By appealing to public concern over environmental issues, Green parties have emerged to gain secure positions in several party systems. However, in Canada, we know very little about why people support the Green Party. This research note draws upon the Canadian Election Study (CES) to explore the ways in which demographic factors, personality traits and individual environmentalism impact vote choice. Theorizing Green Party support as a form of pro-environmental behaviour, we build a model that tests the impact of demographic factors and personality traits as mediated through environmental attitudes. It finds that, while pro-environmental policy attitudes are the strongest predictor of Green Party support, several demographic factors and personality traits—specifically conscientiousness, openness to experience, agreeableness and extraversion—have an effect.

The ideological and issue positions of parties are known to shape citizens’ political attitudes and voting behaviour. One important way to obtain estimates of parties’ positions is to ask experts to place parties on salient ideological dimensions. The Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) has been collecting such estimates for democracies in Europe and elsewhere. CHES Canada adds to this project by providing estimates of party positions and characteristics of Canadian federal parties and provincial parties in Ontario and Quebec. This note introduces this new data source, clarifies how the data were collected and illustrates how the data can be used to (comparatively) study party politics in Canada.

Les instruments auxquels un État peut avoir recours pour atténuer les risques que font peser les inégalités économiques sur la démocratie sont nombreux et peuvent prendre différentes formes. Dans cet article, nous cherchons à mettre en lumière la dimension normative des trois principaux instruments auxquels on a généralement recours pour mitiger l'influence de l'argent dans la compétition électorale, ainsi que le contexte dans lequel ils furent institués, remodelés – et parfois démantelés – au Canada. Ces trois mécanismes sont la limitation des dépenses électorales, le plafonnement des contributions privées et le financement public des partis. Il ne s'agit toutefois pas uniquement de décrire ces instruments, mais de réfléchir aux justifications normatives spécifiques à chacun, et d'en comprendre leur complémentarité. Plus largement, il s'agit d'offrir un cadre pour penser les enjeux de financement électoral en philosophie politique, un sujet trop souvent laissé dans l'ombre par la théorie démocratique.

In this article, we study how political parties located on the right of the political spectrum adapt to changing electoral and political constraints. Drawing on the concept of policy feedback, we turn to the politics of social policy in the province of Quebec to show that the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ), a right-wing party, embraced a more centrist strategy than the preferences of its electoral base would suggest. The CAQ has rejected the austerity policies associated with the previous government and has favoured social policy expansion rather than tax cuts or a quicker return to balanced budgets. We then explore the reasons for this move toward the centre. Our evidence suggests that self-reinforcing feedback effects from existing policies shape public opinion and electoral strategies, which contribute to moderating the actions of this right-wing governing party.

Cet article aborde le phénomène des défections dans les partis politiques grâce à une étude du cas des députés québécois. Les entrevues avec les anciens parlementaires et une analyse des discours médiatiques à propos de leur départ documentent les motivations à quitter ou à rejoindre un autre parti. Cette recherche propose deux typologies novatrices : la première identifie les types de défections et la seconde explore les motivations à quitter. Les analyses montrent que les députés québécois partent surtout en raison de conflits liés aux valeurs et aux politiques, mais très peu pour le prestige. En ouvrant un dialogue avec les travaux d'Hirshman, l'article illustre aussi le rôle de la prise de parole et de l’écoute dans la décision pour un député de quitter un parti ou de rester dans celui-ci.

The Alberta Sovereignty within a United Canada Act is a strategic wedge aimed at raising the salience of western alienation, an issue on which the United Conservative Party and its leader, Danielle Smith, believe they can dominate their opponents and so win the May 2023 provincial election. The act signals the unprecedented circumstances in which the governing party finds itself. It is running neck-and-neck with a formidable opponent and a party leader who previously held the office of premier. Alberta has never experienced such an election.

This article reports the results of a survey examining Canadians’ attitudes about political parties’ collection of personal information. Datified campaigning brings concerns about surveillance, divisiveness, digital redlining and elector autonomy. This article asks whether awareness of parties’ data collection practices affects willingness to engage with campaigns. We find (1) that respondents are not fully aware of political parties’ data collection practices, (2) that awareness of parties’ collection of personal information may reduce electors’ willingness to interact with political parties online, (3) that those who are more aware of these practices report higher levels of concern about them and that those who do not think that parties’ collection of personal information is important to the democratic process also report higher levels of concern, and (4) that new legal measures to regulate how political parties collect and use personal information are supported by respondents.

Under what circumstances do central and local party actors engage in gatekeeping to influence the outcomes of local nomination races? In this article, I develop a theory of gatekeeping in Canadian parties by synthesizing past work on candidate selection with a multi-method field study of New Brunswick provincial nominations (2017–2018). I present evidence in favour of this theory from participant-observation of 25 nominating conventions, 93 elite interviews, and an original dataset of major party nominations for the 2018 New Brunswick election. The theory and evidence show how gatekeeping by central party actors helps explain how nominations can go uncontested, even in competitive and safe seats. The theory also generates several testable claims for future studies of candidate selection in other places, time periods and levels of government in Canada.

Scholarly research suggests that Canadian election campaigns are centralized affairs, with party headquarters managing a disciplined campaign organization across 338 federal constituencies. At the same time, local realities can incentivize constituency campaigns to deviate from their parties. This article examines the extent of local campaign discipline, given these tensions between parties’ centralizing compulsions and countervailing forces that militate against party cohesion. The article relies on original data to identify and explain the extent of local campaign behaviour that defies central party preferences and directives. It draws from interviews with 87 former candidates and eight party strategists, as well as observational data gathered from 10 constituency campaigns during the 2019 federal election. The findings indicate a relatively high level of undisciplined constituency campaign behaviour during the 2015 and 2019 elections. The article contends that this behaviour stems from insubordination, innovation and incompetence within constituency campaigns.

Open political debate on immigration and integration policies (IIP) among Canadian political parties has been relatively limited. As Canada's immigration and integration systems become more decentralized, what about political debates about IIP in Canadian provinces? This article examines how IIP evolved across time by focusing on political parties’ claims, frames and pledges in party platforms and newspapers, using the cases of Ontario and Quebec. In Ontario, IIP were primarily framed as an economic and social resource. However, following the event of 9/11, new frames began to be introduced, contributing to a heightened salience and polarization. In contrast to Quebec, however, this politicization was not sustained. In Quebec, IIP were only marginally a matter of debate until the mid-2000s. This changed following the Hérouxville event, as these topics became salient, and dominant frames of immigration as economic and social resources were challenged by those of immigration as economic and cultural threats.

Scholars have long studied the influence of parties on citizens’ policy preferences. Experiments conducted outside Canada have convincingly shown that the cues offered by political parties can influence people’s attitudes. However, the most prominent study of party cue effects in Canada finds weak effects, concluding that Canadian parties are less influential because they are less clearly ideological than parties elsewhere. We propose that parties are actually more influential than they appear because party cue effects partly depend on variables other than partisanship, notably attitudes toward the cue-giver. This is especially true in countries like Canada with multi-party systems. We show that attitudes toward parties are not clearly reflected in partisanship in Canada. We then show that more specific measures of party and leader attitudes better account for how experimental participants react to cues than does party identification alone.

Reforms to campaign finance laws at the beginning of the twenty-first century led to concerns that Canadian political parties would become more centralized, thereby altering the stratarchical arrangement between local party organizations and the national party office. This article extends the period of analysis to 2008 and 2011. Although concerns were not unfounded, data reported in this article reveal that horizontal linkages developed between constituency associations in the Conservative Party of Canada, instead of downward money transfers from the national office. The article compares the Conservative party to its major competitors and explores three regional cases where these linkages are prevalent. Tobit regression is used to examine whether monetary transfers are coordinated by the central office or initiated by local constituency associations. Given weak evidence for the latter, the findings demonstrate that parties with a reliable base of support can leverage their campaign resources from one region into a national presence.

The grip of austerity in European politics since 2008 presents a double puzzle: electorally weak center-left parties offering no definite alternative, and the surprisingly efficient pursuit of “fiscal consolidation”. To understand this double puzzle this article investigates the institutional bases of alternative economic thinking during the 1930s versus the post-2008 crisis years. Noting the recent prominence of a new social type, the European economist-technocrat (eet), I highlight the historically specific order to which the eet is indigenous: rarefied, international professional circuits that tend to work over, not through, party politics. This contrasts sharply with the nationally-based, party-connected economists who developed new economic orthodoxies between the 1930s and 1960s, including Keynes himself. Approaching the study of economic culture in the public sphere in a Polanyian moral markets framework, I argue that the linkages between European economics and financial technocracies help to explain Europe’s double puzzle. Theoretically, I argue that a focus on expertise and parties, and not just states, is central to our understanding of economic culture in the public sphere.