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Canadian Political Ideology: A Comparative Analysis*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

Roger Gibbins
Affiliation:
University of Calgary
Neil Nevitte
Affiliation:
University of Calgary

Abstract

This article explores contemporary political ideologies in English Canada, francophone Quebec and the United States using cross-national attitudinal survey data. Drawing central hypotheses from the qualitative Canadian-American political culture literature, the analysis focusses on three dimensions of political ideology—ideological polarization, the issue content of the respective lefts and rights, and ideological coherence. Evidence of distinctive national “lefts,” together with fundamental similarities in the English-Canadian and American ideological “rights” and important differences in the ideological structures of the three political cultures, call into question some conventional generalizations found in the nonquantitative literature.

Résumé

Les auteurs ont recours à des données de sondages pour examiner certains aspects des idéologies politiques au Canada anglais, au Québec et aux États-Unis. Ils tentent de vérifier des hypothèses découlant d'une discussion qualitative de la culture politique sur les trois volets suivants: la polarisation idéologique, les questions débattues par les gauches et les droites de ces sociétés, la cohérence idéologique. Plusieurs traits observés mettent en cause des généralisations conventionnelles des tenants d'une analyse non-quantitative de la culture politique : l'existence de gauches distinctes d'une société à l'autre, des similarités fondamentales entre les droites canadienne-anglaise et américaine, ainsi que d'importantes differénces dans les structures idéologiques des trois cultures politiques étudiées.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1985

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References

1 Bell, David and Tepperman, Lome, The Roots of Disunity: A Look at Canadian Political Culture (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1979);Google ScholarChristian, William, “On Rod Preece's ‘The Anglo-Saxon Conservative Tradition,’ this JOURNAL 13 (1980), 785–86;Google ScholarClark, S. D., Canadian Society in Historical Perspective (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1976);Google ScholarGrant, George, Lament for a Nation (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1965);Google ScholarHartz, Louis (ed.), The Founding of New Societies (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1964);Google ScholarHorowitz, Gad, “Conservatism, Liberalism and Socialism in Canada: An Interpretation,” Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 32 (1966), 143–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Notes on ‘Conservatism, Liberalism and Socialism in Canada,’this JOURNAL 11(1978), 383400;Google ScholarMartin, SeymourLipset, , The First New Nation: The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective (New York: Basic Books, 1963)Google Scholar, Revolution and Counterrevolution (New York: Basic Books, 1968)Google ScholarPubMed, and “Radicalism in North America: A Comparative View of the Party System in Canada and the United States,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada 4(1976), 1955;Google ScholarPreece, Rod, “The Anglo-Saxon Conservative Tradition.” this JOURNAL 13 (1980), 332;Google ScholarTruman, Tom, “A Critique of Seymour Martin Lipset‘s Article ’Value Differences Absolute or Relative: The English Speaking Democracies,’” this JOURNAL 4 (1971), 497525;Google ScholarUnderhill, Frank, In Search of Canadian Liberalism (Toronto: Macmillan, 1960).Google Scholar

2 Horowitz, , “Conservatism, Liberalism and Socialism,” 5566.Google Scholar

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4 Preece, , “The Anglo-Saxon Conservative Tradition,” 315.Google Scholar

5 Horowitz, , “Conservatism, Liberalism and Socialism,” 59.Google Scholar

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7 Horowitz, , “Conservatism, Liberalism and Socialism,” 61.Google Scholar

8 Ibid., 51.

9 Given the depth of the nonquantitative scholarship there are remarkably few empirical studies explicitly designed to compare values in the Canadian and American publics. For one attempt to test comparative propositions drawn from the nonquantitative literature, see Craig Crawford and James Curtis, “English Canadian-American Differences in Value Orientations: Survey Comparisons Bearing on Lipset's Thesis.” Srudies in Comparative International Development 14 (1979), 2344.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Both surveys are segments of a larger study, the Cross-National Equality Project, directed by Sidney Verba, Harvard University.

11 Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Chicago, Wisconsin, Indiana, Stanford, Berkeley, Rice and Duke.

12 As in the US case, the Canadian samples were selected randomly from lists generated by registrars' offices at each university.

13 See Truman, , “A Critique,” 525;Google Scholar Seymour Martin Lipset, “Revolution and Counterrevolution—Some Comments at a Conference Analyzing the Bicentennial of a Celebrated North American Divorce,” in Preston, Richard (ed), Perspectives on Revolution and Evolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 1979), 39Google Scholar, and Horowitz, “Notes,” 384–90.

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21 Zipp, John F., “Left-Right Dimensions of Canadian Federal Party Identification: A Discriminant Analysis,” this JOURNAL 11 (1978), 251–78.Google Scholar

22 See Clarke, Harold D., “Ideological Self-Perceptions of Provincial Legislators,” this JOURNAL 11 (1978), 251–78;Google ScholarKornberg, Allan, Mishler, William and Smith, Joel, “Political Elite and Mass Perceptions of Party Location in Issue Space: Some Tests of Two Positions,” British Journal of Political Science 5 (1975), 153–77;CrossRefGoogle ScholarFinlay, David J., Simon, Douglas W. and Wilson, L. A., “The Concept of Left and Right in Cross National Research,” Comparative Political Studies 2 (1970), 201–21;Google ScholarLaponce, Jean, “In Search of Stable Elements of the Left-Right Landscape,” Comparative Politics 4 (1972), 455–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar, “A Note on the Use of the Left-Right Dimension,” Comparative Political Studies 2 (1970), 481502CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Left and Right: The Topography of Political Perceptions (Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 1981).Google Scholar

23 The difficulty of interpretation of left and right for the general population is usually revealed by low response rates to left/right questions. Here, the nonresponse rates are not unusually high and are significantly lower than those reported for surveys of general populations which use similarly worded questions. See Meisel, John, Working Papers on Canadian Politics (2nd ed.; Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press. 1975), 6872;Google ScholarButler, David and Stokes, Donald, Political Change in Britain (New York: St. Martinis Press, 1971), 208–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24 Lipset, “Revolution and Counterrevolution-Some Comments,” 39.

25 For an analysis of neoconservative sentiment among Canadian university students, see Neil Nevitte and RogerGibbins, “Neo-conservatism: Canadian Variations on an Ideological Theme,” Canadian Public Policy 10 (1984), 384–94.Google Scholar

26 Grant, Lament for a Nation, 71.

27 Horowitz, “Conservatism, Liberalism and Socialism,” 49.

28 Lipset, “Revolution and Counterrevolution—Some Comments,” 35.

29 Ibid., 37. The reference is to Robert Presthus, Elite Accommodation in Canadian Politics (Toronto: Macmillan, 1974).Google Scholar

30 The utility of distinguishing between social and economic dimensions of the left-right scale has been pointed out elsewhere. See Ogmundson, R. L., “On the Measurement of Party Class Positions:Google Scholar The Case of Canadian Federal Political Parties,” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 12 (1975), 565–76;Google Scholar and Zipp, “Left-Right Dimensions,” 275.

31 Lipset, “Revolution and Counterrevolution—Some Comments,” 37.

32 Compare, Grant, Lament for a Nation, 71.

33 When the analysis in Table 4 was replicated using unstandardized b's there was no substantial change found in the pattern of values for the Pearson product moment coefficients.

34 Gibbins, Roger, Regionalism: Territorial Politics in Canada and the United States (Toronto: Butterworths, 1982).Google Scholar

35 These differences were confirmed by a factor analysis of the 12 variables embraced by Figure 2. For all three samples, only a single factor emerged with an eigenvalue greater than one. (In total, two factors emerged in the US analysis, three in the English-Canadian analysis, and five in the French Quebec analysis.) This factor explained 90 per cent of the variance across the 12 variables for the US respondents, whereas for English-Canadian and French Quebec respondents a nearly identical factor explained 72 per cent and 55 per cent of the variance, respectively.