In 2021, Alberta held Senate nominee elections for the fifth time in the province's history. Conducted concurrently with municipal elections and multiple referenda/plebiscites, the Senate race had a much lower participation rate than any of the other votes held that day. The purpose of this research note is to identify patterns of ballot roll-off—the phenomenon whereby electors cast a ballot for one race but not another—in the Senate election. Using data from a three-wave survey of Calgarians, the note describes the attitudes of electors toward the Senate election, revealing that electors viewed it as less important than any of the other votes contested that day. It also considers the role of partisan and geographic identities in shaping participation rates. Survey data reveal that both types of identities are associated with roll-off in the Senate election but not any of the other votes with which it was held concurrently.

This review surveys the literature on vote choice in Canada. It highlights key findings regarding a variety of factors that influence Canadians’ vote choice, while also suggesting future avenues of research. The focus is on studies conducted on vote choice at the federal level, with an emphasis on studies that have been published since 2000.

The prosecutorial independence of the Attorney General (AG) is a firmly established constitutional convention in Canada, but it is also an evolving convention, subject to ongoing contestation and debate. This article is a contribution to that debate. It defends a normative constitutional framework wherein the AG’s authority to make final decisions in matters of criminal prosecution is balanced against a corresponding duty to consult with cabinet and the prime minister on the public interest implications of prosecutorial decisions when the circumstances warrant. Within this normative framework, respectful contestation and debate amongst ministers, the prime minister, and the AG in determining the public interest merits of prosecution is welcomed, even encouraged, and if conducted with the requisite integrity, objectivity, and transparency, it is regarded not as a threat but as a valuable check and balance on AG independence and an indispensable form of quality control on the exercise of prosecutorial discretion.

Close relations with Europe, especially but not only with the United Kingdom, have long been a consensual tenet of Canadian foreign policy, which has supported European integration since the 1970s. The UK's withdrawal from the European Union threatens to upset this consensus. While Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has consistently cast Brexit in a negative light, Conservative leaders Andrew Scheer and Erin O'Toole have commented positively on the UK's leaving the EU. Did their polarized views resonate in the population? To answer this question, this article analyzes the results of an original survey of voting-age Canadians. Findings show a strong degree of correspondence between positions expressed in party discourse and preferences in the Canadian population. This raises the possibility that the difference between two models of transatlantic relations, which we call Eurosphere and Anglosphere, could emerge as a new fault line in Canadian foreign policy.

This study explores the relationship between local government dissemination of COVID-19 information and partisanship. The unit of analysis is all official county government websites in the United States. In particular, we investigate if there is a correlation between the overall partisanship of a county and whether a county government's website (1) mentions COVID-19 and (2) provides safety instructions concerning COVID-19. We hypothesize that mass partisanship will impact the probability that a county government's website provides information related to the coronavirus. We find that a larger share of Democratic voters in a county is associated with an increase in the probability that a county government's website mentions COVID-19 and provides safety instructions for its residents. The results hold even after controlling for population density, internet subscriptions and COVID-19 cases and deaths. The finding indicates that citizens’ access to information, even on matters of public health, are partially a consequence of partisanship.

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.