Much attention has been paid to the changing class cleavage that structured political conflict in the twentieth century. In contrast to most advanced democracies, class voting has traditionally been weak in Canada. Using the entire series of the Canadian Election Study (1965–2019), we find the historic pattern of working-class voting for the New Democratic Party (NDP) held outside of Quebec in recent elections, before suddenly falling off in 2019. Starting in 2004, we find a clear and distinct trend where the working class has increased its support for the Conservatives. Although greater partisan sorting is occurring over the economy, cultural issues such as moral traditionalism and anti-immigration are now significant drivers of working-class Conservative support. The findings carry important implications for class-party relationships and reveal that Canada, despite its comparatively weak nativist cleavage, is not immune from the tensions social democratic parties have recently experienced in maintaining cross-class coalitions amid socio-economic structural changes.

This article investigates how established political parties react to the emergence of a far-right party. Prevailing approaches explain established parties’ reactions either as based on a spatial model of politics or as determined by historical trajectory and political culture. Neither approach sufficiently accounts for how party leaders choose between these competing motives for actions or how their strategizing might evolve over time. To complement existing approaches, I suggest understanding the emergence of far-right parties as a problem of interpretation. How parties react to far-right emergence depends on what kinds of heuristics they draw on to make sense of the phenomenon of far-right voting. To validate my approach, I study different stances Germany’s center-right Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (CDU) has taken toward two far-right parties in postwar West German history: the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD), from 1964 to 1969, and the Die Republikaner (REP) from 1983 to 1990. Using archival material documenting internal deliberation, I argue that the social sciences have played a crucial role for how CDU leaders have evolved in their interpretation of far-right emergence. In the 1960s, party leaders drew from external social expertise on the far-right to discount the idea that the NPD was a resurgence of Nazism. In the 1980s, they were concerned with a reform project of their own party, leading them to grasp the REP through heuristics provided by scholarship on electoral strategizing. This resulted in a shift in strategies of repression against the NPD to strategies of demarcation versus co-optation against the REP.

The Canadian party system experienced a period of remarkable transition between 2006 and 2015, with the New Democratic Party (NDP) and Liberals trading places as the main competitor to the Conservatives. While national-level explanations are often used to explain this volatility, William Cross's research has shown that local association revitalization played a central role in the Liberals’ 2015 resurgence. This article examines the relationship between NDP local spending and success between 2006 and 2015. It shows that the NDP was consistently outspent by its opponents overall but that it often had a spending advantage in marginal ridings. As a result, this article finds little evidence that the NDP's local spending disadvantage cost the NDP seats, even though it finds a positive correlation between NDP local spending and NDP vote share.