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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 November 2009
Professor Levesque's note raises a number of interesting and important questions. I shall be concerned directly with only one of these—the question of whether or not John Crosbie was the “best candidate,” as that term has been defined in Levesque's note. I shall try to show that while there was good reason to suppose that Crosbie was the “best candidate,” in fact he was not. I shall then comment briefly on why Brian Mulroney won the convention. The data on which these observations are based are from a series of surveys of delegates to the convention—the first conducted by mail beginning in the first week of May, the second conducted face-to-face by student interviewers during the three-day registration period at the convention, and the third conducted by mail beginning two weeks after the convention.
1 Levesque, Terrence J., “On the Outcome of the 1983 Conservative Leadership Convention: How They Shot Themselves in the Other Foot,” this JOURNAL 16 (1983), 779–84.Google Scholar
2 The first two surveys were designed and carried out for CBC-Television News Specials. The third was done for the book Contenders, The Tory Quest for Power (Scarborough: Prentice-Hall, 1983)Google Scholar by Patrick Martin, Allan Gregg and George Perlin. The first survey was the primary source for information about delegate issue positions, ideological identification, and aspects of the internal political culture of the party; the second was designed to check on shifts in delegate preferences; and the third dealt with behaviour at the convention and factors that the delegates said were important in their behaviour. The first two surveys produced returns in excess of 1,000 cases, out of which there were 958 usable returns from the first and 840 from the second. The third survey was designed as a panel for the first two and produced a total return of 755 usable cases, out of which 579 constitute a panel with the first survey (the primary source of data). The representativeness of the samples is discussed in the appendix to the book.
3 In the pairing with Clark, Crosbie had 52 per cent and Clark 45, while 3 per cent did not express an opinion. In the pairing with Mulroney, Crosbie had 40 per cent and Mulroney 54 per cent, while 5 per cent did not express an opinion.
4 Mulroney's actual fourth-ballot vote was 54 per cent. In the survey he had 55 per cent.
5 There are several pieces of evidence that show this. For example, in the third survey, 40 per cent of the Clark delegates said that finding an accommodation with Quebec was one of the three most important issues in choosing a leader and nearly all of these delegates expressed a preference for Mulroney rather than Crosbie.
6 In the first survey, 64 per cent of the delegates ranked Mulroney first or second for “appealing image on television” (49 per cent mentioned Crosbie and 27 per cent mentioned Clark). In the second survey, 47 per cent ranked Mulroney first or second as the candidate best able to help the party win the next election (43 per cent mentioned Clark and 42 per cent mentioned Crosbie).
7 In the third survey, 74 percent of the delegates said that the ability to help the party win the next election was a “very influential” factor in their choice of a candidate. No other factor was so widely described as “very influential”–not even the candidate's views on policy, a response which would be expected to be given because of the moral approval attached to explaining a choice in this way.