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Regime Support in Canada: A Rejoinder

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Allan Kornberg ,
Harold D. Clarke  and
Lawrence Leduc
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Extract

In their commentary on our paper, Atkinson, Coleman and Lewis, although acknowledging that ‘studies of political support are particularly appropriate in Canada’, are very critical of our effort for two principal reasons. Firstly, they argue that we have presented no compelling evidence that citizens are unable or unwilling to distinguish sharply between regime and the party in power. On the contrary, they note that Shanks and Citrin have concluded that ordinary American citizens routinely distinguish between regime and authorities. Secondly, they claim that rather than measuring regime support, the dependent variable is simply measuring partisan orientations toward the governing Liberal party and its leaders (e.g. ‘evaluation of incumbent authorities’ (p. 403); ‘the party in power and not the regime’ (p. 403); ‘the incumbent Liberal authorities’ (p. 404); and ‘the dependent variable is measuring feelings toward a Liberal party government and not the regime’ (p. 409)).

Type
Notes and Comments
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , July 1980 , pp. 410 - 416
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

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References

1 See, for example, Citrin, Jack, ‘Comment: The Political Relevance of Trust in Government’, American Political Science Review, LXVII (1974), 978–98Google Scholar; Miller, Arthur H., ‘Rejoinder to “Comment” by Jack Citrin: Political Discontent or Ritualism?’, American Political Science Review, LXVIII (1974), 999–1000Google Scholar; Miller, Warren E., ‘Misreading the Public Pulse’, Public Opinion, 11 (1979), 13–14.Google Scholar Although they agree on the existence of such correlations, these investigators disagree sharply on their meaning and significance.

2 Simeon, Richard, Federal-Provincial Diplomacy: The Making of Recent Policy in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972)Google Scholar; Smiley, Donald V., Canada in Question: Federalism in the Seventies (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1976)Google Scholar, Chap. 3; Stevenson, Garth, Unfulfilled union (Toronto: Macmillan, 1979), pp. 198–203.Google Scholar On the ‘open-ended’ quality of Canadian federalism see Cody, Howard, ‘The Evolution of Federal-Provincial Relations in Canada: Some Reflections’, American Review of Canadian Studies, VII (1977), 55–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Clarke, Harold D., ‘Partisanship and the Parti Québécois: The Impact of the Independence Issue’, American Review of Canadian Studies, VIII (1978), 28–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 The thermometer question measuring support for the government of Canada was part of a sequence of items delineating feelings about, inter alia, the federal system, Canada, province of residence, provincial governments. At that point in the interview nothing has been asked about party identification, or images of parties, party leaders and local candidates. See Clarke, Harold D., Jenson, Jane, LeDuc, Lawrence and Pammett, Jon, 1974 Canadian National Election Survey Codebook (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, 1977).Google Scholar

5 Easton, David, ‘A Re-Assessment of the Concept of Political Support’, British Journal of Political Science, V (1975), 435–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also ‘Theoretical Approaches to Political Support’, Canadian Journal of Political Science, IX (1976), 431–48.Google Scholar

6 Atkinson et al.'s argument on this point is reminiscent of those about the utility of party identification for understanding electoral choice in situations where these two variables are very highly correlated. See, for example, Budge, Ian, Crewe, Ivor and Farlie, Dennis, eds., Party Identification and Beyond (New York: Wiley, 1976)Google Scholar. In the context of the debate about the similarity between party identification and vote, however, the percentages of variance considered ‘unacceptably high’ are much greater than 16·7 per cent.

7 It is also worth noting that the variance in the partisan object variable, although not as great as that for government of Canada scores, is substantial (s's = 13·5 and 22·2 respectively).

8 See, for example, the party leader thermometer scores in Clarke, Harold D., Jenson, Jane, LeDuc, Lawrence and Pammett, Jon, Political Choice in Canada (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1979), p. 217.Google Scholar

9 Details concerning the construction of the Guttman scale measure of political participation may be found in Burke, Mike, Clarke, Harold D. and LeDuc, Lawrence, ‘Federal and Provincial Political Participation in Canada: Some Methodological and Substantive Considerations’, Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, XV (1978), 61–75Google Scholar. The coefficients of reproducibility and scalability are ·95 and ·77 respectively.

10 Moreover, as a caveat re the complexity of the relationship, we also stated ‘retrospectively the support-participation relationship seems to be another example of an association whose direction is problematic: do high levels of support for a national regime lead to voting and other forms of political activity, or does participation in various political activities lead to enhanced support for a regime?’ (‘Some Correlates of Regime Support in Canada’, p. 215.)Google Scholar

11 On the direction of the relationship between partisanship and regime support in contemporary Quebec, Posgate and McRoberts and Pinard and Hamilton have argued that erosion of support for the national political regime and the rise of separatism have resulted in a fundamental reordering of the distribution of partisan forces and a restructing of the provincial party system. See Posgate, Dale and McRoberts, Kenneth, Quebec: Social Change and Political Crisis (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976), pp. 191–2Google Scholar; and Pinard, Maurice and Hamilton, Richard, ‘The Independence Issue and the Polarization of the Electorate: The 1973 Quebec Election’, Canadian Journal of Political Science, X (1977), 209–59, pp. 247–48.Google Scholar

12 Clarke, , ‘Partisanship and the Parti Québécois’, p. 30, Table 1.Google Scholar

13 ‘Political Support and National Unity in Canada’, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Grant no. 410–78–0320 and ‘The Quebec Referendum, the Media, and the National Integrity of Canada’, National Science Foundation Grant no. SOC–7915420.

14 See, for example, Kornberg, Allan, Clarke, Harold D. and Stewart, Marianne, ‘Federalism and Fragmentation: Political Support in Canada’, Journal of Politics, XLI (1979), 889–906CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kornberg, Allan, Clarke, Harold D. and Stewart, Marianne, ‘Public Support for Community and Regime in the Regions of Contemporary Canada’, paper presented at the ‘Centralization Versus Devolution in Canada Conference’, Ottawa, Carleton University, 07 1979.Google Scholar