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Explaining the Religious Basis of the Canadian Partisan Identity: Success on the Third Try*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

William P. Irvine
William P. Irvine
Affiliation:
Queen's University
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Extract

The various subtables of Table i, or some variant of them, must be familiar to every teacher and to every student of Canadian voting behaviour. While most of our history books, and certainly all of our current concerns, focus on cultural differences in Canada, all our voting and party identification data suggest that the primary line of political division is between Roman Catholics and non-Catholics. The leftmost tables in the two rows of Table i indicate that religious differences are approximately three times as strong as ethnic ones, regardless of the index chosen. The percentage difference in Liberal identifiers is 20 across religious categories, but only 6 across the ethnic ones; the phi coefficient is.21 as compared to.06, while Yule's Q is.42 as opposed to.13. Nor is this simply an artifact. The same finding shows up for vote as for party identification, for a linguistic dichotomy as for an ethnicity dichotomy, and for undichotomized as for dichotomized variables. Similarly, the religious dichotomy need not be imposed, but emerges quite freely when similar data are analysed with the aid program. Indeed, one need not depend on using dichotomies at all, though the analysis becomes more complex. In each case, however, the basic generalization holds.

Type
Notes
Information
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 7 , Issue 3 , September 1974 , pp. 560 - 563
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1974

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References

1 Among the numerous studies reporting the impact of religion in Canadian electoral politics are Laponce, J.A., “Post-dicting Electoral Cleavages in Canadian Federal Elections, 1949–69,” Canadian Journal of Political Science, V (1972), 270–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Meisel, J., “Cleavages, Parties and Values in Canada,” (unpublished paper presented to the IXth World Congress of the International Political Science Association, Montreal, 1973)Google Scholar; Alford, R.R., Party and Society (Chicago, 1963)Google Scholar, chap. 8; Anderson, Grace M., “Voting Behaviour and the Ethnic-Religious Variable,” Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, XXXII (1966), 27–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McDonald, Lynn, “Religion and Voting: a Study of the 1968 Canadian Federal Election in Ontario,” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, 6 (1969), 129–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Gagne, Wallace and Regenstreif, Peter, “Some Aspects of New Democratic Party Urban Support in 1965,” Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, XXXIII (1967), 529–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The list is not exhaustive.

2 Note the characteristically careful judgments of John Meisel in “Cleavages, Parties and Values in Canada.”

3 Perlin, George and Peppin, Patti, “Variation in Party Support in Federal and Provincial Elections,” Canadian Journal of Political Science, IV (1971), 280–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wilson, John and Hoffman, David, “The Liberal Party in Contemporary Ontario Politics,” Canadian Journal of Political Science, III (1970), 171–204.Google Scholar

4 This sort of model is suggested in Regenstreif, Peter, The Diefenbaker Interlude (Toronto, 1965), 89–94.Google Scholar

5 Meisel, John, Working Papers on Canadian Politics (Montreal, 1972)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap. 2.