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Ontario Provincial Elections, 1934–55: A Preliminary Survey of Voting
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 November 2014
Extract
In this paper I intend to do little more than sketch in very broad outline some of the main features of the electoral anatomy of the province of Ontario as revealed by the official provincial election returns. Since I have relied solely on the actual voting record, which is, of course, tabulated by constituencies, my method is ecological and, unlike survey methods, provides only rough and indirect measures of the social and economic factors related to voting behaviour. My findings are entirely descriptive and do not go much beyond what is accessible to any alert newspaper reader who may have followed Ontario politics over the past two decades.
The chief methodological problem confronting ecological analysts of voting behaviour is how to equate electoral units with the administrative units by which population characteristics are tabulated in the census. In Ontario the smallest units for which official election statistics are given are polling subdivisions, but these fail to correspond to any units for which data on population characteristics are available. However, data on voting by townships can be derived from the election returns, and the census tabulates population characteristics by townships. I have made some determination of the voting habits of ethnic groups from data on townships, but have not set out these findings in detail in the present paper, which does not analyse units smaller than constituencies, and is thus confined to a very broad scrutiny of differential voting patterns.
- Type
- Articles
- Information
- Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne de economiques et science politique , Volume 23 , Issue 3 , August 1957 , pp. 395 - 403
- Copyright
- Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1957
References
1 This is a slightly revised version of a paper that was presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association in Montreal, June 6, 1956. The voting statistics are in all cases derived from the official provincial election returns which are published in the Ontario legislature's Sessional Papers in the year in which the general election was held or in the year immediately following. The Canadian Parliamentary Guide was consulted to determine the party affiliation of candidates in 1934, 1937, 1943, and 1945. The official returns did not list party affiliations for these elections.
The data on rural-urban composition are based on the 1941 and 1951 Censuses of Canada as reported in Economic Survey of Ontario for 1954 and 1955 (Toronto: Province of Ontario, 1955, 1956).Google Scholar
2 Bonham, John, The Middle Class Vote (London, 1955), 151–2.Google Scholar
3 Toronto Globe and Mail, June 10, 1955, 1.
4 Lower, A. R. M., Colony to Nation (Toronto, 1946), 186.Google Scholar
5 Ibid.
6 Economic Survey of Ontario, 1955, J-5, J-6.
7 Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Ninth Census of Canada, 1951, I, Population–General Characteristics (Ottawa, 1953), Table 34 (13–15).Google Scholar
8 On the pattern of federal voting in Canada, see Underhill, F. H., “Political Parties and Ideas” in Brown, George, ed., Canada (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1950)Google Scholar; Lipset, Seymour Martin, “Democracy in Alberta,” Canadian Forum, XXXIV, 11, Dec, 1954 Google Scholar; Wrong, Dennis H., “Notes on the Canadian Party System in Relation to Social Class” (mimeo. for distribution at the Congress of the International Political Science Association, Stockholm, 08 21–7, 1955).Google Scholar