Ontario Members of Parliament: Determinants of Their Voting Behavior in Canada’s First Parliament, 1867–1872

Extract

The historiographical hegemony of the “new” social history in recent years reflects, and undoubtedly has contributed to, the decline of scholarly interest in nineteenth-century Canadian political history. What we know now of federal and provincial parties, politics, politicians, electorates, political leadership, and parliamentary behaviour in Victorian Canada derives from the studies of a generation of scholars whose major contributions to the literature were made in the 1960s, the work of a handful of more recent commentators notwithstanding. But as Allan Bogue has observed in a study of the recent historiography of American political history, new sources, methodologies, and intellectual preoccupations have created new opportunities for the re-examination and re-interpretation of political history. He cites “middle-range” re-interpretations of local and regional political elites, based on pro-sopographical analyses, as a necessary first step toward more “behavioral” studies (Bogue, 1980: 243–245). Elsewhere, students of British political history have been much interested in the intersections of the “new” social history and political history, especially in the relationship between the structures and attitudes of local societies and the political characteristics and parliamentary behaviour of their elected representatives (Aydelotte, 1977; Moore, 1967; Clarke, 1971).