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Ballot Behaviour in Halifax Revisited*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2014

Morris Davis
Morris Davis*
Affiliation:
Tulane University
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Extract

This paper has two aims, one substantive and the other methodological. Substantively the paper presents data from the April 1963 parliamentary election in Halifax in an array parallel to that in my article on the June 1962 election there: this presentation can be brief since the reader may refer to the earlier study if he desires amplification of the argument. On the other hand, the methodological problems involved in repeating a case study and in generalizing one's findings raise issues that must be discussed in greater detail.

Type
Articles
Information
Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne de economiques et science politique , Volume 30 , Issue 4 , November 1964 , pp. 538 - 558
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1964

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Footnotes

*

This paper was presented at a meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association at Charlottetown, PEI, in June 1964. Costs of research were underwritten by a grant from the Atlantic Provinces Studies of the Social Science Research Council of Canada. For aid and advice I am grateful to Professors James Aitchison, John Graham, Alasdair Sinclair, and R. Graham Murray, all of Dalhousie University.

References

1 The article “Did They Vote for Candidate or Party in Halifax?” appears in Meisel, John, ed., Papers on the 1962 Election (Toronto, 1964)Google Scholar; it is hereinafter cited as “Halifax 1962.” Tables I through IX in the present report are numbered and entitled parallel to those in “Halifax 1962.”

2 Had the Social Credit party also run two candidates, the Halifax voter would have had some thirty-seven alternatives among which to choose.

3 The term plumper is British in origin. See, for example, Hanham, H. J., Elections and Party Management: Politics in the Time of Disraeli and Gladstone (London, 1959), 200 Google Scholar; and Butler, D. E., The Electoral System in Britain, 1918–1951 (Oxford, 1953), 171–2.Google Scholar

4 For a more complete explanation, along with some caveats, see “Halifax 1962,” n. 4, 5, and 6.

5 Other factors, such as ideology, are not illumined by this procedure.

6 See Ward, Norman, “Voting in Two-Member Constituencies,” Public Affairs, IX (09 1946), 220–3.Google Scholar

7 The sample used here is the same as the final sample discussed immediately below and detailed in Section II, 1.

8 For the polling places in the sample see Table XII.

9 This relationship is reversed for the NDP, although the small number of votes involved (7 for O'Brien and 10 for Ronayne) urges caution in interpretation.

10 Electors may not know they have two votes or may not know the names of both candidates run by their party. The ballot facilitates this confusion by containing neither directions nor party labels. (Cf. Kamin, Leon J., “Ethnic and Party Affiliations of Candidates as Determinants of Voting,” Canadian Journal of Psychology, XII (12 1958), 205–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar) Electors may also vote for one candidate because of his party and abstain from voting for the other for personal reasons; such behaviour cannot be classified under the categories employed here.

11 Comparison of these findings with those from 1962 is made in some detail in Section II, 2.

12 Since the Social Credit party ran no candidates in Halifax in 1963, there is no need in this report for a table corresponding to Table VII in “Halifax 1962.” A Table VII is therefore omitted in order to facilitate comparison with “Halifax 1962” by keeping identical numbers for similar tables.

13 A plumper vote, on the other hand, despite the evident connotations of the term, would seem much more like a vote for a party. Also see note 10 above.

14 In Table IX “NDP-Lib.“ should be read in the second column as “the number of ballots for either candidate of the NDP along with either Liberal candidate, divided by the number of straight NDP ballots”; “Lib.-NDP“ should be read as “the number of ballots for either candidate of the NDP along with either Liberal candidate divided by the number of straight Liberal ballots”; and so on.

15 Dividing 96 by 467 (the sum of all splits, all plumpers, and twice the number of straights on which the NDP figures) yields a ratio of .205.

16 There were 24 rather than 25 because of constantly exceeding the figure of 7051.

17 Split polls (e.g., 109A, 109B; 258A–K, 258L–Z) were always counted as two polls.

18 The New Democratic party was willing to assist, but had agents at very few polling stations (almost all of them in one section of Halifax City); the Liberals had enough agents, but displayed a suspicious rather than a co-operative disposition.

19 I would like to emphasize my gratitude to Mr. Forrestall for his assistance on a project that would obviously furnish him and his party no tangible advantage.

20 My visit did raise some doubts among the Conservative agents, however. Mr. Forrestall told me of receiving about a dozen telephone calls that day from PC agents I had just seen; but he felt he was able to allay their qualms. No Liberal or NDP agent seems to have raised any objections.

21 Many incorrectly completed Forms 58 had alluded to an omnibus category of “miscellaneous splits” instead of specifying this rarer ballot behaviour in detail. See “Halifax 1962,” n. 17.

22 Professor James Aitchison, who was instructor in Political Science 1, was also a high official and a former parliamentary candidate of the New Democratic party in Nova Scotia. The relatively small number of students who undertook this task reflected the imminence of final examinations. Though some of these students were under age, this caused no problem at the polls.

23 I appreciate the help proffered me by all the students who participated in this activity. Since only seven polls from the urban part of Halifax County fouad their way into the final sample, their aid was particularly important.

24 Street maps were not very useful outside Halifax City, since they often showed streets that did not exist or omitted others that did.

25 “Halifax 1962,” text to note 16.

26 If the service vote is eliminated, the constituency percentages for candidates would be Lloyd 24.5, MacDonald 23.3, McCleave 23.8, O'Brien 2.2, Regan 24.0, and Ronayne 1.9, with 0.2 rejected. The largest sum of absolute differences between these figures and any of the samples would be 3.3 per cent.

27 Ward, supra, “Voting in Two-Member Constituencies,” n. 6.

28 Cf. Dupeux, George, “Le Problème des abstentions dans le département de Loire-et-Cher au début de la troisième République,” Revue Française de Science Politique, II (01-mars 1952), 71–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 “In actual fact, the number of electors in a constituency who vote for both Liberals, or both Conservatives, might be very small without there being a wide variation in the total votes received by the two representatives of each party. A single elector in a two-member constituency, voting in a four-man contest, can do so in ten ways (for any one of the candidates alone, and for any of the six possible combinations of two votes) and the total vote in the constituency could conceivably include an equal number of each of these ten ways of voting, yet the two Liberals, or the two Conservatives, might still poll nearly equal totals.” Ward, , “Voting in Two-Member Constituencies,” 223.Google Scholar

30 If Social Credit ballots were included in Table XV, the following changes would be made in the 1962 figures only.

31 To convert a ratio in line 3 into a percentage divide that absolute number by itself plus 2,000. Thus 638/2,638 = .242; 465/2,465 = .189; and 587/2,587 = .227. The denominator is increased by 2,000 and not 1,000 because each straight ballot contributes twice as much to the total party vote as a plumper or split ballot.

32 This sort of reasoning lies behind many of the electoral sociological analyses of François Goguel and his followers. Cf. my “French Electoral Sociology,” Public Opinion Quarterly, XXII (spring 1958), 35–55.Google Scholar

33 If ballots with Kuglin, the Social Credit candidate, are omitted, .027, .053, .054, and .064.

34 If ballots with Kuglin are omitted, .447, .476, .574, and .978.

35 “Halifax 1962” at note 35.

36 Why, after all, should not one of these candidates have received more plumper than split votes?

37 “Halifax 1962” at note 31.

38 .163 and .341, if ballots with Kuglin are omitted.

39 For simplicity's sake we do not discuss the Social Credit party here.

40 Scarrow, Howard A., “Federal-Provincial Voting Patterns in Canada,” this Journal, XXVI (05 1960), 289–98, especially Table II.Google Scholar See also Wrong, Dennis H., “The Pattern of Party Voting in Canada,” Public Opinion Quarterly, XXI (summer 1957), 252–64, esp. 263 Google Scholar; and Lavau, G. E., Partis politiques et réalités sociales: Contribution à une étude réaliste des partis politiques (Paris, 1953), 52–65.Google Scholar That the conclusions of these comparative analyses vary does not diminish their heuristic and substantive value.

41 Gash, Norman, Politics in the Age of Peel: A Study in the Technique of Parliamentary Representation 1830–1950 (London, 1953).Google Scholar Dual constituencies are discussed in chap. 10 (pp. 239–269) entitled, significantly enough, “Compromise Elections.”

42 Ibid., 266.

43 Ibid., 241 and 267. I have some doubts.

44 In 1868 there was only one Liberal candidate in each of 24 two- or three-member constituencies, and only one Conservative in 53 such constituencies. In 1874 the comparable figures were 36 and 45, and in 1880 they were 46 and 48. Where one Liberal (for example) faced two Conservatives in a dual constituency, there occurred what one might phrase semi-competition. Figures are computed from tables in Hanham, , Elections and Party Management, 198.Google Scholar The Social Credit party in the 1962 election in Halifax was in an analogous semi-competitive position.

45 Ibid., 199.

46 Ibid., 200. Hanham's data on splits and plumpers cannot be generated simply from the election results that he lists. Indeed, from them alone one could hardly specify how many votes a leading candidate received on splits and how many on plumpers. Since Hanham's figures on such ballots are invariably larger than the net differences between the higher and lower candidates of a party, he has presumably been able to examine materials qualitatively similar to those employed in this report.

47 Ibid., 227, 295, 313, and 319. Computations mine.

48 Duverger, Maurice, Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State (trans. B., and North, R.) (London, 1954), 220.Google Scholar

49 Williams, Philip, Politics in Post-War France: Politics and the Constitution in the Fourth French Republic (London, 1955), 314.Google Scholar

50 Ibid., 323n.

51 Ibid., 347.

52 Ibid., 444–5.

53 Ibid., 443n.

54 Supra, 541.

55 The universities also were two- or three-member districts. Though of some interest because they employed proportional representation, they are omitted from this discussion.

56 Butler, , The Electoral System in Britain, 5 and 171.Google Scholar

57 Nicholas, H. G., The British General Election of 1950 (London, 1951), 3.Google Scholar

58 The present system is scrutin d'arrondissement, uninominal, majoritaire, à deux tours. See Wahl, Nicholas in Beer, Samuel H. and Ulam, Adam B., eds., Patterns of Government: The Major Political Systems of Europe, 2nd ed. (New York, 1962), 361.Google Scholar

59 Campbell, Angus and Miller, Warren E., “The Motivational Basis of Straight and Split Ticket Voting,” American Political Science Review, LI (06 1957), 293–312.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

60 Ibid., 294.

61 Ibid., 295.

62 Ibid., 298.

63 Ibid., 299. Ballots vary among the states. Some are arranged in “office-blocks” and others in “party-columns.” Among the latter some permit the casting of a straight ticket by marking a single “x” or moving a single lever. See Key, V. O. Jr., Politics, Parties, and Pressure Groups, 4th ed. (New York, 1962), 691–5.Google Scholar

64 Campbell, and Miller, , “The Motivational Basis,” 308.Google Scholar The other factors are candidate partisanship and issue partisanship.

65 Ibid., 312. Straight tickets are similarly bifurcated.

66 On the structure of campaigns see Meisel, John, The Canadian General Election of 1957 (Toronto, 1962)Google Scholar, and Fox, Paul W., “A Study of One Constituency in the Canadian Federal Election of 1957,” this Journal, XXIV (05 1958), 230–40Google Scholar; on the sociological back-ground of party supporters, S. Peter Regenstreif, “Some Aspects of National Party Support in Canada,” ibid., XXIX (Feb. 1963), 59–74; and on voters' perceptions Pauline Jewett, “Voting in the 1960 Federal By-Elections at Peterborough and Niagara Falls: Who Voted New Party and Why?” ibid., XXVIII (Feb. 1962), 35–53. (The Regenstreif article is cited as an example of a type, not as being exemplary.) See also Meisel, ed., Papers on the 1962 Election.

67 The present capstone volumes from these centers of research are Berelson, Bernard R., Lazarsfeld, Paul F., and McPhee, William N., Voting: A Study of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign (Chicago, 1954)Google Scholar; and Campbell, Angus, Converse, Philip E., Miller, Warren E., and Stokes, Donald E., The American Voter (New York, 1960).Google Scholar