Towards a political analysis of patronage

Political patronage is a phenomenon which has already been analysed and evaluated from many angles. An analytical model inspired by cybernetics is proposed here as a framework for the interpretation of the phenomenon. Such a model leads one to observe interactions between the different actors of a given society in terms of power relations. Using the ideas suggested by the model, the author describes patronage as a complex process in which a client relationship is established between patron and client, following which the former tries to alter his relationship with his opponents in political competition. Through the establishment of a client relationship, the patron helps to pull the client out from a certain state of weakness so as to obtain the means which the client wants for himself. Consequently, thanks to the means obtained by the client, which help him augment his power, the patron tries once more to alter his relations with his rivals in the political competition. In this sense, patronage permits a double transformation.

On an empirical level two questions are posed. Can one trace an evolutionary pattern in the practice of patronage by political parties in Quebec between 1944 and 1972, and in what sense can patronage be defined? Does patronage have different characteristics depending on whether it is practised by the Liberal party or the Union nationale in the period under review?

La perception ordonnée de l'idéologie des partis politiques canadiens

La plupart des chercheurs acceptent comme évident l'énoncé selon lequel les partis politiques canadiens peuvent être ordonnés selon le critère droite-gauche : lendpétant perçu comme étant à gauche, le Parti libéral au centre, le Parti progressisteconservateur à droite et le Crédit social à l'extrême droite. La présente étude a pour objet de vérifier la véracité de certaines propositions implicites à cette approche : (1) un seul critère suffit pour situer les partis les uns par rapport aux autres; (2) ce critère est applicable de pareille façon partout au Canada; (3) l'appartenance à un parti n'influence pas la perception ordonnée des partis.

A l'aide de données provenant de sondages effectués en 1965 et en 1968, il est démontré qu'aucune de ces propositions n'est valide. S'il apparait que les électeurs ont une perception relativement claire d'un continuumnpd – Libéral – Conservateur, ils ne s'entendent pas sur la place à assigner aux Créditistes. De plus, les résidents de la Colombie Britannique et des Prairies ont une égale tendance à concevoir les Conservateurs comme situés à gauche des Libéraux, et les Libéraux comme à gauche des Conservateurs. Enfin, certains partisans politiques (et notamment ceux dundp) ordonnent les partis d'une façon différente des autres.

L'auteur en conclut que le critère droite-gauche, bien que pertinent, ne saurait décrire à lui seul les perceptions spatiales globales de l'idéologie des partis. Il propose que le critère centre-périphérie soit utilisé comme seconde dimension des perceptions idéologiques ordonnées.

Cet article cherche à vérifier de façon empirique certaines hypothèses déduites de l'analyse théorique de Gilles Bourque et Nicole Frenette portant sur la période de la Révolution tranquille (1960–5). Il s'agira essentiellement de vérifier si la nouvelle petite bourgeoisie québécoise a su transformer de façon significative la rôle de l'Etat québécois pour en faire une arme importante de sa lutte pour une position hégémonique.

In this short paper I shall seek to determine the empirical support for two hypotheses about the social sources of continentalism.

In recent years a significant beginning has been made in the investigation into the processes of recruitment of authorities within the Canadian political system. The focus of these studies has been on elective offices at the federal and provincial levels and on party activists. Only limited research has been devoted to the processes by which local decision-makers are recruited. Other than the partial analysis of local leadership selection by Harold Kaplan in his study of Toronto politics and the cursory treatment of this subject by J.G. Joyce and H.A. Hosse in their general survey of city councillors throughout Canada, empirical data about the recruitment of Canadian local decision-makers is confined to the level of social back ground analysis. The remainder of our information about local leadership selection tends to be in the form of hypotheses derived from data generated by the more extensive research on the recruitment of city councilmen in American cities. Although these propositions are useful because of certain shared structural characteristics between Canadian urban political systems and their American counterparts, they remain largely untested in the Canadian urban context and we run the risk of ignoring possible differences in the recruitment processes caused by factors endemic to each system.

The various subtables of Table i, or some variant of them, must be familiar to every teacher and to every student of Canadian voting behaviour. While most of our history books, and certainly all of our current concerns, focus on cultural differences in Canada, all our voting and party identification data suggest that the primary line of political division is between Roman Catholics and non-Catholics. The leftmost tables in the two rows of Table i indicate that religious differences are approximately three times as strong as ethnic ones, regardless of the index chosen. The percentage difference in Liberal identifiers is 20 across religious categories, but only 6 across the ethnic ones; the phi coefficient is.21 as compared to.06, while Yule's Q is.42 as opposed to.13. Nor is this simply an artifact. The same finding shows up for vote as for party identification, for a linguistic dichotomy as for an ethnicity dichotomy, and for undichotomized as for dichotomized variables. Similarly, the religious dichotomy need not be imposed, but emerges quite freely when similar data are analysed with the aid program. Indeed, one need not depend on using dichotomies at all, though the analysis becomes more complex. In each case, however, the basic generalization holds.