Elisabeth Gidengil

ISSUE IMPORTANCE AND PERFORMANCE VOTING

Issue importance mediates the impact of public policy issues on electoral decisions. Individuals who consider that an issue is important are more likely to rely on their attitudes toward that issue when evaluating candidates and deciding for whom to vote. The logic behind the link between issue importance and issue voting should translate to a link between issue importance and performance voting. Incumbent performance evaluations regarding an issue should have a stronger impact on the vote choice of individuals who find that issue important. The analysis demonstrates that there is a significant interaction between performance evaluations and issue importance. People concerned about an issue assign more weight to their evaluations of the governments performance on that issue when making up their mind.

MEASURING PARTY IDENTIFICATION: Britain, Canada, and the United States

The article proposes an empirically based reflection on how to measure party identification cross nationally, using data from the 1997 Canadian Election Study, the 1997 British Election Study, and the 1996 American National Election Study. These studies included both traditional national questions and a new common one, which allows for an assessment of the effects of question wording on the distribution and correlates of party identification. We show that the distribution of party identification is strongly affected by question wording and that the relationship between party identification and variables such as party and leader ratings, and voting behavior does not quite conform to theoretical expectations. We point out problems in the wording of party identification questions and propose an alternative formulation.

Economic Man—Social Woman? The Case of the Gender Gap in Support for the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement

Do differences in basic values and concerns underlie differences in the issue positions of women and men? This article uses a decomposition approach to assess the contribution of male-female differences in basic values and concerns to the gender gap in support for the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement in the 1988 Canadian federal election. Drawing on the work of Gilligan and other “difference” theorists, I theorize these differences in terms of “social woman” and “economic man.” The results support this interpretation. Men were more likely to bring economic considerations to bear in evaluating the agreement, whereas womens opinions were more likely to be influenced by their commitment to the welfare state and their greater concern for social programs. Women also proved to be more egalitarian and less persuaded of the virtues of competition and market solutions than were men.

What do Women Really Know? A Gendered Analysis of Varieties of Political Knowledge

While studies typically find that women know less about politics than do men, feminist scholars have argued that these findings reflect gender-biased measures that underestimate womens political knowledge. This article evaluates the feminist critique by taking a more expansive view of what constitutes political knowledge. Using data from a large Canadian urban sample, we show that gender gaps close or even reverse when people are queried about more practical aspects of political knowledge, such as government benefits and services. Our results also demonstrate that this type of knowledge is more equally distributed than its conventional counterpart, though the women who are the most likely to need government services and benefits are often the least likely to know about them. Finally, we show that knowledge of government services and benefits has a significant effect on womens intended vote choice. This article thus shows that more practical types of political knowledge might serve as meaningful additions to existing definitions and measures of political knowledge.

Explaining The Gender Gap in Support for the New Right The Case of Canada

This article uses data from the 2000 Canadian Election Studyto examine a variety of possible explanations for the gender gap in support for the newright. The authors find structural and situational explanations to be of little help in accounting for the gap. What matters are values and beliefs. The gender gap in support for Canadas new right party reflects differences in views about the appropriate role of the state, lawand order, and traditional moral values. It also appears to reflect differences in the salience of politics in mens andwomens lives. When all of these attitudinal factors are taken into account, the gender gap ceases to be significant. The implications of the findings are considered in light of comparative analyses of gender gaps in vote choice and support for radical right-wing populist political parties in Western Europe.

Election Campaigns as Information Campaigns: Who Learns What and Does it Matter?

During election campaigns political parties compete to inform voters about their leaders, the issues, and where they stand on these issues. In that sense, election campaigns can be viewed as a particular kind of information campaign. Democratic theory supposes that participatory democracies are better served by an informed electorate than an uninformed one. But do all voters make equal information gains during campaigns? Why do some people make more information gains than others? And does the acquisition of campaign information have any impact on vote intentions? Combining insights from political science research, communications theory, and social psychology, we develop specific hypotheses about these campaign information dynamics. These hypotheses are tested with data from the 1997 Canadian Election Study, which includes a rolling cross-national campaign component, a post-election component, and a media content analysis. The results show that some people do make more information gains than others; campaigns produce a knowledge gap. Moreover, the intensity of media signals on different issues has an important impact on who receives what information, and information gains have a significant impact on vote intentions.

The formation of party preferences: Testing the proximity and directional models

We review the methodological debate between defenders of the proximity and directional models. We propose what we believe to be a rigorous and fair test of the two models, using the 1997 Canadian Election Study. The analysis is based on responses to questions in which the various issue positions are explicitly spelled out. We rely on individual perceptions of party positions because it is individual perceptions that matter in the formation of party preferences but we control for projection effects through a multivariate model that incorporates, in addition to indicators of distance and direction, socio-demographic characteristics, party identification, and leader ratings. We also take into account whether a party is perceived to be extreme. The empirical evidence vindicates the proximity model.

Does the Local Candidate Matter? Candidate Effects in the Canadian Election of 2000

This article ascertains the impact of local candidates on vote choice in the 2000 Canadian election. The authors show that 44 per cent of Canadian voters formed a preference for a local candidate and that this preference had an effect on vote choice independent of how people felt about the parties and the leaders. The findings suggest that the local candidate was a decisive consideration for 5 per cent of Canadian voters, 6 per cent outside Quebec and 2 per cent in Quebec. Although preference for a local candidate had a similar effect on urban and rural voters, as well as on voters of varying degrees of sophistication, the findings revealed that rural voters and more sophisticated voters were more likely to have formed a preference for their local candidate. As a consequence, the local candidate was more likely to be a decisive consideration for more sophisticated rural voters.

Making Sense of Regional Voting in the 1997 Canadian Federal Election: Liberal and Reform Support Outside Quebec

This article uses a regression decomposition approach to explore the meaning of the gaps in electoral support for the federal Liberal party between Ontario, the West and Atlantic Canada, as well as the gap in Reform party support between the West and Ontario in the 1997 federal election. The analysis proceeds in two stages. The first stage involves determining whether the regional vote gaps reflect “true” regional differences or whether they can be explained simply in terms of differences in the sociodemographic makeup of the regions. Having ascertained that the gaps are not spurious, the second stage of the analysis probes the beliefs and attitudes that underlie them. The authors conclude that the gaps are driven not just by differences in political orientations and beliefs from one region to another, but also by more fundamental differences in basic political priorities.

Filtering the female: Television news coverage of the 1993 Canadian leaders' debates

This article uses televised news reports of the 1993 Canadian leaders’ debates to examine gendered mediation in the coverage of women politicians. By assessing the preponderance of interpretive versus descriptive coverage for the male and female debate participants we show that coverage of female political leaders is more filtered than men’s. A comparison of actual debate behavior and sound bite coverage also reveals that political coverage tends to marginalize women when they fail to conform to traditional masculine norms of political behavior but will over-emphasize the behavior counter to traditional feminine stereotypes when they do behave combatively. As a result, the women’s soundbites focused disproportionately on aggressive verbal behavior and gestures. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-342-9678. E-mail address: Website: ]