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Regionalism, majority government and the electoral system in Canada : the case for two-seat constituenciesSutherland, Neil John January 1988 (has links)
A continual problem in Canadian politics is regional conflict. There are several reasons why the major issues in Canadian politics are regionally-defined. Some of the socio-economic variables include ethnicity and economic bases, which are reinforced by geography. Some of the political variables include the division of powers between the central and provincial governments, and the regional concentration of party representation in the central government legislature.
At the level of the electorate, Canada's national political parties actually receive multi-regional support. Thus, introducing an electoral system that translates votes into seats more proportionately than the present system should increase the multiregional representation of Canada's political parties at the level of seats in the legislature.
However, introducing a more proportional electoral system would probably decrease the likelihood of a party forming a majority government. Consequently, if Canada's legislators felt that executive stability through majority government was a more important normative criterion (along with whatever vested interests they might have) than a government with multiregional representation, then proposals for a more proportional electoral system will remain an academic exercise.
The objective of this study was to find an alternative electoral system which satisfies both the criteria of majority government and multiregional representation.
Based on the premise that the most significant independent variables affecting majority government and multiregional representation are district magnitude and geographical distribution of partisan support, it was hypothesized that Increasing the district magnitude from one to two, or from one to three, would maintain the bias in favour of and increase the multiregional representation of a large, diffuse party.
The results of the study show that a district magnitude of two would provide a large diffuse party with a majority of seats for the same voter support as the present system does. In addition, DM2 rewards this large diffuse party with the seats necessary to form a minority government at a much lower voter support level than does the existing system. Thus, DM2 solves the problem of underrepresentation of regions in the government party, and is at the same time even more advantageous to a large diffuse party than is the present electoral system. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate
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Voters’ evaluations of prime ministerial candidates : the impact of leader traits in the 2000 Canadian federal electionNakai, Emily 11 1900 (has links)
This study examines the impact of perceived personality traits of the political party
leaders on voting decisions in the 2000 Canadian federal election, replicating Richard
Johnston's research that is based on the 1997 election. Employing data from the 2000
Canadian Election Study (CES), the research uses Ordinary Least Squares regression analysis
to estimate how evaluations of leader personality traits over two aggregated dimensions -
competence and character - moved votes.
The changes in the design of the 2000 CES from prior years created many difficulties
in assessing voters' evaluations of the party leaders and limited the comparability of the
results from the study. The key methodological differences are: (1) leaders were not
evaluated individually; (2) it did not measure the degree of applicability of the trait labels; (3)
it included significantly fewer leader personality questions, and (4) the "new ideas" variable
does not fall squarely into either the competence and character domains and seems to favour
the new Alliance Party leader.
This study finds that leader effects are more critical to the parties struggling for their
political survival. A counterfactual party leader-switching exercise suggests that the distance
between the frontrunner parties and the others was too great for leader-switching effects to
make a difference in determining which parties would form the government and the Official
Opposition and whether the winning party would form a majority or minority government.
Joe Clark improved his party's standing during the campaign and helped it to retain
its official party status while evaluations of Stockwell Day declined. The relevance of
judgements of Day and Clark on pre-election vote intentions moved in the same direction as
voters' respective evaluations of the leaders over the campaign. This study confirms that
campaigns can have an effect on voters.
The study supports earlier research findings that suggests that Canadian elections are
vulnerable to leader effects. Conventional wisdom that is driven by the media's focus on the
personalities suggests that leaders are significant factors in Canadian federal elections, but the
empirical research reported in this study and others before it suggest otherwise.
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He who votes decides nothing --Warman, Richard January 2003 (has links)
What is the meaning of the right to vote, and the concurrent right to play a meaningful role in the electoral process as guaranteed by s. 3 and informed by the equality provisions of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms? These questions, and whether the current Canada Elections Act adequately respects them are considered in light of jurisprudence concerning democratic rights including the Supreme Court's recent Figueroa decision. / The English Jenkins Commission is examined, as are the lessons to be learned from the experiences of Germany, South Africa, Italy, and New Zealand with proportional representation voting. At home, the tentative steps toward voting reform in Quebec, British Columbia, PEI, and the work of the Law Commission of Canada are discussed. Finally, basic goals for voting reform are suggested and measured against model recommendations. The prospects for reform ultimately depend on a rebalancing of the values of democracy and power.
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Voters’ evaluations of prime ministerial candidates : the impact of leader traits in the 2000 Canadian federal electionNakai, Emily 11 1900 (has links)
This study examines the impact of perceived personality traits of the political party
leaders on voting decisions in the 2000 Canadian federal election, replicating Richard
Johnston's research that is based on the 1997 election. Employing data from the 2000
Canadian Election Study (CES), the research uses Ordinary Least Squares regression analysis
to estimate how evaluations of leader personality traits over two aggregated dimensions -
competence and character - moved votes.
The changes in the design of the 2000 CES from prior years created many difficulties
in assessing voters' evaluations of the party leaders and limited the comparability of the
results from the study. The key methodological differences are: (1) leaders were not
evaluated individually; (2) it did not measure the degree of applicability of the trait labels; (3)
it included significantly fewer leader personality questions, and (4) the "new ideas" variable
does not fall squarely into either the competence and character domains and seems to favour
the new Alliance Party leader.
This study finds that leader effects are more critical to the parties struggling for their
political survival. A counterfactual party leader-switching exercise suggests that the distance
between the frontrunner parties and the others was too great for leader-switching effects to
make a difference in determining which parties would form the government and the Official
Opposition and whether the winning party would form a majority or minority government.
Joe Clark improved his party's standing during the campaign and helped it to retain
its official party status while evaluations of Stockwell Day declined. The relevance of
judgements of Day and Clark on pre-election vote intentions moved in the same direction as
voters' respective evaluations of the leaders over the campaign. This study confirms that
campaigns can have an effect on voters.
The study supports earlier research findings that suggests that Canadian elections are
vulnerable to leader effects. Conventional wisdom that is driven by the media's focus on the
personalities suggests that leaders are significant factors in Canadian federal elections, but the
empirical research reported in this study and others before it suggest otherwise. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate
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He who votes decides nothing --Warman, Richard January 2003 (has links)
No description available.
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Campaigns, the media and insurgent success : the Reform party and the 1993 Canadian electionJenkins, Richard W. 11 1900 (has links)
It is well recognized that the 1993 election campaign catapulted the Reform party into the
national political scene, but our understanding of how this was possible is quite limited.
Drawing on the work in cognitive psychology on attitude change, the work on the news
media coverage of elections, and the political science work on election campaigns, this
thesis locates the impetus for Reform's success in the dynamic flow of information about
the party that was available in television news broadcasts and voters' likelihood of being
persuaded by that information. This link is developed by an analysis that makes use of a
content analysis of the 1993 campaign, the 1993 Canadian Election Study, and a merged
analysis of the election and news data.
The Reform party began the campaign as a minor component of the news coverage of the
election, but the news media coverage changed dramatically. Reform was provided with
more news access than its support indicated it deserved and that coverage focused on what
became a major theme of the election; the welfare state and the role of government.
Coverage of Reform underwent a further change as it both decreased and focused on
cultural issues during the last two weeks of the campaign. Using a two-mediator model of
attitude change, the analysis shows that people who were predisposed to agree with
Reform's anti-welfare state message and who were likely to be aware of the news
information, changed both their perceptions of the party and increased their support for the
party. Further support for the impact of the media is derived from the analysis of voter
response to the second change in news coverage.
The analysis suggests that campaigns do matter, but that the size of the impact is dependent
upon the underlying uncertainty associated with the parties and candidates, and on the
degree to which the information flow of the campaign changes. The information flow
contributes to both learning and priming among people who receive and accept new
information. While voters respond reasonably to new information, the outcome will
depend on what information voters are given and what information actually reaches the
habitually unaware segments of the population.
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Mars casts his ballot: men and the gender gap in Canadian electionsSteele, Andrew Morgan 05 1900 (has links)
This study argues that previous investigations of the gender gap have concentrated
almost exclusively on the behaviour of women voters and have underestimated the electoral
significance of men. Employing public opinion surveys and rational choice theory of coalitions,
it contends that men's voting behaviour is a key factor in modern elections and that by
investigating male voters as people affected by their gender, the gender gap can be better
explained. The study finds that the relative importance of the gender gap in Canada may be
declining as parties contending to form the government display less gender division in their
support, and significant gender differences in the 1997 election are found only in the more
extreme parties, like the New Democratic Party and, especially, the Reform Party. Significant
gender-related support for the Liberal Party is found to be concentrated in the Trudeau era. The
gender gap in Reform Party support is attributed to differences over capitalism, feminism and
the use of force. A theoretical model of gender block behaviour is developed using rational
choice theory, and the power of the male voting block is demonstrated. Cohesion, elasticity,
positioning, size and turnout are identified as important measures of block power, with cohesion
and elasticity the most important variable in the gender gap. The gender gap is shown to not be
an automatic advantage for women, and that sometimes it works against women's interests. The
final chapter discusses the effect of situational and socialisation constraints on attitutudes
towards violence, 'masculinized opportunity' and the reactionary backlash against feminism.
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What voters want, what campaigns provide : examining Internet based campaigns in Canadian federal electionsFarries, Greg, University of Lethbridge. Faculty of Arts and Science January 2005 (has links)
This paper examines differences between what voters want from a campaign website and what political parties are actually providing on their campaign websites. A series of focus groups were conducted and the results of those discussions provided insight into what potential voters wanted from a campaign website. Analysis of the Conservative, Liberal, Bloc Quebecois, Green and New Democratic Party campaign websites was then conducted, and the results provided a glimpse at what the political parties were providing during the 2004 federal election campaign. The results of this research show that is a significance imbalance between what the political parties in Canada were providing and what the focus groups mentioned they wanted from a campaign website. The participants wanted more engaging and mobilizing features, while the campaign websites used during the 2004 election lacked these types of features. / vi, 130 leaves ; 29 cm.
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Campaigns, the media and insurgent success : the Reform party and the 1993 Canadian electionJenkins, Richard W. 11 1900 (has links)
It is well recognized that the 1993 election campaign catapulted the Reform party into the
national political scene, but our understanding of how this was possible is quite limited.
Drawing on the work in cognitive psychology on attitude change, the work on the news
media coverage of elections, and the political science work on election campaigns, this
thesis locates the impetus for Reform's success in the dynamic flow of information about
the party that was available in television news broadcasts and voters' likelihood of being
persuaded by that information. This link is developed by an analysis that makes use of a
content analysis of the 1993 campaign, the 1993 Canadian Election Study, and a merged
analysis of the election and news data.
The Reform party began the campaign as a minor component of the news coverage of the
election, but the news media coverage changed dramatically. Reform was provided with
more news access than its support indicated it deserved and that coverage focused on what
became a major theme of the election; the welfare state and the role of government.
Coverage of Reform underwent a further change as it both decreased and focused on
cultural issues during the last two weeks of the campaign. Using a two-mediator model of
attitude change, the analysis shows that people who were predisposed to agree with
Reform's anti-welfare state message and who were likely to be aware of the news
information, changed both their perceptions of the party and increased their support for the
party. Further support for the impact of the media is derived from the analysis of voter
response to the second change in news coverage.
The analysis suggests that campaigns do matter, but that the size of the impact is dependent
upon the underlying uncertainty associated with the parties and candidates, and on the
degree to which the information flow of the campaign changes. The information flow
contributes to both learning and priming among people who receive and accept new
information. While voters respond reasonably to new information, the outcome will
depend on what information voters are given and what information actually reaches the
habitually unaware segments of the population. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate
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Mars casts his ballot: men and the gender gap in Canadian electionsSteele, Andrew Morgan 05 1900 (has links)
This study argues that previous investigations of the gender gap have concentrated
almost exclusively on the behaviour of women voters and have underestimated the electoral
significance of men. Employing public opinion surveys and rational choice theory of coalitions,
it contends that men's voting behaviour is a key factor in modern elections and that by
investigating male voters as people affected by their gender, the gender gap can be better
explained. The study finds that the relative importance of the gender gap in Canada may be
declining as parties contending to form the government display less gender division in their
support, and significant gender differences in the 1997 election are found only in the more
extreme parties, like the New Democratic Party and, especially, the Reform Party. Significant
gender-related support for the Liberal Party is found to be concentrated in the Trudeau era. The
gender gap in Reform Party support is attributed to differences over capitalism, feminism and
the use of force. A theoretical model of gender block behaviour is developed using rational
choice theory, and the power of the male voting block is demonstrated. Cohesion, elasticity,
positioning, size and turnout are identified as important measures of block power, with cohesion
and elasticity the most important variable in the gender gap. The gender gap is shown to not be
an automatic advantage for women, and that sometimes it works against women's interests. The
final chapter discusses the effect of situational and socialisation constraints on attitutudes
towards violence, 'masculinized opportunity' and the reactionary backlash against feminism. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate
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