In 1961, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation collaborated with the Canadian Labour Congress to form the New Democratic party. The CLC urged its affiliates to affiliate with the new party; and assumed that widespread affiliation would lead to a more competitive party. Increased electoral support, however, was not forthcoming. This note argues that levels of union support forthe NDP(measured by rates of affiliation) are very low, and thus the transformation of the CCF into the NDP was, in many respects, a non-event. However, the study also argues that members of NDP-affiliated union locals are more likely to identify with the vote for the NDP than are members of unions not affiliated with the party. Thus, the problem forthe NDP is that too few Canadian unions are explicitly advocating NDP support through affiliation.

Richard Johnston's article is addressed to an article of mine and to another, co-authored with Haim Gold.2 It is much more relevant to the former than to the latter, despite the fact that Johnston uses the data from the 1974 National Election Survey on which the Irvine and Gold article was based. The purpose of that article was to discover whether, if at all, a cleavage between two groups is sustained by social processes involving members of those groups.

In the course of arguing his case for electoral reform, John Stuart Mill proposes a criterion of government by majority which has gone largely unnoticed. Mill holds that any majority coalition of representatives in an assembly must directly represent a majority of electors. A representative directly represents those electors, and only those electors, who voted in his favour at his election. An implication of Mill's version of the principle of majority rule is that, given an assembly of any considerable size, all but a small fraction of the electorate must have direct representation.

Eighteenth-century British Whig and Tory accounts of mixed government and the balanced constitution are examined together with the similar doctrine favoured by British liberals of the Great Reform Bill period, among them Lord Durham. Durham's Report of 1839 is particularly interesting, it is argued, since it purports to demonstrate the superiority of mixed government to the kind of majoritarian democracy put forward in those years by British and colonial radicals. Durham's proposal to curtail the powers of the democratic branch of government in Lower Canada—the Legislative Assembly, he wrote, had “endeavoured to extend its authority in modes totally incompatible with the principles of constitutional liberty”—is compared to the eighteenth-century “court” party argument for a strong political executive. It is suggested that Durham and the eighteenth-century thinkers together provide grounds for supposing that even today the egalitarian aims of modern societies are furthered by a political system that recognizes man's natural inequalities.

This article examines the structure and setting of Encounter '79, the televised debates between party leaders which took place a week prior to the 1979 federal election, and considers the possible impact of this event on individual voting behaviour and on the outcome of that election. Using data from the 1979 National Election Study to measure exposure to the debates and perceptions of their content, it is argued that much of the potential effect is limited by public exposure to other political information through television and by the tendencies of such events to reinforce existing attitudes. The direct effects, if any, are more likely to be on participation than on voting decisions.

This work extends the authors' earlier work on incumbency by examining, riding by riding, results in 10federal elections from 1926 to 1980. Regression results indicate that incumbency generally had a significant impact, and between 1957 and 1980 incumbency was worth about four points for the Liberals, Conservatives and New Democrats, and significantly more for the Social Credit. The results vary and seem to be smaller than those observed in Ontario provincial elections, but this may be due to the greater instability in federal politics, since general shifts in party allegiance seem to reduce incumbency effects.