Social group conflict along regional, ethnic, linguistic, and religious cleavages is deeply embedded in the Canadian historical experience. Contemporary analyses, however, have deprecated the role of religion and religiosity in shaping Canadians' political attitudes. This analysis demonstrates that religion and religiosity are significant correlates of Canadian attitudes on moral issues, paralleling the pattern observed in the United States. It demonstrates that the religious cleavage has been a salient feature of Canadian politics for some time and considers whether the contemporary moral divide could serve as a portent of cultural-religious conflict in Canada if a “political entrepreneur” articulated an issue agenda linked to these religion-based differences.

The social cleavage theory of parly systems has provided a major framework for the study of Western party systems. It has been quite unimportant in studying other party systems, especially those of developing countries, where comparative development, and not mass electoral politics, has been the focus of study. This article reports the results of an attempt to bridge these traditions by analysing popular support for the Congress Party of India in terms of the expectations of the social cleavage theory of parties. This analysis illustrates the degree to which Indian partisanship conforms to the expectations of the theory. More importantly, this social cleavage theory analysis offers some new perspectives on (1) the inability of the Indian political system to develop national parties other than the Congress and (2) the ‘disaggregation’ of the Congress party.

This paper demonstrates that the creation of majority-minority districts was no more than an indirect cause of Democratic losses in 1992 and 1994, and the second-order effect of losing familiar voters was more important than the first-order effect of a reduced black constituency. Further, it demonstrates that a pro-GOP surge, independent of redistricting, was the critical factor without which neither new voters nor the reduced black population would have defeated many incumbent Democrats. These results integrate existing theory about voter behavior, the influence of short-term forces, incumbency dynamics, and structural adjustments such as redistricting to formulate a fuller account of the losses.

Traditional studies of voter turnout in the United States have identified three factors which are presumed to explain most of the differences between the states in voter turnout: socio-demographic differences, electoral competitiveness, and differences in the rules under which elections are conducted. These studies have not, however, clearly distinguished the three factors largely because of their exclusive reliance on aggregate data to analyze the differences. The purpose of this paper is to 1) distinguish between individual and systemic components of turnout and 2) to attempt to partition the variation in turnout between the components. Unlike previous research, this study used both survey and aggregate data to decompose the variation in turnout among the states into first two components—individual and systemic, and then the latter into political (electoral competitiveness) and legal.