One of the purposes of political parties is to reduce a heterogeneous polity into a few
political elements. This thesis determines if there is a relationship between political
parties and social cleavages in Canada. I have used provincial election results and census
data from 1956 to 1991. Electoral results are converted into two measures of party
system size, the effective number of parties (the number of significant parties in a
legislature) and the competitive number of parties (the number of relevant parties in an
election). Social heterogeneity is measured by converting census data into a series of
indexes that measure the ethnic, religious, and linguistic diversity. 1 also examine the
affect of rural/urban and centre periphery cleavages in provincial politics.
I have found that there is a significant relationship between social heterogeneity and party
system size in Canada. Of the cleavage structure examined, ethnicity is positively
correlated with party system size and the size of a province's rural population is
negatively correlated with party system size. Curiously, religion and language have
mixed affects; religion is positively correlated with the number of parties that get elected
but negatively correlated with the number of parties that win seats. Similarly, the size of
a provinces French speaking population has a positive relationship with the number of
parties that win seats but a negative relationship with the vote distribution among parties.
There are two important conclusions in this thesis. First, there is substantial evidence that
social heterogeneity influences party systems size in Canadian provinces. This result
challenges institutional explanations which suggest that party systems in polities that use
plurality electoral systems which elect single members will not be affected by social
diversity. My second conclusion is the identification of a largely untouched area of
research on provincial party systems. European theorists have used social structural
approaches for fifty years to explain how societies and political parties co-evolve. This
thesis proves that this approach has an important role to play on this side of the Atlantic. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/17592 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Tanaka, Kashi |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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