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Political Elite and Mass Perceptions of Party Locations in issue Space: Some Tests of Two Positions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Allan Kornberg ,
William Mishler  and
Joel Smith
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Extract

Our analyses have enabled us to test several important theoretical propositions advanced by two outstanding scholars, Anthony Downs and Donald E. Stokes. Our data do not support the Downsian position that it is possible to array parties along a single left-right continuum. The factor analyses suggested that a left-right factor underlies the perceptions some individuals have of the positions Canadian parties take on some specific issues. However, the left-right factor that emerged from the analyses was not always what conventional wisdom supposed it to be, with the NDP on the left, the Liberals to the left of center, the Conservatives to the right of center and Social Credit on the right.39 Nor was it in accord with the structuring of parties that places the NDP on the far left, both the Liberals and the Conservatives in the same right-of-center position and Social Credit on the far right.40 Moreover, the left-right factor most often underlies the perceptions of MPs. To a lesser extent it underlies the images of the upper stratum of the public. It least often underlies the perceptions of average Vancouver and Winnipeg citizens.

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Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , April 1975 , pp. 161 - 185
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1975

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References

1 Downs, Anthony, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper, 1957), p. 115.Google Scholar

2 Stokes, Donald, ‘Spatial Models of Party Competition’, American Political Science Review, LVII (1963), 368–77, pp. 369–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Carroll, Lewis, The Complete Works (New York: Random House, 1922), pp. 162–3.Google Scholar

4 Downs, An Economic Theory.

5 Stokes, , ‘Spatial Models’, p. 369.Google Scholar

6 Stokes, , ‘Spatial Models’, p. 372.Google Scholar

7 Stokes, , ‘Spatial Models’, p. 375.Google Scholar

8 See, for example, Riker, William and Ordeshook, Peter, An Introduction to Positive Political Theory (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973), pp. 307–75Google Scholar; Hitiich, M. J., Ledyard, J. O. and Ordeshook, P. G., ‘A Theory of Electoral Equilibrium: A Spatial Analysis Based on the Theory of Games’, Journal of Politics, XXXV (1973), 154–93Google Scholar; Mckelvey, R., ‘Some Extensions and Modifications of a Spatial Model of Party Competition’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Rochester, 1972Google Scholar; and Hinich, M. J. and Ordeshook, P. G., ‘Plurality Maximization VS. Vote Maximization: A Spatial Model with Variable Participation’, American Political Science Review, LXIII (1970), 772–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Shepsle, K. A., ‘Parties, Voters and the Risk Environment: A Mathematical Treatment of Electoral Competition under Uncertainty’, in Niemi, R. G. and Weisberg, H. F., eds., Probability Models of Collective Decision Making (New York: Charles F. Merrill, 1972), pp. 273–97Google Scholar; Aranson, A. H. and Ordeshook, P. G., ‘Spatial Strategies for Sequential Elections’, in. Niemi and Weisberg, Probability Models, pp. 298–331Google Scholar; Coleman, J. S., ‘The Positions of Political Parties in Elections’, in Niemi and Weisberg, Probability Models, pp. 332–57Google Scholar; and Davis, O. A. and Hinich, M. J., ‘Spatial Competition under Constrained Choice’, in Niemi and Weisberg, Probability Models, pp. 358–77.Google Scholar

9 See, for example, Daalder, H. and Rusk, J. G., ‘Perceptions of Party in the Dutch Parliament’, in Patterson, S. C. and Wahlke, J. C., eds., Comparative Legislative Behavior: Frontiers of Research (New York: Wiley, 1972), pp. 143–98Google Scholar, and Pederson, M., Damgaard, E. and Olson, P., ‘Party Distances in the Danish Folketing, 1945–1968’, Scandinavian Political Studies, VI (1971), 87–106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 See, for example, Converse, P., ‘The Problem of Party Distance in Models of Voting Change’, in Jennings, M. K. and Ziegler, H., eds., The Electoral Process (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), pp. 175–207Google Scholar; Sarlvik, B., ‘Party Change as a Measure of Distances and Dimensions in the Swedish Party System’, Sociologisk Forskning, I (1968), 35–80Google Scholar; Laponce, J., ‘A Note on the Use of the Left-Right Dimensions’, Comparative Political Studies, II (1970), 481–502CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Meisel, J., Working Papers on Canadian Politics (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1973), pp. 63–119.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Converse, Philip, ‘The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Polities’, in Apter, David, ed., Ideology and Discontent (New York: Free Press, 1964), pp. 206–61.Google Scholar

12 Butler, David and Stokes, Donald, Political Change in Britain: Forces Shaping Electoral Choice (New York: St Martin's Press, 1969), passim.Google Scholar

13 With respect to partisanship, for example, a perusal of a random sample of reading lists for courses in political science and sociology that utilize the results of quantitative and empirical research (e.g., ‘comparative political behavior’, ‘comparative party politics’) will reveal the frequency with which Stokes’ article is cited to disprove Downs. With respect to uncertainty, Pederson, et al., note that ‘authors often tend a priori to assume the existence of a left-right political spectrum within which parties are naturally placed, or give a few relatively unsatisfactory reasons to support a proposed location of parties along the continuum’ (Pederson, et al., ‘Party Distances’, p. 88). And with regard to matters still under dispute, Butler and Stokes, although they argue against the empirical validity of the left-right continuum, acknowledge that 85 to 90 per cent of French electors are prepared to place themselves along a five-point scale ranging from extreme left to extreme right (Butler, and Stokes, , Political Change in Britain, pp. 210–11, fn.Google Scholar).

14 Canada appeared to us to be an especially appropriate site for testing these contrasting notions because the public has shown some ability to order parties along a left-right continuum (Laponce, ‘Use of the Left-Right Dimension’ and Meisel, Working Papers) and because the several parties’ positions, as well as individual positions on political issues, seemingly are important determinants of both the public's images of parties and the direction of voting in Canada (Meisel, Working Papers; cf. Tables 4–6 in appendix).

15 As might be expected, we were somewhat less successful in securing the participation of cabinet members. We succeeded in interviewing only fifteen of the then twenty-nine members of the Liberal cabinet. Consequently, the proportion of interviews completed with Liberal party MPs (66 per cent) is considerably lower than are the proportions of completed interviews with Conservatives (89 per cent) and NDP (88 per cent) Members. Members of the Creditiste party proved almost as reluctant to be interviewed as cabinet ministers, but we eventually were able to complete interviews with seven (54 per cent) of them. The reader should note that the label ‘Creditiste’ has been appropriated by the Quebec section of the Social Credit party. In theory, the Creditiste party and the Social Credit party outside of Quebec share many of the same basic political, economic, and even social values because they accept and profess to believe in the doctrines of Social Credit. In practice, there are a number of important areas in which the two groups are quite distinct, but it would take a separate paper to describe and try to explain these distinctions. Although the portion of the public that identifies with Social Credit in Winnipeg and Vancouver are always labelled as such in this paper, at times we may refer to the Creditiste MPs as both Creditiste and Social Credit.

16 Rziss, A., et al. , Occupation and Social Change (Glencoe:Free Press, 1961).Google Scholar The occupations of individuals in the group with scores at or above this point include professionals and people in technical occupations excepting such occupations as clergymen, dieticians, nurses, surveyors, photographers and the like. The category also includes about half of the occupations that comprise the manager, proprietor, official group, with those associated with smaller businesses and/or businesses handling such dirtier items as fuel, food, and automobile repairs excluded.

17 Pederson, , Damgaard, , and Olson, , ‘Party Distances’, pp. 89–92Google Scholar, for example, suggests at least four general categories of data that are appropriate for the study of party distances for different units of analysis.

18 Indeed, the first two of these issues were major subjects of controversy during the several ‘Confederation Debates’ in the legislature of United Canada on the conditions under which the new nation was to be established.

19 It is true that Canada had already engaged in substantial trade (in the form of massive wheat sales) with both China and the USSR since the late fifties. However, at the time, the Prime Minister's then impending official visit to the Soviet Union and the prospect of a return visit by Mr Kosygin as well as a state visit by another major Communist head of state, Marshall Tito, coupled with the government's supposed reassessment of Canada's role in NATO and the defense of Western Europe, all suggested that Canadian-Communist bloc relations had entered or might be entering a new and qualitatively different phase.

20 The other polar positions were: (1) On the provision of social services, ‘The government should take a bigger part’ – ‘The government should take less of a part’; (2) on the federalism question, ‘Federal government is too powerful’ – ‘Provincial governments are too powerful’; (3) on the character of Canada's relations with Communist bloc countries, ‘Expand relations with Communist countries’ – ‘Reduce relations with Communist countries’; (4) and on the issue of United States investment, ‘Take major steps to reduce United States investment’ – ‘Take no major steps to reduce United States investment’.

21 It is true that more recently the in thing for some elements in the progressive left is to opt for decentralization — small is beautiful?

22 Carrigan, D. L., compiler, Canadian Party Platforms, 1867–1968 (Toronto: Copp Clark, 1970).Google Scholar

23 The reader will recall that the continua along which the respondents were asked to locate the parties and then themselves actually were nine-point scales although the respondents were not aware of this.

24 Our data tend to support some of the findings of earlier studies in this area. By way of illustration, the response patterns of MPs and members of the public generally are in accord with previously reported research findings on elite-mass differences in political sophistication and political awareness. See, for example, Milbrath, Lester, Political Participation: How and Why People Do Get Involved in Politics? (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1965)Google Scholar, passim. There is some support for Laponce's finding that Social Credit identifiers view their party as a moderately conservative one that in some instances can actually be located to the left of the Conservatives. The pattern of response to the questions we posed is also consistent with some of John Meisel's findings from his national election studies in 1965 and 1968. Consistent with our own findings, for example, Meisel found that the NDP was viewed as the left-most party in Canada and that the Liberal and Conservative parties were more visible to Canadians than were the two minor parties. He found that the image of the Social Credit-Creditiste party was particularly unclear. So did we. An inspection of the several ns (i.e., numbers of respondents able to provide answers to the questions posed) in Table 2 reveals that not only both sectors of the public but also the MPs found greater difficulty locating the Social Credit party's position on the issues than the other parties’.

25 According to John Meisel, his 1965 and 1968 election studies show that foreign policy questions have the same low salience in Canada as in the United States. Indeed, there seems to be even less interest in foreign policy in Canada. (Private communication from J. Meisel, 20 September 1973.)

26 Butler, and Stokes, , Political Change in Britain, pp. 184–92.Google Scholar

27 In support of this assumption, see Meisel, John, ‘Cleavages, Parties and Values in Canada’, a paper delivered at the IPSA Ninth World Congress, Montreal, 081973.Google Scholar

28 Huntington, Samuel, ‘Political Development and Political Decay’, World Politics, XVII (1965), 368–430.Google Scholar

29 Regarding style, at every conference both the prime minister and the several provincial premiers are given the opportunity to deliver carefully prepared statements drafted by members of their administrative bureaucracies. These formal statements are followed by several days of acrimonious exchanges with respect to the issue or issues currently under consideration(e.g., the magnitude of a federal subsidy to the provinces, the requirement of a matching provincial contribution for an activity, the jurisdiction over off-shore oil deposits, etc.). Invariably, however, and regardless of which party controls either the national or the provincial governments, the prime minister and the several provincial premiers are ritualistically cast in adversary roles. The prime minister asserts that the subsidy to the provinces cannot be increased; he asks that the provincial governments pay their fair share in matching grants for the activity in question; he asserts that the federal government has jurisdiction over off-shore deposits; the provincial premiers invariably take the opposite positions! Interspersed with these ritualized and stylized interactions are a round of formal but nonetheless congenial dinners after which the conference is adjourned with the tacit understanding that the real business of deciding current questions will be left to the appropriate sectors of the federal and provincial bureaucracies.

30 Meisel found, in contrast, that the public perceived the Conservative and Liberal parties occupying virtually the same positions (i.e., to the right of centre) on issues. One explanation for this discrepancy between Meisel's findings and our own may lie in the different publics that were questioned. Since Meisel's data derived from a national sample of the public whereas our data reflect the opinions and perceptions of the public in two metropolitan areas in Western Canada, it may be that Meisel's findings are more descriptive of reality (i.e., people do perceive the Liberal and Conservative parties occupying the same positions on an ideological continuum). A second possible explanation is that people see the Liberal party taking positions on basic issues that are to the left of the Conservative party, as our data indicate. We may have been able to delineate them because we have relied on indirect measures of left-right party differences (i.e., we have inferred them from people's perceptions of the parties’ positions on specific issues) rather than measuring them directly by asking whether parties are to the left or right of one another, as did Meisel (Meisel, Working Papers). The question of whether direct or indirect measures ought to be utilized to delineate matters such as the possible positioning of parties and personal preferences along a left-right continuum raises a number of conceptual and methodological problems that cannot be addressed at this time but do deserve future consideration.

31 In interpreting the geometric plots, we considered only those locational differences that one could reasonably describe as substantial. For example, differences of less than ·10 were ignored. In such instances, it was simply assumed that parties occupied similar space.

32 In each instance, the first factor explained between 35–50 per cent of the total variation in the data whereas the second factor independently explained approximately 30–35 per cent of this total variation.

33 Converse, ‘Belief Systems’, passim.

34 Alford, Robert, Party and Society: The Anglo-American Democracies (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1963)Google Scholar; Dawson, R. McGregor and Ward, Norman, The Government of Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970).Google Scholar

35 Two of the questions asked in the interviews with the two segments of public were the now-familiar ones regarding the direction and intensity of their psychological identification with the several political parties.

36 Stokes, , ‘Spatial Models’, p. 375.Google Scholar In the analyses that follow separate results are not presented for the higher and lower socio-economic strata of the public. While the data indicate differences between them on these issues, the differences generally are considerably smaller than those that exist between the public as a group and the MPs. The data relevant to this decision are available to interested readers upon request.

37 The reader should note that other interesting aspects of these data may be derived by examining: (a) the progression of means within the columns; and (b) differences between these within-column variations when pairs of columns derived from the same group of judges are compared (i.e., when the progression of means for the identifiers and for the MPs of a party is compared as to their judgements of their parties and themselves).

38 The tendency of American voters to misperceive the positions taken by political parties and party candidates, even on highly visible issues, and/or to reduce cognitive dissonance by ascribing the positions they hold to the parties and candidates they support, has been well documented in a series of election studies that go back to 1948: e.g., Lazarsfeld, P. F., Berelson, B. and Gaudet, H., The People's Choice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948).Google Scholar

39 Alford, , Party and Society, p. 11.Google Scholar

40 Porter, John, The Vertical Mosaic: An Analysis of Social Class and Power in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Horowitz, Gad, ‘Conservatism, Liberalism and Socialism in Canada: An Interpretation’, Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, XXXII (1966), 143–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar