R. Kenneth Carty

PARTIES AS FRANCHISE SYSTEMS The Stratarchical Organizational Imperative

The article begins by identifying a number of apparently dissonant characteristics of modern party organization, suggesting that they define patterns of internal organizational relationships that are more stratarchical than hierarchical. To provide a framework for analysing the structure and activities of stratarchical parties, the article develops a franchise model of party organization. After identifying the essential elements of the franchise party, and particularly the contract that defines it, the article points to how the model elucidates the distinctive character of factionalism, membership and leadership in modern political parties.

Do local campaigns matter? Campaign spending, the local canvass and party support in Canada

Though most observers agree that election campaigns have become increasingly nationalized in recent decades, considerable disagreement persists over whether and how local campaigns effect the vote. This study explores the impact of campaign spending and campaign activists on support levels for the national parties contesting the Canadian federal election of 1988, and builds on parallel work done in the U.K. Despite the unusually nationalized character of the 1988 election (dominated by the issue of the Free Trade Agreement with the U.S.), we are able to demonstrate convincingly that local campaigns do matter for most candidates. Specifically, campaign effects were strongest for candidates running for the opposition parties, especially those who ran non-winning campaigns. Our results suggest that the local party organizations of non-winning candidates are in the position of being able to realize potentially significant electoral returns through the mobilization of additional personnel or financial resources in their constituency campaigns.

Can Stratarchically Organized Parties be Democratic? The Canadian Case

Abstract In this paper we are concerned with the fundamental question of internal party democracy. Must political parties that depend upon a substantial membership inevitably end as oligarchies? Has the emergence of the cartel party, the “public utility” of modern democracies, spelled an end to active citizen‐partisans? To approach this issue we explore the cartel theorists’ suggestion that stratarchical organizational forms might provide parties with a way out of an apparent democratic dead end. The paper considers the logic of such parties and then examines how Canadian parties have been organized around stratarchical principles. The second substantial part of the paper turns to an assessment, in terms of the standards adopted by the Canadian Democratic Audit, of how, and to what extent, these parties might be considered democratic institutions.

Canadians and electoral reform: an impulse to doing democracy differently

Electoral reform has been at the centre of major political debates around the world over the last decade and a half. The emergence of competitive liberal democracies in Eastern Europe launched a round of questioning about how democratic elections ought to be conducted as those new regimes wrestled with the challenge of devising, and then fine-tuning, electoral systems. Questions of electoral engineering have also been on the agenda of a number of the established democracies. The countries of the European Union have needed to adopt systems to elect members to the growing European Parliament. In the United Kingdom, a variety of electoral experiments, for London and the new Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly have made electoral institutions a major item on the political agenda. And several other countries have engaged in wholesale electoral reforms in an attempt to restructure their electoral politics. Italy abandoned its system of proportional representation as New Zealand moved to adopt one, and Japan moved from one idiosyncratic system to another. Clearly the subject of electoral reform is much in the air. In stubborn contrast, electoral reform has never been an issue to seize many Canadians. Despite the gradual evolution of a set of institutional building blocks to structure electoral competition (Courtney, 2004), it is fair to say that the subject has rarely appeared on the public agenda. From time to time the issue has popped up in Liberal Party platforms, but usually only when the party was in opposition and perplexed by that disruption to what it believed was the natural order. Once safely back in office, Liberal governments have given it little second thought. Some of the smaller opposition parties have occasionally advocated electoral reform, but they have never managed to persuade a government, or the public, that it was in their interest to change a system that regularly produced one-party majority governments. Canadas national political parties take the electoral system for granted, believing it a good thing that produces majority governments when divisions among the voters would not. In recent years, the Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservative parties have seen their immediate political problem as one in which the system penalised them for being divided. Their solution was a merger in which legitimate and important differences over a range of policy areas are necessarily compromised. An alternative perspective is not that the supporters of these political parties have got it wrong, and so should cease to exist as distinctive elements in the body politic, but that a different electoral system is needed which would allow for their legitimate differences to be articulated in the countrys Parliament.

Fianna Fáil and Irish party competition

Whatever issues animate the campaigns of politicians and their parties, or mobilise and engage voters, once an election outcome is known analysts inevitably want to ask whether the election in question was one marked by continuity or by change. Of course, sometimes there is evidence of both and that has certainly been the case of judgements of recent Irish general elections. Writing of the 1997 election, Michael Laver argued it ‘was remarkable more for what didn’t happen than for what did’, but he then went on to conclude that it ushered in a ‘more or less permanent era of coalition government ... which meant a much enhanced role for the Labour party’.1 After the 2002 contest John Coakley suggested that ‘the Irish party system arrived in the twenty-first century with few signs of age’, although he also conceded that there was now ‘substantial support for new political forces’.2

National politics and community in Canada

Many Canadians are convinced that region, class, gender, and ethnicity define the minority units of national society. Challenging this conviction, the authors of this collection examine the nation as a unit and make the national political system, its institutions, and its personnel the heart of their concern.

Party Activity across Electoral Cycles: The New Brunswick Party System, 1979-1994

Political parties in Canada oscillate between periods of inter-election quiescence and active electoral year mobilization. This article moves beyond vote share accounts of party system change by using the financial accounts of local associations and central party organizations to track these patterns in the New Brunswick party system. The analysis covers several electoral cycles encompassing government turnover and the rise of a flash party. Ecological models rooted in electoral district-level data (including measures of party activity based on their annual financial records, census data describing the electoral districts and conventional aggregate electoral data) are developed to provide a more nuanced account of a party and party system change than those based on simple election results. The findings demonstrate that even in a period of remarkable electoral flux, party activity and success appears to be rooted in diverse constituency social and political contexts.

Preface: Party Organization and Campaigning at the Grass Roots

For some decades, students of elections have been convinced that local constituency-level campaigns do not matter. They have argued that it is national party campaigns, driven by sophisticated polling, television messaging and focused around the appeals of leadership that determine election outcomes. This is so even in electoral systems that maintain geographically based electoral districts. New work is reassessing that conventional wisdom and finding it wanting. Ironically, the re-examination of the impact and significance of local party campaign activity began in Britain, long regarded as having among the simplest and most nationalized of party systems. Using evidence from surveys of party organizers and party members as well as the financial records of local party activity, scholars such as Denver and Hands, Seyd and Whiteley and Johnston and Pattie have demonstrated that local party activity does matter. Their work has measured the shifting place of constituency organization and activity over several electoral cycles as the parties moved in and out of government. The articles in this issue take up these questions in a number of other established constituency-based party systems. Using a variety of evidentiary bases and approaches, each of the authors reveals much about how parties actually organize and operate at the grass roots and with what consequences for the character and outcomes of politics. The analyses of party practices in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Ireland support arguments drawn from British experience that there is a significant dimension to local party activity which plays onto electoral outcomes. The articles also demonstrate that much is changing in local–central party relationships and any full understanding of party campaign behaviour and outcomes needs to take that into account. These articles were delivered as part of a workshop entitled ‘Local Campaigning in Comparative Perspective’ held during the 2002 annual meetings of the Canadian Political Science Association in Toronto.

Is There a Local Dimension to Modern Election Campaigns? Party Activists’ Perceptions of the Media and Electoral Coverage of Canadian Constituency Politics

Modern election campaign studies focus on national dimensions at the expense of attending to local campaigns in legislative elections. This is also true of analyses of media coverage and impact of election campaigns. This paper examines the local dimension of media and election campaigns across a wide range of diverse constituency contexts in Canada in order to identify the political, socioeconomic, and geographic determinants of constituency party associations ability to attract local media attention during an election campaign. We also examine the role of these features of the constituency settings and explain variations in satisfaction with the medias coverage of the local campaign.

MPs and electoral redistribution controversies in Canada, 1993–96

The political careers of members of the Canadian House of Commons are filled with uncertainties and are comparatively short. One of the sources of political uncertainty is that which results from the periodic readjustment of electoral boundaries. The constituency boundary readjustment process following the 1991 census led to a particularly acrimonious conflict. This paper analyses MPs’ reactions to both the process and the ridings established by the boundary commissioners. Two main data sets are employed: a survey of English Canada backbench MPs to inquire into MPs’ attitudes about electoral redistribution and the record of MPs appearing before the Commons sub‐committee charged with hearing objections to the electoral map in the autumn of 1995. The two different analyses both point to a conclusion that MPs’ self‐interest, rather than principle or constituency characteristics, appears to determine MPs’ satisfaction with the process and their propensity to take action by objecting to the proposed boundaries...