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RESEARCH ARTICLE/ÉTUDE ORIGINALE
Racial Attitudes and Vote Choice in National
Canadian Elections
Isaac Hale
Department of Politics, Occidental College, Johnson Hall 308, 1600 Campus Road, Los Angeles,
CA, 90041, USA
Email: halei@oxy.edu
Abstract
This article examines the effect of racial attitudes on the electoral performance of the New
Democratic Party (NDP). Since 2017, the NDP has been led by Jagmeet Singh, the first
non-white leader of a nationally competitive Canadian political party. Voters’racial attitudes
and the race of party leaders have a significant effect on vote choice in the United States. Less
is known about whether similar effects exist in Canadian elections. I show that NDP vote
choice polarized on the basis of racial attitudes following Singh’s ascension to party leader.
Voters with cold feelings toward racial minorities were less likely to vote for the NDP in
2019 and 2021 than in comparable historical elections. In contrast, there is no significant dif-
ference between 2019/2021 and prior elections in support for the Liberals and Conservatives
among such voters. These results suggest that racial attitudes are salient in Canadian elections
and that national parties may face an electoral penalty when selecting non-white party leaders.
Résumé
Cet article examine l’effet des attitudes raciales sur la performance électorale du Nouveau
Parti Démocratique (NPD). Depuis 2017, le NPD est dirigé par Jagmeet Singh, premier
chef non blanc d’un parti politique canadien compétitif à l’échelle nationale. Les attitudes
des électeurs et la race des dirigeants des partis ont un effet significatif sur le choix du vote aux
États-Unis. On sait moins si des effets similaires existent dans les élections canadiennes. Je
montre que les électeurs canadiens ayant des attitudes négatives à l’égard des minorités raciales
étaient moins susceptibles de soutenir le NPD sous la direction de Singh en 2019 et 2021 que
dans des scrutins historiques comparables. En revanche, il n’y a pas de différence significative
entre 2019/2021 et les élections antérieures en ce qui concerne le soutien accordé par ce même
électorat aux libéraux et aux conservateurs. Ces résultats suggèrent que les attitudes raciales
sont saillantes dans les élections canadiennes et que les partis nationaux peuvent être
pénalisés à l’issue du vote, dès lors qu’ils choisissent des chefs de parti non-blancs.
Keywords: racial attitudes; Canadian politics; parliamentary elections; electoral choice
Mots-clés: attitudes raciales; politique canadienne; élections parlementaires; choix électoral
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Canadian Political Science Association
(l’Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique. This is an Open Access
article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is
properly cited.
Canadian Journal of Political Science (2023), 1–25
doi:10.1017/S0008423923000367
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008423923000367 Published online by Cambridge University Press
While race has not historically been a major focus in the study of Canadian politics
research (Bilodeau et al., 2012; Thompson, 2008; Gidengil et al., 2012) and has not
historically been highly salient in Canadian politics and policy (Banting and
Thompson, 2021), race has increasingly been at the forefront of both academic
and popular discourse in Canada in recent years. While this scholarly disinterest
might at one point have been tied to Canada’s historical postwar ethnic homogeneity,
when 96 per cent of the population was of European descent (Banting and
Thompson, 2021), one in five Canadians today are people of colour (per the
2016 Census).
1
In addition to this increasing diversity, racial justice has risen to
prominence in Canadian political discourse. There have been revelations in recent
years about the mistreatment of Indigenous peoples in Canada, which Canada’s
Truth and Reconciliation Commission has dubbed a “cultural genocide,”
(BBC News,2021), and anti-immigrant politics have gained new traction
(Magesan, 2019; Newbold, 2020). In the 2019 election campaign, Liberal
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s use of blackface in his younger days was a highly
publicized scandal (Besco and Matthews, 2022; Dobrowolsky and Leal-Iyoupe,
2022). In addition, a body of research has emerged examining multiple dimensions
of race in Canadian politics, including electoral support for minority candidates
(for example, Besco, 2015; Bird et al., 2016; Black and Erickson, 2006) and public
support for permissive immigration policy (for example, Soroka and Roberton,
2010; Harell et al., 2012; Stolle et al., 2016). Despite this flourishing body of research,
only a small body of work so far has attempted to assessthe relationship between racial
attitudes and voters’partisan voting preferences, though Blais (2005) and Gravelle
(2018a,2018b) are notable exceptions.
The 2019 and 2021 Canadian federal elections provide an ideal opportunity to
contribute to this emerging area of Canadian politics literature. In these elections,
Jagmeet Singh was the party leader for the New Democratic Party (NDP), which
has been one of Canada’s most electorally popular parties since its founding in
1961. Importantly, Singh was the first non-white leader to lead a nationally com-
petitive political party.
2
Given the overwhelming body of evidence in the United
States that Barack Obama and downticket Democrats received an electoral penalty
among voters with negative attitudes toward racial minorities (for example, Lewis-
Beck et al., 2010; Clarke et al., 2011; Piston, 2010; Knuckey and Kim, 2015), it is
worth asking whether the NDP faced a similar electoral penalty in 2019 and
2021 under Singh’s leadership. This question is particularly salient given that
Singh is likely to once again be the only non-white national party leader in the
next Canadian election (which will take place by 2025). Furthermore, the use
of the first-past-the-post electoral system in Canadian parliamentary elections
heightens the stakes, given the precarious third-party position of the NDP. A pen-
alty of even a few points nationally has the potential to swing the party’s seat share
to a substantially greater extent than it might in a system of proportional
representation.
There are two existing articles examining the effect of Singh’s leadership of the
NDP in the 2019 election on Canadian politics. Bouchard (2022) finds that coeth-
nic Sikh Canadians were relatively more favourable toward Singh (though other
voters of colour were not) and that Singh was viewed relatively unfavourably in
Quebec.
3
Besco and Matthews (2022) find that non-racial policies have acquired
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racial valence by dint of their association with Singh—a“racial spillover”effect.
While research by Bouchard (2022) and Besco and Matthews (2022) provides
vital lessons about the role of race in policy and leader evaluations, I seek to expand
on this nascent body of work by interrogating the relationship between racial atti-
tudes and support for the NDP under Singh’s leadership.
In order to assess whether racial attitudes took on new importance for NDP
support under Singh’s leadership, I provide a novel analysis of large-Ndata from
the 2004–2021 Canadian Election Studies (CES).
4
I find that Canadian voters
with more negative attitudes toward racial minorities were less likely to support
the NDP under Singh in 2019 and 2021 than they were to support the NDP in
prior contests, even after accounting for potential confounding variables such as
partisanship. No such effect occurs for either the Liberal or Conservative parties.
This study provides strong evidence that the NDP paid an electoral penalty in
2019 and 2021 among Canadian voters with negative attitudes toward racial
minorities.
1. Race and Voting Behaviour
Recent research on Canadian politics has sought to analyze public attitudes toward
racial minorities and immigrants. In the aggregate, at least one-third of Canadians
have clearly negative views of diversity, immigration, multiculturalism and racial
minorities—a figure echoed in public polling data (Besco and Matthews, 2022).
Breton (2015) finds in a survey experiment that, in contrast to the Netherlands,
priming Canadians to national identity does not decrease their support for
immigration—suggesting that immigration and multiculturalism may be positively
associated with national identity in the Canadian context. Banting and Soroka
(2020) find that while Canadian support for immigration is unusually high in a
comparative context (see also Harell et al., 2017, and Bilodeau et al., 2012), these
attitudes are driven by the same factors as other countries (in contrast to Breton,
2015). As in other contexts, Canadian anti-immigrant sentiment is propelled by
cultural anxiety (Breton, 2015) and concern about loss of control over personal
social and economic conditions (Harell et al., 2017)—though both factors are offset
in the aggregate by the widespread belief among Canadians that immigration aids
the economy.
Beyond the national level, scholarship on Canadian politics has also examined
variation in attitudes on race and immigration by province. Bilodeau et al.
(2012) find that, as is the case nationwide, attitudes toward immigrants and racial
minorities are net positive in every province and that these attitudes became
substantially more positive between 1988 and 2008. Despite this overall positivity,
some differences do emerge: Ontario and British Columbia residents are more
likely than other Canadians to prefer a reduction in immigrants, while Quebecers
are less comfortable with racial minorities. With regard to Quebec, this divide
has parallels with traditional Canadian social cleavages between English and
French speakers (Johnston, 2019).
New studies have also begun to home in on the relationship between party
identification and Canadians’attitudes toward racial minorities and immigrants.
Gravelle (2018a) finds that Liberal and NDP party identifiers have more positive
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feelings toward Muslims than do Bloc Québécois (BQ) and Conservative identifiers.
Gravelle (2018b) also examines attitudes toward immigrants and finds that NDP
supporters are less likely than Liberals to believe that there is too much immigration
to Canada—and that Liberals are substantially less likely to hold this belief than
Conservatives. A similar pattern emerges when partisans are asked about their sup-
port for accepting refugees.
Although this body of work is still relatively new, a number of scholars have
examined the independent effect of racial attitudes in Canadian elections. Some
of this research has examined support for minority candidates (for example,
Murakami, 2014; Black and Erickson, 2006; Black and Hicks, 2006; Besco, 2015;
Bird et al., 2016; Tossutti and Najem, 2002), while a smaller body of work has
examined how minority identity and feelings toward racial minorities affect parti-
san vote choice among white voters. Research by Blais (2005) finds that white vot-
ers who favour immigration and aid to racial minorities are more likely to support
the Liberals in national elections.
Despite the relative novelty of scholarship on the effect of racial attitudes on
Canadian elections, there is ample reason to expect that racial attitudes affect
Canadian voters. Like the United States, Canada, from its time as a British colony
to the present day, has been greatly defined by settler-colonial expansion and both
cultural and outright genocide against Indigenous peoples (Woolford, 2015;
Preston, 2013). Though there were fewer forms of legal discrimination in Canada
than in the United States, Canadian politics in the mid-twentieth century were
also heavily influenced by minority demands for expanded civil rights (Calliste,
1995). As in the United States, there is both current and historically significant
racial inequality in Canada in areas such as income, health and social integration
(Reitz and Banerjee, 2007; Ramraj et al., 2016), and there is evidence that rates
of racial discrimination in employment in Canada are similar to rates in the
United States (Quillian et al., 2019). While Canadian voters may not have sorted
into parties on the basis of race (Adams and Griffith, 2015) in the way that
many ethnic groups in the United States have (Carmines and Stimson, 1989;
Layman and Carsey, 2002; Valentino and Sears, 2005), there is still ample reason
to expect that Canadian party politics, like US party politics, should be affected
by voters’racial attitudes. While the two countries’demographic compositions
and racial politics are clearly distinct (Harell et al., 2012; Soroka and Roberton,
2010), the overwhelming evidence that racial attitudes shape voter preferences in
the United States raises questions about whether similar effects manifest in
Canadian elections.
The US case provides an important theoretical basis for investigating electoral
support for the Singh-led NDP in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections. Racial
attitudes affect political behaviour in the United States both historically and in
the modern era. The 1950s heralded the beginning of a multidecade process of
racial realignment in American politics, with racially conservative whites increas-
ingly affiliating with the Republican Party while black voters and racially liberal
whites moved to the Democratic Party (Carmines and Stimson, 1989). During
this period, there was a substantial shift in elite rhetoric on race, as explicit
appeals to “old-fashioned racism”(OFR) became less socially desirable, as both par-
ties publicly embraced the new norm of racial equality ( for example, Mendelberg,
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2001; Tesler, 2013; Hillygus and Shields, 2014). While racial resentment against
ethnic minorities (that is, the belief that black people don’t adhere to American
cultural values) continued to drive vote choice in this period (Tesler and Sears,
2010), old-fashioned racist attitudes (such as belief in black intellectual inferiority
or opposition to miscegenation) were not predictive of party preferences (Valentino
and Sears, 2005; Tesler, 2013) until 2008. That year, the candidacy of Barack
Obama, the United States’first non-white major party presidential candidate,
harkened a return of OFR as a predictor of voting behaviour (for example,
Tesler, 2013).
The return of OFR in predicting voter behaviour in 2008 coincided with a surge
in the predictive power of race for voting behaviour in many contexts. Racial
resentment made white voters less likely to support black candidates in the
2010–2016 elections (Hale, 2019; Petrow et al., 2018). Scholarship in the following
years clearly identified that voters with negative attitudes toward racial minorities
were less likely to support President Obama in both his historic 2008 run (for
example, Lewis-Beck et al., 2010; Clarke et al., 2011; Piston, 2010) and his 2012
re-election (Knuckey and Kim, 2015). Negative attitudes toward racial minorities
also depressed the vote shares of Democratic candidates in the 2009–2020 time
period (for example, Abrajano and Hajnal, 2015; Algara and Hale, 2019,2020;
Hale, 2019), by dint of the party’s association with racial liberalism and racial
minorities.
An important finding of the US literature is that Obama’s role as the first
non-white candidate to lead a major party was the catalyst for the increased
salience of racial attitudes in voting behaviour. Several studies have found that
Obama underperformed in 2008 (for example, Lewis-Beck et al., 2010; Piston,
2010; Tesler, 2013) and 2012 (for example, Jardina, 2019; Knuckey and Kim,
2015) as a result of racial prejudice. The racial backlash against Obama also
spilled over into congressional races. As Luttig and Motta (2017) and Abrajano
and Hajnal (2015) find, perceptions of the 2014 midterm congressional
election as a referendum on Obama were racialized, and those perceptions
mediated the link between racial attitudes and 2014 vote choice. Racial backlash
against Obama also spilled over into the 2016 presidential race, where Hillary
Clinton’s embrace of Obama and racially inclusive policy helped Donald
Trump’s explicit racial appeals resonate with white voters (Sides et al., 2017).
More generally, public opinion in the United States has polarized on the basis of
racial attitudes, in reaction to Obama’s historic presidential campaigns and his pres-
idency (for example, Tesler, 2013; Petrow et al., 2018; Luttig and Motta, 2017;
Jardina, 2019).
2. Theory and Hypotheses
The overwhelming evidence that Obama’s historic candidacy dramatically
increased the salience of racial attitudes in US elections raises the question:
Could a similar dynamic be at work in Canada? The 2019 and 2021 Canadian fede-
ral elections provide an ideal test, with NDP leader Jagmeet Singh making history as
the first non-white national party leader of a party competitive throughout the
country. In addition to his historical candidacy, Singh, as both a provincial and
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national party leader, vocally advocated for racial minorities (Besco and Matthews,
2022). This article’s focus on party leadership, rather than the race of individual
candidates for the House of Commons, aligns both with research on Obama in
the United States and with research finding that Canadian voters, when deciding
how to vote, tend to focus substantially more on a leader’s image than on candi-
dates in their riding (Blais et al., 2003; Gidengil et al., 2006; Clarke et al., 2019;
Stevens et al., 2019;O’Neill, 1998).
Importantly, there are strong reasons to be skeptical that Singh’s racially
historical candidacy would engender the same electoral penalty for the NDP as
Obama’s did for the Democratic Party in the United States. As Banting
and Thompson (2021) note, the Canadian party system is substantially less
racially polarized and race is less salient in Canadian political discourse.
Furthermore, Ambrose and Mudde (2015) point out that the Conservative
Party, Liberal Party and NDP all publicly embrace multiculturalism, and in the
first two cases, the parties officially embrace it as policy when in government.
Finally, the Liberal Party has historically performed very well among racial and
ethnic minorities and been perceived as the primary party allied with them
(Blais, 2005).
My expectation is that opposition to the NDP in 2019 and 2021 under the lead-
ership of Jagmeet Singh was racialized to a greater extent than opposition to the
NDP in prior elections. I expect that racial animus toward minorities will spill
over from Singh and affect voting for the NDP, as it did for Democratic congres-
sional candidates during the Obama presidency. In other words, I predict that vot-
ers with warmer (colder) feelings toward racial minorities will support the NDP at
higher (lower) rates in 2019/2021, all else equal, and that this differential will be
greater than in elections prior to 2019.
H1a: More positive (negative) attitudes toward racial minorities among individual
voters increased (decreased) their likelihood of supporting the NDP in the 2019
and 2021 elections.
H1b: The effect of racial attitudes on NDP vote choice in 2019 and 2021 will be
greater than in pre-2019 elections.
While racial attitudes may affect vote choice for other parties as well, I expect
that the historical candidacy of Jagmeet Singh engenders a unique electoral penalty
for the NDP among voters with conservative attitudes toward racial minorities. As
such, I predict that there will be no similar statistically significant difference in sup-
port for the Liberals and Conservatives pre-2019 versus 2019/2021 among racially
conservative voters.
3. Data and Methods
For this research, I employ data from the 2004–2021 CES, excluding 2011. The year
2011 is excluded from this analysis due to the highly atypical party vote shares, par-
ticularly with regard to the NDP and Liberals. The 2011 election saw the Liberals
reduced to third-party status for the first time in the party’s history, with the NDP
6 Isaac Hale
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forming the Official Opposition to the Conservative government following the elec-
tion. While the NDP’s vote share has fluctuated between 7 and 20 per cent for every
other election from 1962 to 2021, the NDP won 31 per cent of the national popular
vote in 2011. Ultimately the NDP surge did not result in a long-term realignment of
the party system, with the NDP returning to its traditional third/fourth party status
in the 2015, 2019 and 2021 elections.
Each of the six surveys included in this analysis (the 2004, 2006, 2008, 2015,
2019 and 2021 CES) employs both a campaign period survey (CPS) in the cam-
paign period and a post-election survey (PES) in the weeks following the election.
The 2004–2008 studies were conducted primarily by phone and also included a
post-election mail-back survey. The 2015 CES was primarily web-based but also
included a telephone and mail-back component. The 2019 CES was conducted pri-
marily online, though a separate phone survey was also administered.
5
The 2021
CES was conducted entirely online.
In order to effectively compare voter behaviour in the pre-2019 and 2019/2021
periods, data from these six surveys are pooled. For all analyses, weights are used to
ensure a nationally representative sample. Weights are stratified by CES year in the
pooled data to ensure proper application. The coding of all variables (for example,
party identification, vote choice, income category, education, and so on) has been
standardized across each CES prior to pooling.
3.1 Measuring vote choice
To test my hypotheses, I generate a standardized vote choice variable, with catego-
ries for the five largest parties by vote share in each election: Liberal (1),
Conservative (2), NDP (3), BQ (4) and Green (5). Supporters for other parties
are coded (6). In each year, vote choice is coded first based on PES response. If
no party vote is reported in the PES, CPS vote choice intention responses are
used. Finally, CPS questions asking voters which party they lean toward supporting
are used to code vote choice if the aforementioned responses are missing. For a full
description of the coding scheme, question wording and summary statistics for each
variable, refer to the supplementary material.
3.2 Measuring racial attitudes
The main explanatory variable in this study is the respondent’s feelings toward
racial minorities. In each CES survey, respondents are asked to report their feelings
toward racial minorities on a continuous 0–100 scale, with zero corresponding to
“really dislike”and 100 to “really like.”Respondents who decline to answer are
coded as missing.
6
To aid the ease of interpretability of the feeling thermometer
in subsequent analyses, responses have been rescaled to range from 0–1.
Figure 1 shows the unweighted distribution of minority feeling thermometer
scores pooled among all respondents and across partisans in the six CES surveys.
Though responses are left-skewed for all respondents and for the three largest parti-
san subgroups, there is still considerable variation in each. Notably, the Canadian
parties are not fully sorted on the basis of racial attitudes: there are substantial num-
bers of Conservative voters in the electorate with warm feelings toward racial
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minorities, and there are substantial numbers of Liberal and NDP voters with nega-
tive attitudes toward racial minorities. While social desirability bias may be contrib-
uting to a left skew in this variable, such a skew is likely to result in an
underestimation of any effect of racial attitudes on vote choice rather than an exag-
geration of it.
Direct measures of feelings toward minorities (also known as old-fashioned rac-
ism, or OFR), such as the feeling thermometer scores shown in Figure 1, have often
been criticized as likely to dramatically underestimate effects in an era where such
views are commonly perceived to be socially undesirable (Tesler, 2013; Mendelberg,
2001). In the United States before Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential run, old-
fashioned racist sentiments were unrelated to party preferences for decades (for
example, Sears et al., 1997; Valentino and Sears, 2005). As such, a finding that a
direct effect of OFR exists in support for the Singh-led NDP in 2019 and 2021
would be notable, as analyses using such measures are likely to underestimate rather
than overestimate the effects of racial attitudes. Furthermore, a growing body of
research in contexts outside of Canada shows that explicit measures of racial atti-
tudes are increasingly as effective as implicit measures (for example, Valentino
et al., 2018; Schaffner, 2020).
In addition to using a minority feeling thermometer, I test my hypotheses
using an alternate explanatory variable. In each of the included CES surveys,
respondents are asked “Howmuchdoyouthinkshouldbedoneforracial
minorities?”and allowed to respond on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from
“much less”to “much more.”Figure 2 shows the unweighted distribution of
responses pooled among all respondents and across partisans in the six CES sur-
veys. As with the minority feeling thermometer, the variable is left-skewed,
though there is variation in the aggregate and within the three largest partisan
subgroups.
While this survey item provides a valuable alternate explanatory variable, it
has two major drawbacks. First, this question has been asked only in the PES,
not the CPS, meaning that a large proportion of respondents in the pooled
data did not answer this question. Furthermore, while the 2019 and 2021 CES
provide PES-only survey weights (which are applied in this article in analyses
using this question as the explanatory variable), prior CES instruments do not
provide such an option. Second, while this alternative explanatory variable
may raise fewer social desirability concerns than the minority feeling thermome-
ter, it introduces a policy consideration that is distinct from racial attitudes. A
“much less”response due to racial animus is observationally equivalent to a
“much less”response due to ideological opposition to government intervention.
This measurement problem has been identified in similar questions measuring
“racial resentment”in the American National Election Study (ANES), which critics
have argued conflate symbolic racism with conservative ideological views on eco-
nomic redistribution (Feldman and Brook, 2005) and more generally measure atti-
tudes other than affect toward racial minorities (Kam and Burge, 2018; Banks and
Valentino, 2012). As a result of these caveats and a growing body of research in
international contexts suggesting that the power of racial attitudes is largely consis-
tent regardless of whether survey questions are racially explicit or implicit (for
example, Valentino et al., 2018; Schaffner, 2020), the minority feeling thermometer
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is presented as the primary explanatory variable in this article, with the “done for
racial minorities”item used as an alternative explanatory variable as a robustness
check.
3.3 Control variables
In addition to my primary independent variable, my regression models also
include a number of control variables commonly used in models of vote choice
in legislative elections. I control for voter demographics, individual-level charac-
teristics (such as party identification) and election context (such as region). Full
question wording, summary statistics and coding details are provided in the sup-
plementary material.
I include standard demographic controls in my predictive models, including
education, age, income and gender. Education is an ordinal scale ranging from 1
to 11, with 1 signifying “no schooling”and 11 a professional degree. Age is
coded as an ordinal variable, generated by subtracting the respondent’s birth year
from the year when the survey was administered. Income is coded as an ordinal
scale ranging from 1 to 5, with 1 indicating household income below $30,000
and 5 indicating household income over $110,000.
7
Gender is coded as a binary
variable, with 0 for men and 1 for women.
8
I also account for individual and contextual characteristics identified in the
Canadian vote choice literature.
9
Party identification is included and coded
with identical categories to the vote choice dependent variable. I also account
for regional variation by including a binary indicator variable for Quebec, given
that numerous studies have noted substantial differences in political behaviour
between Quebec and English-speaking Canada (for example, Gidengil et al.,
1999; Blais et al., 2003; Blais, 2002;Bilodeauetal.,2012;Wrightetal.,
2017; Johnston, 2019) and prior work by Bouchard (2022) finding more neg-
ative perceptions of Singh in Quebec. Not only are political and racial attitudes
distinct in Quebec, but voters’choice set of parties is distinct as well, thanks to
the BQ.
10
3.4 Specifying a model of voting
Let us now consider my models of vote choice in the 2004–2021 (excepting 2011)
Canadian federal elections. In each case, the dependent variable indicates which
party’s candidate the respondent reports intending to vote for in their riding in
the election. Because of the multiparty choice set in Canadian elections, a multino-
mial logistic regression is used.
Party Votej=
a
+
b
1×(Minority Feeling Thermometer ×2019/2021 indicator)
+
b
i×Xi+1
where Party Vote is the predicted likelihood of a voter casting a vote for party jin
their riding, Minority Feeling Thermometer is the respondent’s self-reported atti-
tude toward racial and ethnic minorities, 2019/2021 indicator is an indicator vari-
able reflecting whether the election is 2019 or 2021 (as opposed to an earlier
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election), Xis a set of control variables and εis the error term. The minority feeling
thermometer variable is interacted with the 2019/2021 election indicator variable,
since I expect that the effect of racial attitudes on vote choice will be conditioned
by the presence of Jagmeet Singh as party leader (which was first the case in the
2019 election).
4. Findings
4.1 Feelings toward minorities and vote choice
Table 1 reports parameter estimates for my vote choice models for the NDP across
the elections in this study. Each column displays the results for NDP vote choice.
The first model (naive) is bivariate, with the interaction between minority feeling
thermometer and the 2019/2021 election indicator as the sole right-hand term.
The demos only model includes demographic characteristics but excludes the
Quebec indicator and party identification. The full model includes all variables
of interest, including party identification (the strongest predictor of vote choice).
All analyses use nationally representative survey weights, stratified by election sur-
vey. Each model presented in Table 1 is a multinomial logistic regression predicting
Table 1 Three Models of NDP Vote Choice, Minority Thermometer IV (multinomial logit, Liberal baseline)
NDP (naive) NDP (demos only) NDP (full )
Minority thermometer 0.54** 0.46* −0.10
(0.17) (0.18) (0.27)
2019/2021 indicator 0.01 0.03 −0.68**
(0.15) (0.16) (0.22)
Thermometer × 2019/2021 0.14 0.09 0.74*
(0.19) (0.20) (0.28)
Income −0.14*** −0.09***
(0.01) (0.02)
Education −0.04*** −0.02
(0.01) (0.01)
Age −0.02*** −0.01***
(0.00) (0.00)
Gender (female) 0.24*** 0.25***
(0.03) (0.05)
Quebec indicator −0.44***
(0.06)
Liberal Party ID (baseline) —
Conservative Party ID 1.68***
(0.80)
NDP ID 3.63***
(0.05)
BQ Party ID 2.12***
(0.16)
Green Party ID 2.19***
(0.11)
Constant −0.97*** 0.65*** −0.77***
(0.14) (0.17) (0.24)
Observations 48,466 45,545 38,952
Note: Entries are logistic regression coefficients with standard errors in parentheses.
*p< .05; ** p< .01; *** p< .001
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vote choice for the NDP. Regression output for other parties is provided in the sup-
plementary material.
Each model treats a Liberal vote as the base outcome and Liberal Party ID as the
baseline party ID, meaning that regression coefficients should be interpreted
relative to those bases.
11
Each coefficient represents the expected change in log
odds of NDP vote choice for a unit change in the predictor variable. For each
model, the minority thermometer coefficient indicates the effect of very warm
feelings (1.0) toward racial minorities in federal elections from 2004 to 2015.
This effect is positive and significant for the naive and demos only models but
not statistically significant in the full model. The 2019/2021 indicator variable
indicates the effect on the likelihood of support for the NDP at the minimum
level of the minority feeling thermometer (0) in the 2019/2021 elections. This effect
is insignificant for the naive and demos only models but negative and significant
in the full model. The interaction term captures the effect on the likelihood of sup-
port for the NDP at the maximum feeling thermometer level (1.0) in 2019/2021.
This effect is positive across all models but only statistically significant in the full
model.
Across both the demos only and full models, higher levels of income and age are
associated with decreased likelihood of voting for the NDP, whereas female gender
identity is associated with greater likelihood of voting for the NDP. In addition,
higher levels of education are associated with decreased likelihood of voting for
the NDP in the demos only model, but the effect is not statistically significant in
the full model. Quebec residence is negatively associated with NDP vote choice
in the full model as well. Compared to Liberal Party partisans, Conservative
Party, NDP, BQ and Green Party identifiers are more likely to vote NDP than
Liberal.
To get a better understanding of how racial attitudes affected vote choice for
the NDP in 2019 and 2021, we can examine Figure 3. Given that the coefficients
in Table 1 present logistic regression coefficients relative to a baseline of vote
choice for the Liberal Party, it can be challenging to assess the hypothesized rela-
tionship of interest without further examination of the model results. Figure 3
shows the predicted probability of voters supporting the NDP in their local riding
in 2019/2021 versus 2004–2015 (excluding 2011).
12
Unlike the coefficients reported
in Table 1, the predicted probabilities shown in Figure 3 and in the subsequent fig-
ures in this article are not relative to a baseline of Liberal Party vote choice. In the
2019/2021 elections, as voters’feelings toward minorities become more positive,
their likelihood of voting for the NDP increases (confirming H1a). In the earlier elec-
tion period, there is no statistically significant difference between the likelihood of an
NDP vote as feelings toward racial minorities go from the minimum to maximum
value.
Importantly, there is a statistically significant 4.5 per cent gap in the likelihood of
NDP vote choice between voters with very negative feelings toward racial minorities
in in the 2019/2021 elections versus the 2004–2015 elections (confirming H1b).
Voters with very warm feelings toward racial minorities were not more likely to
support the NDP in 2019–2021 than in earlier elections (as evidenced by the over-
lapping confidence intervals at the maximum value of the minority feeling
thermometer).
Canadian Journal of Political Science 13
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Output for regressions and predicted probability plots for models both excluding
Quebec and exclusive to Quebec are presented in the supplementary material.
National analysis excluding Quebec yields results with similar substantive implica-
tions.
13
Analysis in Quebec alone (Table 9 and Figure 7 in the supplementary
material) reveals a somewhat, though not altogether, distinct story. As in the
national analysis shown in Figure 3, voters in Quebec were less (more) likely to
support the NDP when they had very cold (warm) feelings toward racial minorities.
Unlike in the national analysis, this effect is not contingent on period, with racial
attitudes conditioning Quebec voters’NDP support in the 2004–2015 elections as
well.
14
While a comprehensive exploration of this distinct result in Quebec is
beyond the scope of this article, it aligns with previous work by Bilodeau et al.
(2012) showing less enthusiasm for racial diversity and immigration in Quebec
and by Turgeon et al. (2019) showing that attitudes toward minority religious
symbols are negatively associated with voter-level Liberal values in Quebec but
not the rest of Canada.
The relationship presented in Figure 3 is not sensitive to model specification.
Figure 4 shows corresponding predicted plots for the naive and demos only models.
As we can see, the relationship between racial attitudes and vote choice in the 2004-
2015 elections and the 2019-2021 elections is similar, though differences in NDP
vote choice likelihood between election periods among those with the most negative
sentiments toward racial minorities are not statistically distinct at the 95 per cent
level when party identification and region are not accounted for (as they are in
the full model shown in Figure 3). As we might expect, given the predictive
power of party identification (see column three of Table 1), the effect of feelings
Figure 3. Predicted probability of NDP vote by minority feeling thermometer and time period (full
model); 95% confidence intervals.
14 Isaac Hale
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008423923000367 Published online by Cambridge University Press
toward racial minorities on vote choice is greater in both pre- and post-2019 peri-
ods when party identification is omitted.
To provide further validity for these findings, we can examine whether similar
relationships exist for support of the Liberal Party and Conservative Party.
Such a result would suggest that the shift observed in NDP support by racial
attitudes pre-2019 versus post-2019 is reflective of a broader shift in the party
system rather than a function of perceptions of the NDP. Figure 5 shows the
predicted probabilities of support for the Liberals (a), Conservatives (b) and
Figure 4. Predicted probability of NDP vote by minority feeling thermometer and time period (naive +
demos only models); 95% confidence intervals. (a) Naive model, (b) Demos only model.
Canadian Journal of Political Science 15
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008423923000367 Published online by Cambridge University Press
NDP (c). While the effects of feelings to racial attitudes on vote choice vary by party
and by election period, the NDP is the only party for which support varies between
election periods among voters with highly negative feelings toward racial minori-
ties. The other notable shift between these two election periods is a 4 per cent
decrease in support for Conservatives among voters with highly positive views of
Figure 5. Predicted probability of Liberal, Conservative and NDP vote by minority feeling thermometer
and time period (full model ); 95% confidence intervals. (a) Liberal, (b) Conservative, (c) NDP.
16 Isaac Hale
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008423923000367 Published online by Cambridge University Press
minorities (Figure 5, panel b). In other words, it appears that voters with very warm
feelings toward racial minorities are decreasingly supportive of Conservatives,
while voters with very cold feelings toward racial minorities are decreasingly
supportive of the NDP. This mirror image between NDP and Conservative
support suggests the emergence of polarization on racial attitudes, paralleling
that observed in US elections since the 2008 Obama candidacy (for example,
Sides et al., 2018; Algara and Hale, 2020). In sum, the results presented in Figure
5suggest support for the theoretical expectation underlying H1b: that the shift
in NDP support across periods among voters with cold feelings toward minorities
is exceptional.
4.2 Assessing vote choice with an alternate measure of racial attitudes
It is important to assess whether this result is simply a measurement artifact. I
address this concern by using the only alternate measure of racial attitudes present
in every CES wave included in this analysis. As described and visualized in the sec-
tion above on measuring racial attitudes, I leverage a PES question asking respon-
dents “How much do you think should be done for racial minorities?”with
responses in the form of a 5-point Likert scale ranging from “much less”to
“much more.”Though, as described earlier, this measure has drawbacks in compar-
ison to the feeling thermometer, it is nevertheless worthwhile to assess whether a
less different measure of racial attitudes yields similar results.
Figure 6 shows the relationship between level of agreement that “more should be
done”for racial minorities with likelihood of vote choice for the Liberals (a),
Conservatives (b) and NDP (c), by election period.
15
Aside from the use of this
Figure 5. Continued.
Canadian Journal of Political Science 17
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new measure in lieu of the minority feeling thermometer, the control variables
included to predict vote choice are specified identically and all included. As we
can see across partisan vote choice categories, the results closely parallel the find-
ings using the minority feeling thermometer presented in Figure 3 and Figure 5.
Figure 6. Predicted probability of Liberal, Conservative and NDP vote by “How much . . . should be done
for racial minorities?”response and time period (full model); 95% confidence intervals. (a) Liberal, (b)
Conservative, (c) NDP.
18 Isaac Hale
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008423923000367 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Once again, the results suggest that the findings presented here are robust to alter-
nate measures of attitudes toward racial minorities.
5. Conclusion
In this article, I find that racial attitudes affected support for the NDP in the 2019
and 2021 Canadian federal elections under the leadership of Jagmeet Singh. While
feelings toward racial minorities appear to have had no independent effect on
Canadians’likelihood of supporting the NDP in the 2004–2015 elections, colder
feelings toward minorities were associated with a decreased likelihood of NDP sup-
port in 2019 and 2021. Other parties also saw effects of racial attitudes on vote
choice. After accounting for standard predictors of vote choice, colder feelings
toward racial minorities decreased support for the Liberals and increased support
for the Conservatives in both the 2004–2015 and 2019–2021 periods.
Importantly, the NDP was the only major national party to see a change in sup-
port between these election periods among voters with the most negative feelings
toward racial minorities. By contrast, voters with very warm feelings toward racial
minorities were less likely to support the Conservatives in the 2019–2021 period
than the 2004–2015 period. These shifts at the ideological poles of Canadian
major party politics suggest (though do not conclusively prove) the emergence of
polarization on the basis of racial attitudes in the Canadian party system. Further
research in this area is crucial.
While recent research on American politics has consistently found an indepen-
dent effect of racial attitudes on vote choice, this article is one of the first to do so in
the Canadian context. The consensus in Canadian elections research has long been
Figure 6. Continued.
Canadian Journal of Political Science 19
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that racial attitudes are significantly less salient for vote choice in Canada than in
the United States. The 2019 and 2021 elections provide a strong test of this theory,
with the NDP’s Jagmeet Singh standing as the first non-white leader of a nationally
competitive political party. In line with research showing that the Democrats
received an electoral penalty associated with Barack Obama’s status as the first non-
white party leader in the United States, my results suggest that the NDP paid a sim-
ilar electoral price among voters with negative feelings toward racial minorities in
2019 and 2021. These results are particularly notable given that, unlike some prior
studies, the analysis here is not limited to white voters. This article’s findings on the
interplay between racial attitudes and voter support for the NDP since 2019 join
previous studies’findings by Bouchard (2022) and Besco and Matthews (2022)
on the policy and public opinion ramifications of Singh’s leadership.
The presence of an electoral penalty for the NDP among such voters is partic-
ularly challenging for the party, given the electoral system used in Canadian elec-
tions. Under a first-past-the-post electoral system, parties have two primary paths to
receiving a large share of seats. The first is to be competitive in ridings nationwide
(as is the strategy for the Liberals and Conservatives). The second is to be highly
regionally concentrated (as is the case for the BQ). While the NDP achieved the
former in 2011, becoming the Official Opposition in Parliament for the first
time in Canadian history, it has not found a path to similar electoral success in
subsequent national elections. Despite winning more than twice the popular vote
of the BQ in both 2019 and 2021, the NDP nevertheless earned fewer seats in
both contests. In short, if the NDP strategy for winning seats is through nationwide
competition, any electoral penalty, even a minor one, is potentially a major
obstacle. Indeed, despite surveys showing that Singh was perceived to be the
most trustworthy and competent leader (as well as the most favourably viewed
overall) in the 2021 election campaign (Rieti, 2021), the NDP ultimately gained
only a single seat.
While this article is an important first step, more research should be done to
assess the impact of racial attitudes on Canadian elections. Additional data collec-
tion is needed to determine whether the race of individual candidates in voters’
ridings also distort their vote preferences. It is possible that Canadian politics are
sufficiently nationalized that no such effect exists (for example, Stevens et al.,
2019), but a candidate-level effect is still possible—especially given that research
in the United States has found that black congressional candidates in the Obama
era faced an additional electoral penalty among voters with negative attitudes
toward racial minorities (Hale, 2019).
The findings in this article join an emerging body of research in showing that race
is a more central feature in Canadian politics than previously believed. Earlier work
has found evidence that racial minorities in Canada support racial in-group candi-
dates at higher rates (for example, Landa et al., 1995;Besco,2015) and that support
for social welfare policies is affected by the racial group perceived to be benefiting
from that policy (Stolle et al., 2016). This study finds evidence that these effects
extend to the electoral arena as well, with troubling implications for Canadian politics.
If non-white leaders present real barriers to partisan success in Canadian elections, it
is perhaps unsurprising that it has taken so long for such a leader to emerge. Even
though partisanship is by far the largest predictor of vote choice in Canadian national
20 Isaac Hale
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008423923000367 Published online by Cambridge University Press
elections, this article demonstrates that the confluence of negative racial attitudes and
a non-white party leader can nevertheless affect vote choice.
In summary, this study extends US research on the effect of racial attitudes on
voting behaviour to recent Canadian elections. I find that following the historic
major party leadership of Jagmeet Singh in the 2019 and 2021 elections, the
NDP was the only party to suffer a novel electoral penalty among voters with
strongly negative attitudes toward racial minorities. Furthermore, this shift may
be occurring in the context of polarization in party support on the basis of racial
attitudes. This article thus contributes to our knowledge of the relationship between
racial attitudes, descriptive representation and voter behaviour in Canada.
Supplementary material. The supplementary material for this article can be found at https://doi.org/10.
1017/S0008423923000367
Acknowledgments. I thank Richard Johnston, Roi Zur and Carlos Algara for their feedback and consul-
tation on this project.
Competing interests. The author declares none.
Notes
1Statistics Canada: “Visible Minority (15), Generation Status (4), Age (12) and Sex (3) for the Population
in Private Households of Canada, Provinces and Territories, Census Metropolitan Areas and Census
Agglomerations, 2016 Census—25% Sample Data,”https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/
2016/dp-pd/dt-td/Rp-eng.cfm?TABID=2&LANG=E&A=R&APATH=3&DETAIL=0&DIM=0&FL=A&FR
EE=0&GC=01&GL=-1&GID=1341679&GK=1&GRP=1&O=D&PID=110531&PRID=10&PTYPE=109445
&S=0&SHOWALL=0&SUB=0&Temporal=2017&THEME=120&VID=0&VNAMEE=&VNAMEF=&D1=0
&D2=0&D3=0&D4=0&D5=0&D6=0.
2Vivian Barbot briefly led the regionally competitive Bloc Québécois in 2011.
3A province that notably has had substantial political battles over the issue of religious garments such as
those worn by Singh (Turgeon et al., 2019; Jahangeer, 2020; Gaudreault-DesBiens and Grillo, 2009).
4As explained in the data and methods section, the 2011 election is excluded from this analysis due to
highly atypical levels of support for the NDP.
5Due to question differences, 2019 CES phone survey data is not included in this study. This omission
does not compromise the 2019 data, since the 2019 web data are weighted to be nationally representative.
6Despite some concerns about the interpretability of survey responses to feeling thermometers, numerous
studies have validated the reliability of feeling thermometers for analyzing attitudes (Alwin, 1997; Lupton
and Jacoby, 2016; Gidron et al., 2022).
7In the 2004 and 2006 CES, the largest income category is “More than $100,000.”Respondents in this
category are recoded here to be in the highest income category.
8A third option is not provided in CES waves prior to 2019, and less than 1 per cent of respondents in the
2019 and 2021 CES identified as neither a man nor a woman.
9Retrospective economic evaluations—a standard variable included in models of vote choice in individual
elections—are omitted here. Since the incumbent party varies across elections (Liberals in 2004, 2006, 2019
and 2021; Conservatives in 2008 and 2015), there is no reason to expect that retrospective economic eval-
uations would have comparable effects on vote choice across elections.
10 I present the results of Quebec-only and non-Quebec regressions in the supplementary material. The
substantive interpretation of the results when Quebec is omitted matches those in the national analysis.
11 This modelling choice was made based on the Liberals being the largest party by self-identification in
the pooled sample. The predicted probability probabilities of party support shown in Figures 3 through 8
are not affected by the choice of which party is used as the baseline vote choice category in the multinomial
logistic regression.
12 All predicted probability plots in the article and supplementary material show 95 per cent confidence levels.
Canadian Journal of Political Science 21
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008423923000367 Published online by Cambridge University Press
13 A minor, though interesting, difference is that the increase in likelihood of support for NDP candidates
among those with maximally warm feelings toward racial minorities is statistically significant once Quebec
is omitted. See Figure 8 in the supplementary material for more detail. This may be a result of Quebec’s
exclusion or a result of the absence of survey weights (non-national analyses are unweighted).
14 Analysis of Quebec alone does not use survey weights, as weights to generate a representative sample of
Quebecers are not available across the included CES waves.
15 Full multinomial logistic regression output in table form is provided in the supplementary material.
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Cite this article: Hale, Isaac. 2023. “Racial Attitudes and Vote Choice in National Canadian Elections.”
Canadian Journal of Political Science 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008423923000367
Canadian Journal of Political Science 25
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