Allan Kornberg

The Political Economy of Attitudes toward Polity and Society in Western European Democracies

This article employs 1976-1986 Euro-Barometer data to investigate the political economy of public attitudes toward prevailing political and social arrangements in eight Western European countries. Pooled cross-sectional time series analyses reveal that the effects of economic conditions extend beyond their impact on governing party support to influence feelings of life and democracy satisfaction and demands for radical and reformist social change. Attitudes toward democracy and social change also respond to important political events such as the occurrence and outcomes of national elections. We conclude by arguing that the political economy of attitudes toward polity and society in contemporary Western democracies is real, but limited by widely shared beliefs that have become key elements in the political cultures of these countries.

Support for the Canadian Federal Progressive Conservative Party since 1988: The Impact of Economic Evaluations and Economic Issues

Since their victory in the dramatic 1988 Canadian federal election, the governing Progressive Conservatives have suffered a rapid and precipitous decline in public support. Observers have attributed the massive erosion in popularity to the failure of the Meech Lake Accord, the governments insistence on implementing the highly unpopular value-added Goods and Services Tax (GST) and increasing public reservations about the wisdom of the free trade agreement. This article contends that, while these arguments have merit, a more important factor is that many Canadians blame the federal government for the poor state of the national economy and adverse personal economic circumstances. Moreover, negative reactions to the two highly salient economic issues, free trade and the GST, are, in part at least, products of public disapproval of the governments economic performance. The analyses are based on data gathered in national cross-sectional and panel surveys conducted over the 1983–1990 period.

Beliefs About Democracy and Satisfaction with Democratic Government: The Canadian Case:

This study uses 1990 Canadian national survey data to investigate public beliefs about democracy and how these affect satisfaction with the opera tion of an existing democratic political system. Confirmatory factor analyses reveal that conceptions of democracy are structured in terms of four factors- security, opportunities, elections-capitalism, and equality of group influence. All four factors affect levels of democracy satisfaction, controlling for several other influential variables. Consistent with the long-standing, but largely un tested, congruence hypothesis, Canadians whose beliefs about democracy tend to be consistent with the realities of political life in their country are more satisfied than are those whose beliefs accord less well with prevailing practices.

Arenas and Attitudes: A Note on Political Efficacy in a Federal System

Most research on political attitudes has ignored the influence of political context on attitude structure. This paper investigates political efficacy at the national and provincial levels of the Canadian federal system using 1983, 1984, and 1988 survey data. Confirmatory factor analyses of alternative measurement models reveal that efficacious attitudes are structured in terms of separate internal and external factors at the two levels of government. The degree of articulation in attitude structure varies strongly and inversely with regional differences in the similarity of national and provincial party systems.

Political Elite and Mass Perceptions of Party Locations in issue Space: Some Tests of Two Positions

Our analyses have enabled us to test several important theoretical propositions advanced by two outstanding scholars, Anthony Downs and Donald E. Stokes. Our data do not support the Downsian position that it is possible to array parties along a single left-right continuum. The factor analyses suggested that a left-right factor underlies the perceptions some individuals have of the positions Canadian parties take on some specific issues. However, the left-right factor that emerged from the analyses was not always what conventional wisdom supposed it to be, with the NDP on the left, the Liberals to the left of center, the Conservatives to the right of center and Social Credit on the right.39 Nor was it in accord with the structuring of parties that places the NDP on the far left, both the Liberals and the Conservatives in the same right-of-center position and Social Credit on the far right.40 Moreover, the left-right factor most often underlies the perceptions of MPs. To a lesser extent it underlies the images of the upper stratum of the public. It least often underlies the perceptions of average Vancouver and Winnipeg citizens.

Policy Differences in British Parliamentary Parties

Questionnaire data that delineate the positions of 197 Labour and 126 Conservative M.P.s in the British House of Commons on ten major policy issues are utilized in an empirical test of some of the positions taken by British political parry scholars, Samuel H. Beer and Robert T. McKenzie. Assuming that policy stances taken on these issues reflect more general ideological orientations, the data support Beers view that serious ideological differences divide the parties. However, McKenzies belief that policy differences between the frontbenches are narrower than are differences between their backbench supporters is also confirmed. The data also indicate that the differences between the front and backbenches are greater in the Labour party than in the Conservative party, a situation that could be intrinsic to the parties or merely a function of the fact that Labour was in power when these data were collected. Finally, it is suggested that although there are significant differences between the frontbenches and an extreme wing of their respective backbenches, as McKenzie had assumed, it would be unwise to exaggerate the importance of such intraparty differences.

Too Close to Call: Political Choice in Canada, 2004

Canadas June 28th, 2004, federal election was an exciting and, in several respects a surprising contest. One major surprise was the election campaign itself. Rather than being the predictable, boring event many commentators had anticipated, the campaign was a closely fought battle between a longtime governing party and a new opposition party that had been formed only six months before the election was called. A second surprise, at least for some observers, was turnout, with participation in a national election falling to the lowest level in Canadian history. A third, potentially very significant, surprise was the success of the separatist Bloc Quebecois, accompanied by a resurgence of support for Quebec sovereignty. After the election, the future of Canadas national party system, indeed, the future of Canadian democracy, appeared more problematic than had been the case only a few months earlier.

From a two-party-plus to a one-party-plus?: Ideology, vote choice, and prospects for a competitive party system in Canada

Conventional wisdom, buttressed by numerous empirical studies, has questioned the importance of both class and ideological factors on voting behavior in Canada. However, two recent studies of the 1997 Canadian national election [Gidengil et al., Canadian J. Political Sci. 32 (1999) 247; Nevitte et al., Unsteady State: The 1997 Canadian Federal Election, Oxford University Press, Ontario, 2000] indicate that ideological factors played an important role in determining the outcome of the election, since they affected the direction of the vote for the several parties in both Quebec and the rest of Canada. In this paper, we clarify and extend these analyses with data from the 2000 election, as well as the 1997 election. We find that a number of ideological dimensions underlie the issue positions of voters in Quebec and the rest of Canada in both the elections and that these have important implications for the maintenance of the multiparty system that seemed to emerge in the last decade. More specifically, we find that ideological factors affect partisan volatility in Canada, and that the inclusion of these factors improves the explanatory power of a standard vote choice model in both election years. We infer from our findings that ideological differences among Canadian voters can help sustain a multiparty system in the foreseeable future but that it is a system that currently favors the Liberal Party—so much so, in fact, that the ability of any other party to successfully displace the Liberals as the government in the future is problematic. However, there is a curious periodicity to the electoral fortunes of Canadian parties at both the federal and provincial levels. Political parties can govern for years and then experience an electoral disaster of a magnitude sufficient to make them a distinctly minority party.  2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Some Correlates of Regime Support in Canada

This paper is concerned with the distribution and foundations of public support for the political regime in Canada. Support for the regime historically has been a matter of concern to Canadian elites. The recent provincial electoral victory of the Parti Quebecois, a party dedicated to making Quebec an independent nation, has made regime support and maintenance matters of concern to average citizens as well. The analyses that follow are based upon data gathered in a nation-wide survey of the Canadian electorate in 1974. We focus on the following areas: the extent to which socio-demographic and attitudinal variables conventionally employed in studies of political behavior are related to levels of regime support; the relationships between the direction and strength of partisanship and support for the political regime; the relationships between attitudes toward key political institutions and political actors and the level of regime support; and finally, the effects of major structural and cultural factors (i.e. federalism and regionalism) on support for the regime. From the perspective of comparative political analysis, research in these areas allows us an opportunity to comment on and expand the base of the existing empirical research on regime support. From the more particular perspective of Canadian politics, our analysis may help to clarify the impact on regime support of ethnicity, regionalism, federalism and a British-model parliamentary system.

Flawless campaign, fragile victory: Voting in Canada's 2006 federal election

Canadas 23rd general election was held on January 23, 2006. Only 20 months earlier, on June 28, 2004, the governing Liberals—in power continuously since 1993—had been reduced to a minority in Parliament, winning 135 of 308 seats and 37% of the popular vote. Minority governments in Canada typically have quite short half-lives, and the Liberal government formed in 2004 was no exception. After narrowly avoiding defeat on its budget bill in May 2005, the government lost a vote of confidence in the House of Commons on November 28, and Canadians faced the prospect of a winter trek to the polls. And, since the holiday season was fast approaching, Election Day was deferred until late January, making the campaign an atypically long one by Canadian standards. It also proved to be a very exciting one.