocus their attention towards local parties.
A BSTRACT In this paper we are concerned with the fundamental question of internal party democracy. Must political parties that depend upon a substantial membership inevitably end as oligarchies? Has the emergence of the cartel party, the "public utility" of modern democracies, spelled an end to active citizen-partisans? To approach this issue we explore the cartel theorists' suggestion that stratarchical organizational forms might provide parties with a way out of an apparent democratic dead end. The paper considers the logic of such parties and then examines how Canadian parties have been organized around stratarchical principles. The second substantial part of the paper turns to an assessment, in terms of the standards adopted by the Canadian Democratic Audit, of how, and to what extent, these parties might be considered democratic institutions. To sort out the internal structural dynamics of political parties Katz and Mair (1993) focus on what they call the three "faces" of party organizations: the party on the ground, the party in central office, and the party in public office. These distinct elements are held to be in competition with each other for organizational dominance and it is the particular balance struck among them that is the characteristic feature which distinguishes different types of parties – cadre (sometimes called elite), mass, catch-all and cartel – from one another. On this basis alone the model constitutes a major breakthrough in our conceptualization and understanding of party organiza-tion in liberal democracies. However, it does two important things more. It provides a framework for the analysis of the evolution of parties, and party competition, since the emergence of electoral democracy in Western Europe. Tracing the competitive advantages of the different faces of the parties, and the social bases for them, illuminates the underlying dynamics that explain the rise and fall of party types (Katz & Mair, 2002). Equally significant, the model links the character of party organization to alternate conceptions of democracy (Katz, 2002), though whether distinct party types generate different understandings of democracy or whether shifting conceptions of democracy call forth different types of parties seems to be an open question.
Why are fewer women than men elected? Research suggests that this is the combined result of: (1) the supply of female aspirants, or the qualifications of women as a group to run for political office; and (2) the demand for female aspirants, or the preference of political elites for male over female candidates. The aim of this article is to reassess this explanation through the lens of recent case studies of female representation in four regions of the world: Africa, Latin America, North America and Western Europe. On their own, each contribution lends support to arguments about either supply or demand, leading their authors to offer distinct recommendations for change: an increase in the number of women who come forward, which is likely to be a slow and difficult process, or the adoption of gender quotas, which are quick but may produce mixed results. Yet juxtaposing these studies also exposes the limits of the traditional supply and demand model of candidate selection. On the one hand, the ‘political market’ does not operate efficiently towards an equilibrium solution of supply and demand. Rather, ideologies of gender introduce important distortions to the process: the fact that women are under-represented in all countries around the world suggests that both the supply of and demand for female candidates is artificially repressed, leading to low numbers of women in elective office. On the other hand, important variations exist in women's descriptive representation across countries and across political parties. These differences suggest that dynamics of supply and demand are shaped in crucial ways by features of the broader political context, which may include structural conditions but also the emergence of new and sometimes unanticipated opportunities.
Though most observers agree that election campaigns have become increasingly nationalized in recent decades, considerable disagreement persists over whether and how local campaigns effect the vote. This study explores the impact of campaign spending and campaign activists on support levels for the national parties contesting the Canadian federal election of 1988, and builds on parallel work done in the U.K. Despite the unusually nationalized character of the 1988 election (dominated by the issue of the Free Trade Agreement with the U.S.), we are able to demonstrate convincingly that local campaigns do matter for most candidates. Specifically, campaign effects were strongest for candidates running for the opposition parties, especially those who ran non-winning campaigns. Our results suggest that the local party organizations of non-winning candidates are in the position of being able to realize potentially significant electoral returns through the mobilization of additional personnel or financial resources in their constituency campaigns.
Grassroots Liberals: Organizing for Local and National Politics
- Roycekoop
Catherine McKenna's relentless race to win Ottawa Centre
- Elizabethpayne
Making Her Way In: Women, Parties and Candidacies in Canada
- Lyndaerickson
Dominance and Decline: Making Sense of Recent Canadian Elections
- Elisabethgidengil
- Neilnevitte
- Andréblais
- Patrickfournier Joannaeveritt
The Race Question in Canada
- Andrésiegfried
External Shocks, Leadership Replacement and Party Change: the Case of Fianna Fail.” Paper presented at the annual meetings of the American Political Science Association
- Little Conor
- David Farrell
The Local Parliament Project
- Loewen Peter
- Daniel Rubenson
- Royce Koop
Catherine McKenna's relentless race to win Ottawa Centre.” Ottawa Citizen
- Payne Elizabeth
Liberals Tout Record Turnout in a Leadership vote that showed the Challenges ahead
- De Souza
A Matter of Quality? Candidates in Canadian Constituency Elections.” Doctoral thesis
- Coletto David
Because it's 2015: Trudeau's Gender-equal Cabinet Makes Headlines Around the World, Social Media
- Frisk Adam
How the Conservative Party Can Avoid the Political Wilderness.” Globe and Mail
- Jenni Byrne
The Stalled Omnibus: Canadian Parties in the 1960s
- Meisel