In terms of party systems, Canada's system is an outlier. In our present work, we develop Richard Johnston's account of Canada's polarized pluralism in three ways. First, we link the literature on party systems to social identity theory. Second, we make an empirical contribution by directly testing Johnston's claim that intergroup affect plays a central role in shaping the dynamics of the party system. Using Canadian Election Study data from seven elections, we offer strong empirical support for the theory of polarized pluralism. Congruent with existing research, we find that the most important feature summarizing group-based affect in Canadian politics corresponds with the ideological left/right divide, but we also find that feelings toward groups on a second, uncorrelated axis (feelings toward Quebec and minority groups) shape vote choice. Yet our results show that fault lines in the polarized pluralist structure of the Canadian party system are emerging.

Recent increases in the number of openly LGBTQ2+ candidates have not resulted in a corresponding rise in the number of LGBTQ2+ politicians elected to the Canadian House of Commons, reviving the hypothesis of the “sacrificial lamb” candidacies. Drawing upon Lovenduski and Norris’ work on political recruitment, we analyze the backgrounds and experiences of the 172 LGBTQ2+ candidates who ran in the 2015, 2019 and 2021 federal elections in Canada. Our approach is based on the idea that LGBTQ2+ candidacies are the new sacrificial lambs of Canadian politics, although some of them seem less likely to be sacrificed than others. Indeed, we highlight how the electoral opportunities (for example, district competitiveness) afforded to LGBTQ2+ cis men are more likely to result in success than those afforded to LGBTQ2+ cis women or gender minority candidates.

La communication politique conventionnelle occulte l’usage des symboles culturels de l’apparence que sont les vêtements lors des campagnes électorales. Or le vêtement est incorporé à l’œuvre de conquête et de conservation du pouvoir politique du fait de son potentiel de séduction. En prenant pour site d’observation la campagne pour l’élection présidentielle camerounaise d’octobre 2018, cet article entreprend de rendre intelligible le comportement vestimentaire des candidats. Les données de cette étude sont issues d’une observation participante lors de meetings et de l’analyse des affiches de campagnes de cette élection. Il en ressort que le vêtement est un média de l’expression de la personnalité et des stratégies de séduction des candidats qui agit davantage comme un stimuli de la mobilisation que comme un déterminant du vote.

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.

Depuis un an, le Parti conservateur du Québec (PCQ) a fait des gains considérables dans les sondages d'intention de vote. Le parti peut-il encore faire des gains ou a-t-il atteint son plein potentiel? Dans cette note de recherche, nous tentons de répondre à cette question en utilisant un nouvel indicateur, l'index relatif de confiance (IRC), qui permet de mesurer le potentiel de croissance et la solidité du vote des partis.

Much attention has been paid to the changing class cleavage that structured political conflict in the twentieth century. In contrast to most advanced democracies, class voting has traditionally been weak in Canada. Using the entire series of the Canadian Election Study (1965–2019), we find the historic pattern of working-class voting for the New Democratic Party (NDP) held outside of Quebec in recent elections, before suddenly falling off in 2019. Starting in 2004, we find a clear and distinct trend where the working class has increased its support for the Conservatives. Although greater partisan sorting is occurring over the economy, cultural issues such as moral traditionalism and anti-immigration are now significant drivers of working-class Conservative support. The findings carry important implications for class-party relationships and reveal that Canada, despite its comparatively weak nativist cleavage, is not immune from the tensions social democratic parties have recently experienced in maintaining cross-class coalitions amid socio-economic structural changes.

Although the existence of strategic voting in the United Kingdom and Canada has been well documented, quantifying when a voter will cast a strategic ballot has yet to be done. This article draws on electoral data from five UK and Canadian elections in order to address this gap by identifying a precise “tipping point” for when a non-viable party supporter's probability of voting strategically crosses a 50 per cent threshold. I find the best tipping point measure occurs when a voter rates their favourite viable party greater than 59 out of 100 in the UK and greater than 73 out of 100 in Canada. Both countries also have clear tipping points for the likeability of an individual's highest preferred party and perceptions of that party's distance from contention. Overall, by calculating these tipping points, researchers can better gauge voter behaviour and how, or when, certain factors contribute to strategic voting.

In a seminal article published in 2003, Blais et al. demonstrated that local candidates mattered for about 5 per cent of voters in the 2000 Canadian federal election. This study's reliance on a single election raises external validity concerns. We replicate Blais et al.'s original analyses on four elections from 2000 to 2008 using a decade's worth of data from the Canadian Election Study. The local candidate effect first uncovered by Blais et al. is not specific to a single election. Local candidates are a decisive consideration for about 5 to 8 per cent of voters outside Quebec and for about 2 to 5 per cent of voters in Quebec.

The Canadian party system experienced a period of remarkable transition between 2006 and 2015, with the New Democratic Party (NDP) and Liberals trading places as the main competitor to the Conservatives. While national-level explanations are often used to explain this volatility, William Cross's research has shown that local association revitalization played a central role in the Liberals’ 2015 resurgence. This article examines the relationship between NDP local spending and success between 2006 and 2015. It shows that the NDP was consistently outspent by its opponents overall but that it often had a spending advantage in marginal ridings. As a result, this article finds little evidence that the NDP's local spending disadvantage cost the NDP seats, even though it finds a positive correlation between NDP local spending and NDP vote share.

Voters are deterred from casting a vote and more likely to vote strategically if their preferred choice is less competitive in their electoral district. We use 2019 Canadian Election Study data to show that respondents’ answers to a “how likely are you to vote” question depend on their estimate of their preferred party's local chances of winning, relative to other parties. This deterrent effect on turnout from the competitiveness of a voter's preferred party is concentrated among certain parties (NDP, Green, People's Party of Canada). Under first-past-the-post (FPTP), voters with particular policy perspectives are systematically deterred from voting, relative to other voters. Furthermore, we find that despite supporters of all parties having an incentive to vote strategically if their party is outside the top two in the district, strategic voting is heavily concentrated among voters who prefer parties other than the nationally most competitive two parties.

How accessible are polling locations in Canada? This article explores, for the first time in the Canadian context, the distance that voters may travel to get to their polling stations. It assembles a new set of data from the province of Ontario, mapping the distance between polling locations and a representative point in the polling division, using a variety of measures, including walking, driving and public transit times. It estimates the relationship between these distances and travel times and socio-demographic characteristics of each polling division, finding noteworthy relationships between these distances and the percentage of minority populations (both immigrant and Indigenous) in the polling division. This article also presents a potential negative, but nonlinear, relationship between distances and travel times and turnout, contributing to our understanding of how voters’ rational calculus of voting may be related to the locations of polling stations.

War comes with terrible costs both in terms of money and lives. Do voters punish incumbents for these costs? Much of the existing literature on the effects of war deaths on public opinion toward incumbents and their war efforts suggests that the answer is yes. We test this proposition on data from a non-US case: Canada's war in Afghanistan. We estimate models of the effect of local war deaths on incumbent support using individual-level panel data from the 2006, 2008 and 2011 Canadian Election Studies and aggregate district-level data from the 2008 and 2011 general elections. In none of our models do we find support for the conclusion that war deaths decrease support for candidates of the governing party. Instead, we find evidence at both the individual and district levels that support for Conservative party candidates is higher in districts that experienced war deaths.

This article investigates the extent to which provincial political parties made use of social media in their strategy, organization and communication in order to achieve their electoral goals during the Quebec 2012 general election. Using data from a series of 19 interviews conducted with online strategists and campaign directors from the five leading parties active in the 2012 election, we identify the strategic objectives these organizations followed when developing their social media campaigns. The strategists' narratives reveal that social media became a central component of electioneering and that parties were carrying out, in various forms, hybrid campaigns that combined traditional and emergent communication technologies and employed both old and new types of organizational principles.