During the election of April, 1963, Liberal speeches and editorials tended to depict minority government (that is, government by a cabinet with less than half the seats in the House of Commons) as a nameless, faceless horror, the political fate that is worse than death. The authors of these productions are now hard at work trying to prove themselves wrong. They may not find it easy. For they face three deeply rooted popular notions on the subject; indeed, it was precisely because these notions were so widespread and so deeply rooted that the appeal to vote for a winner proved so powerful.

The first is that minority governments are altogether exceptional, abnormal, almost unheard of, except, of course, among benighted continental Europeans and other “lesser breeds without the Law.” This is simply not so. We have had relatively few minority governments, colonial, Dominion, or provincial, in Canada; but Britain, Australia, and New Zealand have had plenty. Britain, from 1834 to 1931, had sixteen, which held office for a total of thirty-two years out of the ninety-seven. In Australia, before federation, minority governments were the rule rather than the exception in New South Wales, South Australia, and Tasmania till the 1890's, and in Victoria till the 1880's (New South Wales often had three or four governments in a single Parliament, South Australia four or five), and there have been plenty of minority governments in the states since federation. The Commonwealth itself had nothing but minority governments (six of them) from its inception till 1909, and another as recently as 1941–43. Minority governments were the rule also in New Zealand till the 1890's (one Parliament saw six governments). So it can scarcely be maintained, rationally, that minority government is something monstrous and unnatural, foreign to the whole spirit of British parliamentary institutions.

This paper has two aims, one substantive and the other methodological. Substantively the paper presents data from the April 1963 parliamentary election in Halifax in an array parallel to that in my article on the June 1962 election there: this presentation can be brief since the reader may refer to the earlier study if he desires amplification of the argument. On the other hand, the methodological problems involved in repeating a case study and in generalizing one's findings raise issues that must be discussed in greater detail.