Cross, Pruysers and Currie-Wood set out to provide a comprehensive organizational account of Canada's contemporary political parties. The Political Party in Canada walks readers through the various components and actors of these parties, dedicating a chapter each to members, local associations, candidates, donors, the party bureaucracy, and the caucus. The analytical chapters rely heavily on six surveys conducted by the authors, as well as on interviews and reviews of party documents and other sources. The chapters are bound together through three animating themes the authors present in the introduction—stratarchy and organizational complexity, representation and inclusivity, and personalization—and return to throughout the analysis, lending the book a coherent quality despite tackling many topics.
The Political Party in Canada has two noteworthy characteristics. First, it is comprehensive. We have many outstanding recent accounts of one Canadian party or one aspect of the parties but lack a comprehensive account of most of the various aspects of all of Canada's major parties. Just as one cannot describe an elephant by touching only its tail or ears, the authors argue that we can only understand Canadian parties by describing all their components and how they fit together.
Second, the book exemplifies the organizational approach to studying political parties. It rejects conceptions of parties as unitary actors and instead emphasizes the importance of understanding their internal complexities and power relations. In this sense, the book fits with a long tradition stretching back to the work of Maurice Duverger. The Political Party in Canada is grounded in mainstream theoretical accounts of Canadian parties, including the work of Samuel Eldersveld and R. Kenneth Carty on stratarchical conceptions of party organization, and the authors make frequent and effective use of Richard Katz and Peter Mair's “Three Faces of Party Organization” model.
What sorts of insights does this comprehensive organizational approach yield? One remarkable example comes when the authors, as part of a broader discussion about the inclusiveness and representativeness of Canadian parties, illustrate findings regarding the proportion of women in various positions within the parties (236). Using data from various sources, the proportion of women as party members, Electoral District Association (EDA) members, candidates, donors, Members of Parliament, cabinet ministers, critics, and leaders for all three major parties is illustrated in a single figure. The depth of data required to achieve this is striking, and it demonstrates the book's effectiveness as an organizational account of Canadian parties. The ability to convey comprehensive insights like this across parties and within them is a major strength of the book.
In addition, while many of the findings in the book's analytical chapters reinforce conventional understanding of how Canadian parties function, others directly challenge that understanding or otherwise make new and unique contributions to themes of long-standing interest and concern to scholars.
On page 100, for example, we learn that a majority of Liberal and Conservative EDAs who are dissatisfied with the central party's role in local affairs, far from wanting party bureaucrats to butt out of their business, want greater central party involvement. This finding adds substantial nuance to stratarchical accounts of Canadian parties, which have tended to present local party officials as actors who jealously guard their traditional responsibilities against incursions from the party brass in Ottawa. Indeed, such accounts have generally downplayed the role of the central party office in Canadian parties. But Cross, Pruysers and Currie-Wood find multiple instances where the party bureaucracies are playing increasingly important roles and are asserting themselves. In these instances, the authors engage in theoretical development, since these findings challenge or provide nuance to some of the central theoretical assumptions underpinning previous research into Canadian parties.
Other similar examples show how Canadian parties are changing, and how we study them might, as a result, need some updating. On page 239, for example, the authors graph the ideological self-placements of voters, members, EDA presidents, candidates, and donors from all three major parties. While there are some intraparty ideological differences between these actors, the major difference is between the three parties. All the various actors of the Conservative Party are substantially more right-wing than the Liberals, and all the various actors of the Liberal are more right-wing than the New Democratic Party. It appears that intraparty disagreements, as predicted by May's law of curvilinear disparity, are far less important than ideological differences between the parties. In this way, the authors provide a compelling organizational affirmation that the days of Tweedledum and Tweedledee politics are long gone and that Canadian politics really has become ideologically fractured.
The Political Party in Canada is full of thought-provoking findings like this, and the danger when reading the book is it is often easy to pass them by without comprehending their significance. The downside of the comprehensive approach the authors have employed is that it can be difficult to process all the presented data and make sense of the related findings. The authors have some culpability here, as findings are sometimes presented but not supplemented with the thorough discussion they deserve before moving on. On the other hand, the book's three themes are effectively used to bring the reader back to the book's primary contributions.
Notwithstanding this criticism, Cross, Pruysers and Currie-Wood have made a significant empirical and theoretical contribution to our understanding of Canadian political parties and Canadian politics. I hope the book will be read by scholars of Canadian parties and scholars of parties in other developed democracies interested in learning from an outstanding organizational account of political parties.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
