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Regional Political Cultures in Canada*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 November 2009
Abstract
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- Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 7 , Issue 3 , September 1974 , pp. 397 - 437
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- Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1974
References
1 See for example, Regionalism in the Canadian Community, 1867–1967, ed. Mason Wade (Toronto, 1969).
2 See for example, Blake, Donald E., “The Measurement of Regionalism in Canadian Voting Patterns,” Canadian Journal of Political Science, 5 (March, 1972), 55–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and the references he cites; and Meisel, John, Working Papers on Canadian Politics (Montreal, 1972)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially chap. 1.
3 Lane, R.E., Political Life (Glencoe, 1959), 164.Google Scholar
4 This parallels closely the distinction between “demographic” and “cultural” explanations by Stinchcombe, Arthur, Constructing Social Theories (New York, 1968)Google Scholar, chap. 3.
5 Gamson, William, Power and Discontent (Homewood, Ill., 1968)Google Scholar; and Jack Citrin, Political Disaffection in America, 1958–1970 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., forthcoming).
6 “British Columbia: The Politics of Exploitation” in Social and Cultural Change in Canada, ed. Mann, W.E. (Toronto, 1970), 1, 112–29.Google Scholar
7 Democracy in Alberta (Toronto, 1953).
8 Agrarian Socialism (Garden City, 1968).
9 “Some Obstacles to Democracy in Quebec,” in his book Federalism and the French Canadians (Toronto, 1968); and Quebec Royal Commission of Inquiry on Constitutional Problems, Report (Quebec, 1956).Google Scholar
10 “Regionalism seems to us to be on a par with “nation” as an unspecified intervening variable rather than an explanatory variable. See the extensive discussion of this problem in Przeworski, Adam and Teune, Henry, The Logic of Comparative Social Inquiry (New York, 1970), esp. 24–30.Google Scholar
11 Almond, Gabriel and Verba, Sydney, The Civic Culture (Princeton, 1963)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, are mainly responsible for popularizing this conception.
12 Ibid., 493.
13 Economists, Sociologists and Democracy (London, 1970); and Citrin, Jack and Elkins, David J., “Political Disaffection in Great Britain: Evidence from Student and General Population Samples,” unpublished manuscript, 1973.Google Scholar
14 Lowi, Theodore, The Politics of Disorder (New York, 1971), 109–19.Google Scholar
15 Aberbach, JoelWalker, And Jack, “Political Trust and Racial Ideology,” paper presented to the American Political Science Association, 1969, 6.Google Scholar
16 Wylie, Laurence, Village in the Vaucluse (Cambridge, Mass., 1957).Google Scholar
17 This means that characterizations of “New Brunswick” in this paper actually refer only to the English two-thirds of the population. However, on virtually all indicators French-speaking New Brunswickers seem to be like the English though slightly less involved and efficacious and slightly more trusting. This appears to show that regional political cultures may override linguistic divisions, though this conclusion is highly tentative.
18 Note, for example, the differences between Alberta and Saskatchewan found by Macpherson, Democracy in Alberta and Lipset, Agrarian Socialism.
19 A more detailed study than ours, in Great Britain, throws some light on the cognitive elements involved in efficacy and trust: Citrin and Elkins, “Political Disaffection.”
20 Of course, if one knew what these different interpretations of the questions were, they could be used as indicators of the effects of culture on perceptions and responses.
21 Citrin and Elkins, “Political Disaffection,” found sharp differences between views of British politicians and British bureaucrats. See also Canada, Report of the Task Force on Government Information (Ottawa, 1969).Google Scholar
22 This assumes that “errors” are random. If they are not random, then they are of interest in cultural analysis.
23 Campbell, Donald and Fiske, D.W., “Convergent and Discriminant Validation by the Multitrait-Multimethod Matrix,” Psychological Bulletin, 56 (1959), 81–105.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
24 Readers may write the authors for details of scaling procedures.
25 Guttman, L., “Principles of Scalogram Analysis,” in Stouffer, S., et al., Measurement and Prediction, vol. IV of The American Soldier (Princeton, 1950).Google Scholar
26 Cronbach, L. and Meehl, P.E., “Construct Validity in Psychological Tests,” Psychological Bulletin, 52 (May 1955), 281–302CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; and Loevinger, Jane, “Objective Tests as Instruments of Psychological Theory,” Psychological Reports, 3 (1957), 635–94Google Scholar, Monograph Supplement 9.
27 Note that most regions in Table I, for example, differ significantly from the national average.
28 See Meisel, John, Working Papers in Canadian Politics, 2nd ed., (Montreal, 1973).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
29 The scale is made up of the following individual items in the 1968 survey:
“What do you think you could do if the federal government were considering a law which you felt to be unfair or wrong?” Dichotomized between those who said “nothing” or “don't know” and the rest.
“People like me don't have any say about what the government does.” Agree-disagree.
“Sometimes government and politics seem so complicated that a person like me can't really understand what's going on.” Agree-disagree.
“How much do you feel that having elections makes the government pay attention to what the people think? A good deal, some, or not very much?” Dichotomized between “not very much” and the two other responses.
It should be noted that this scale differs slightly from that employed by John Meisel using the same data. His includes items which form part of the Trust scale outlined later.
30 The Civic Culture, 185. Almond and Verba asked about a law which was unjust or harmful rather than unfair or wrong.
31 The scale is made up of responses to the following items in the 1968 survey:
“How much of the time do you think you can trust the government to do what is right?” Dichotomized between “just about always” and “most of the time” and “some” or “none of the time”.
“Do you think that quite a few people running the government are a little crooked, not very many are crooked, or do you think hardly any of them are crooked?” Dichotomized between “hardly any” and the rest.
“Do you feel that almost all of the people running the government are smart people who usually know what they are doing, or do you think there are quite a few of them who do not know what they are doing?” Dichotomized between “almost all know what they are doing” and the rest.
“Do you think that all of the people who are high in the government give everyone a fair break – big shots and ordinary people alike – or do you think some of them pay more attention to what the big interests want?” Dichotomized between “fair to everyone” and the rest. “Do you think that people in the government waste a lot of the money we pay in taxes, waste some of it, or don't waste very much of it?” Dichotomized between “don't waste very much” and the rest.
32 Guiseppe Di Palma defines “disaffection” to include an absence of close ties to the polity, a posture of estrangement, remoteness and rejection relating to the whole system. See Apathy and Participation: Mass Politics in Western Societies (New York, 1970), chap. II. Our term disaffection is also close to R.E. Lane's notion of alienation. See Political Ideology (New York, 1962), 42.
33 William Gamson, Power and Discontent, 48.
34 The scale is made up of the following items on the 1965 survey:
“How much interest do you generally have in what is going on in politics – a good deal, some, or not much?” Dichotomized between “not much” and the rest.
Recall correctly the name of the winning candidate.
“Did you, on your own, talk to any people and try to show them why they should vote for one of the parties or candidates?”
“Did you attend any political meetings or gathering during the campaign?”
“Did you read any party leaflets or reports of election speeches during the campaign?”
Report voting in all federal elections since you have been old enough to vote.
Report voting in all provincial elections since you have been old enough to vote.
35 See also Loon, Rick Van, “Political Participation in Canada: the 1965 Election,” Canadian Journal of Political Science, III (September, 1970), 376–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
36 The regional differences in 1968 were larger. Asked about their interest in the 1968 election, the proportion saying they had no interest ranged from 11 to 13 per cent among all the English-speaking groups west of Quebec. It rose to 24 per cent in the Maritimes as a whole, 31 per cent among French-speakers outside Quebec, and 40 per cent among the Quebec French. Just over 53 per cent of Ontarians reported ‘Very much” interest; only 39 per cent of Maritimers did. The figures for the Maritimes and Quebec are especially striking, since the former had a “native son” as leader of the Conservatives, and the latter had a French Canadian as Liberal leader, and Confederation as a major issue.
37 This is the argument of P.J. Fitzpatrick. See “New Brunswick; The Politics of Pragmatism,” in Canadian Provincial Politics, ed. Robin, Martin (Scarborough, Ontario, 1971) esp. 119, 122.Google Scholar
38 After describing the issue-free, patronage-oriented, ethnically tense politics of New Brunswick, Fitzpatrick concludes that there is general satisfaction: “the people prefer their political system the way it is.” Our data suggest a very different interpretation. See Fitzpatrick, ibid., 133.
39 This interpretation contrasts strongly with the more impressionistic view of Martin Robin, who argues that rampant patronage, low political morality, and disregard of democratic rules and procedures have bred mass resentment and apathy. See his “British Columbia, the Politics of Class Conflict,” in Canadian Provincial Politics, 27–68, esp. 38.
40 The question was – “Which of the following five social classes would you say were in – upper class, upper-middle class, middle class, working class or lower class?” A probe forced respondents to choose. In the tables, upper and upper-middle were combined as “upper” and “working” and “lower” were combined as “working.”
41 The federal party identification coding used here is not the same as in the codebook for the 1968 study. Instead we have combined that question with the follow-up questions about (a) whether the individual was thinking of the federal or provincial level (and if provincial, we then used the next question on what his federal identification was) and (b) whether he had a “leaning” towards one party or another if he said he had no identification.
42 The literature here is too large to summarize fully. Notable examples of the class interpretation are Porter, John, The Vertical Mosaic (Toronto, 1965)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Taylor, Charles, The Pattern of Politics (Toronto, 1970)Google Scholar, and the work of Robert Alford is the most closely identified with the non-class view. See Party and Society (Chicago, 1963), and “Class Voting in the Anglo-American Democracies,” in Party Systems and Voter Alignments, ed. Lipset, S.M. and Rokkan, Stein (New York, 1967), 67–93.Google Scholar
43 But note that in Table XVI each provincial sample is considered separately. It is not possible from the table to make interprovincial comparisons, such as whether men in New Brunswick are more likely to have a strong sense of efficacy than are men in Ontario.
44 Lipset, Agrarian Socialism, esp. 244–68.
45 Blake, “Measurement of Regionalism,” has also found that the ethnic and religious correlates of party voting depend significantly on the province in which the group is located.
46 For further information on the nature of analysis of variance, see Hays, William L., Statistics for Psychologists (New York, 1963)Google Scholar, chaps. 12 and 13; and Scheffe, H., The Analysis of Variance (New York, 1959).Google Scholar
47 Given the numbers of cases in the smaller provinces, an analysis of variance involving more than two control variables requires that one collapse the Maritimes together as one region and the Prairies and bc as another; or that one collapse the control variables to the point of meaninglessness – for example Liberals and Conservatives as one group and “all other parties” as another. We have, therefore, not been able to conduct an analysis of variance which would take account simultaneously of all the relevant variables.
48 In the same way, status differences in turnout have been found to be smaller in European countries with strong socialist parties than in the United States where such parties do not exist. See also Palma, Guiseppe Di, “Disaffection and Participation in Western Democracies,” The Journal of Politics 31 (November, 1969), 984–1015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
49 See George Perlin, “Social Change, the Mobilization of Electoral Support and Political Development in Newfoundland.” Unpublished manuscript.
50 John Wilson, “The Canadian Political Cultures: Towards a Redefinition of the Nature of the Canadian Political System,” below.
51 Tarrow, Sydney, “The Political Economy of Stagnation: Communism in Southern Italy, 1960–70,” Journal of Politics 34, no. 1 (February, 1972), 120–2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
52 Di Palma in Apathy and Participation has argued strongly for the need to link levels of apathy and participation to government performance and party activity. See “Conclusion.”
53 John Wilson has argued that differences in provincial party systems can in part be traced to differences in regional cultures. See “The Canadian Political Cultures.” For us studies, see Wolfinger, Raymond, “Why Political Machines Have Not Withered Away and Other Revisionist Thoughts,” Journal of Politics, 34, no. 2 (May, 1972), 365–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wolfinger, and Greenstein, Fred I., “Comparing Political Regions: The Case of California,” American Political Science Review 63 (March, 1969), 74–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Prothro, James and Grigg, Charles, “Fundamental Principles of Democracy: Bases of Agreement and Disagreement,” Journal of Politics 22 (1960), 276–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and McClosky, , “Consensus and Ideology in American Politics,” American Political Science Review (1964).Google Scholar
54 Di Palma, Apathy and Participation, 116.
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