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Perceived Party Choice and Class Voting*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

Ronald D. Lambert  and
James E. Curtis
Ronald D. Lambert
Affiliation:
University of Waterloo
James E. Curtis
Affiliation:
University of Waterloo
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Abstract

This article presents tests of effects of social class background on voters' perceptions of most and least favoured federal parties, perceived party differences and subjective class voting. The data were taken from the 1984 Canadian National Election Study. The results show that subjective class voting extended to voters' beliefs about least liked parties. And the greater the perceived differences between voters' preferred parties and their second and third choice parties, the greater the level of class voting. An index which combined respondents' perceptions of the class orientations of most and least liked parties increased the estimate of the level of subjective class voting that takes place. The results suggest that this index provides an improved way of assessing subjective class voting. This index is a useful improvement upon previous measures because it incorporates information on the extent to which voters see Canadian politics as presenting class-based alternatives. This is the conceptual domain of the dependent variable in the literature on subjective class voting, but perceived class-based alternatives are seldom measured directly.

Résumé

Dans cet article, nous analysons les effets du statut socio-économique sur la perception que les électeurs ont des partis politiques les plus et les moins populaires, sur la façon dont les électeurs perçoivent les différences entre ces partis, et sur leur propension à voter en fonction du sentiment d'appartenir à une classe (vote de classe subjectif). Les données sont tirées de l'Étude électorale nationale de 1984. Les résultats montrent que le vote de classe subjectif est associé à l'opinion des électeurs sur les partis les moins aimés. Plus les électeurs perçoivent de grandes différences entre les partis qu'ils préfèrent et leurs deuxièmes et troisièmes choix, plus le vote de classe est élevé. Un index de la perception des participants quant à l'orientation de classe des partis les plus et les moins populaires conduit à ré-évaluer à la hausse le degré de vote de classe subjectif. Les résultats indiquent que cet index permet de mieux prédire le vote de classe subjectif. L'index est aussi utile en ce qu'il aide à déterminer dans quelle mesure les électeurs conçoivent la politique canadienne comme représentative des classes sociales. Bien qu'on considère conceptuellement cela comme la variable dépendante dans la littérature sur le vote de classe subjectif, peu d'études l'ont mesuré directement.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , June 1993 , pp. 273 - 286
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1993

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References

1 Alford, Robert A., Party and Society: The Anglo-American Democracies (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1963)Google Scholar; and “Class Voting in the Anglo-American Democracies,” in Lipset, S. M. and Rokkan, S., eds., Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives (New York: Free Press, 1967), 67–93.Google Scholar

2 See, for example, Dawson, R. MacGregor, Democratic Government in Canada (rev. ed.; Toronto: Copp Clark, 1957), 124–25Google Scholar; and Christian, W. and Campbell, C., Political Parties and Ideologies in Canada (3rd ed.; Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1990), 2–4.Google Scholar

3 Compare, for example, Jewett, Pauline, “Voting in the 1960 Federal By-elections of Peterborough and Niagara Falls: Who Voted New Party and Why?” Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 28 (1962), 35–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Guindon, Hubert, “Social Unrest, Social Class and Quebec's Bureaucratic Revolution,” Queen's Quarterly 71 (1964), 150–62Google Scholar; Regenstreif, Peter, The Diefenbaker Interlude (Toronto: Longmans, 1965)Google Scholar; Robin, Martin, “The Social Basis of Party Politics in B.C.,” Queen's Quarterly 77 (1966), 675–90Google Scholar; Simmons, J. W., “Voting Behaviour and Socio-Economie Characteristics: The Middlesex East Federal Election, 1965,” Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 33 (1967), 389–400CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wilson, John, “Politics and Social Class in Canada: The Case of Waterloo South,” this Journal 1 (1968), 288–309Google Scholar; and Laskin, Richard and Baird, Richard, “Factors in Voter Turnout and Party Preference in a Saskatchewan Town,” this Journal 3 (1970), 450–61.Google Scholar

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5 Ogmundson, Rick, “Party Class Images and the Class Vote in Canada,” American Sociological Review 40 (1975), 506–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Ogmundson, , “Party Class Images,” 511.Google Scholar

7 Ibid.

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10 LeDuc, Lawrence, “Political Behaviour and the Issue of Majority Government in Two Federal Elections,” this Journal 10 (1977), 337Google Scholar. But compare Bowler, Shaun and Lanoue, David J., “Strategic and Protest Voting for Third Parties: The Case of the Canadian NDP,” Western Political Quarterly 45 (1992), 485–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar, based on the 1984 CNES.

11 Compare Popkin, Samuel L., The Reasoning Voter: Communication and Persuasion in Presidential Campaigns (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 9–12.Google Scholar

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13 See, for example, Nadeau, Richard and Blais, André, “Do Canadians Distinguish Between Parties? Perceptions of Party Competence,” this Journal 23 (1990), 317–33.Google Scholar

14 We are not indifferent to the question of how realistic respondents' judgments about the parties are, but this is not our immediate concern. Ogmundson dwells on some of these issues in “On the Measurement of Party Class Positions,” and Erickson asserts that a party's class orientation can be determined objectively so that people's opinions are not equally valid (see Erickson, Bonnie H., “Region, Knowledge, and Class Voting in Canada,” Canadian Journal of Sociology 6 [1981], 121–44).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 Lambert, Ronald D., Brown, Steven D., Curtis, James E., Kay, Barry J. and Wilson, John M., The 1984 Canadian National Election Study Codebook (Waterloo: University of Waterloo, February 1986).Google Scholar

16 Andrews, F., Morgan, J., Sonquist, J. and Klein, L., Multiple Classification Analysis (2nd ed.; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973).Google Scholar

17 We checked the correlation between the two discrepancy measures. We did not expect a high correlation between them, given that the second-choice party represents a preference while the third-place party signifies some active rejection. There was a tau-b of. 16 (p < .001 ) for the relationship between the two measures, suggesting a slight tendency for people who perceived a discrepancy between their first- and third-choice parties to report a discrepancy between their first- and second-choice parties.

18 Respondents who were excluded from the MCAs because of missing values on one or more of the variables used in the analyses differed systematically from those who were included, as we would expect. Comparing them on the basis of the predictor variables reported in Table 1, excluded respondents reported lower levels of education and income, were more likely to think of themselves as working class, were more likely in low-status blue-collar occupations or housewives and were less likely to describe themselves on the left/right rating scale.

19 See Fletcher, Joseph F. and Forbes, H. D., “Education, Occupation and Vote in Canada, 1965–1984,” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 27 (1990), 441–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 It should be noted that the occupation measure contains a category of housewives. In general, housewives tended to favour political parties perceived as sympathetic to the middle or upper classes. It may well be that families that can survive on a single income, in this case the husband's income, must be middle class or higher in contemporary Canada. In some additional analyses, we excluded housewives and assessed the effects on gender (in order to eliminate the partial redundancy between housewives in the occupational variable and gender). There was no evidence of a gender effect on subjective class voting.

21 Note, in column 3 of Table 2, that both the Polarized Class Vote Index, the dependent variable, and the Perceived Choice Index, the principal predictor variable, draw upon information about respondents' class ratings of the party they voted for and their disliked party. The dependent variable sums the ratings assigned to the first-choice party and the reversed ratings assigned the least liked party. The predictor variable includes the magnitude of the discrepancies between the first-choice party and each of the second-choice and least liked parties.

22 Brym and colleagues criticize what they call the “fetish of R-squared” on the statistical grounds invoked here. See Brym, Robert J., Gillespie, Michael W. and Lenton, Rhonda L., “Class Power, Class Mobilization, and Class Voting: The Canadian Case,” Canadian Journal of Sociology 14 (1989), 31–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar