Jean Crête

Electoral and Partisan Cycles in the Canadian Provinces

This study tests explanations of the growth of Canadian provincial governments that draw from the political budget cycle approach. The approach assumes that governments jointly respond to electoral and partisan goals. When the next election is not expected soon, the government uses its discretionary power to pursue its ideological target. When the next election is near, politicians in government, fearing electoral defeat, deviate from their normal behaviour and engage in a re-election effort by undertaking an expansionary policy. This study suggests that provincial governments behave in the opportunistic fashion described by the model. Moreover, there is no sign that this opportunistic behaviour has been affected by government cutbacks in the 1990s.

Explaining the Evolution of Government Size in the Canadian Provinces

Using time-series and time-series cross-section data from the 10 Canadian provinces, the authors test several competing explanations of government growth. Multivariate analyses reveal that the results are sensitive to how government size is measured. The authors find strong empirical support for the intergovernmental grants, the bureau voting, and the electoral budget cycle explanations irrespective of the measure of government size used. The party control explanation, the fiscal supply explanation, and part of Wagners law give superior results when they are evaluated using real (adjusted) measures of government size than when they are evaluated using nominal (unadjusted) measures. The authors find virtually no support for the personal income part of Wagners law.

Measuring Government Growth in the Canadian Provinces: Decomposing Real Growth and Deflator Effects

In this paper, we argue that, when measuring government growth, we should distinguish among three growth phenomena: growth resulting from the broader scope of government activity, referred to as real growth; growth that results from higher costs of providing government goods and services, referred to as deflator effect; and growth in the simple ratio of government expenditure to gross domestic product (GDP), nominal growth, which is due to the combined impact of real growth and deflator effect. Using data on provincial government spending, we show that, over the 1971-95 period, there has been no real growth in three provinces and that there has been a substantial deflator effect on provincial government growth in all ten provinces.

Factors influencing e-government use in non-urban areas

Evidence suggests that citizens outside larger urban centers are less prone to use the various functionalities of e-government, while they are the most likely to benefit from these services. Few studies have been performed to understand rural citizens’ attitudes. Our purpose was to identify factors that influence the use of e-government services in outlying regions in the Province of Quebec (Canada). Our study was based on a subset of attitude-related variables that were shown to be strong predictors in prior research. We performed a survey involving 1587 citizens living in four selected outlying regions of Quebec, and held two focus groups with users and non-users of e-government. Our results confirm that attitude is influenced by perceived usefulness; perceived ease of use, perceived risk and trust and that attitude is strongly related to the intention to use e-government services. These results may help to plan more effective strategies to increase use in non-urban areas.

L'élection québécoise de 1985: un bilan des sondages

A great number of polls have been made public by the media during the 1985 electoral campaign in Quebec. The polls correctly predicted the winning party, but were not very good for forecasting the actual vote. A difference of 3 percent has been observed between the prediction and the vote with respect to the Liberal party and third parties considered as a whole. It is shown that the discrepancy must be attributed more to those who do not answer polls at all than to those individuals not willing to reveal their vote intention. Finally, the campaign seems to have had a small impact on the vote, the Liberal party increasing its share by 2 per cent and third parties loosing many votes among those who were tempted to support them at the beginning of the campaign.

Do Parties Matter? A Qualitative Answer with Numbers

A central condition for liberal democracy to persist is that the authorities implement what they said they were going to do. The actions of the authorities, or policies, are here observed through the Inaugural Speeches which list what the governments would do in the following months. The content of those addresses is compared to the content of the electoral party platforms of the parties forming the government. The data cover 46 years of political life in Quebec. The Inaugural Speeches as well as the party platforms are analyzed along a left–right dimension using the categories of the Comparative Manifesto Project. The results show that policies diverge as much in the years 2000 as they did in the 1960s. The detailed study of the party platforms do not predict exactly the policies, but the relative position of the parties, on a left–right continuum, gives a clear idea of what their policies will be. When a political party takes control of the government it implements what it said it was going to do. There is no dissonance between the before and the after.