the shifting place of political parties in canadian public...
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choicesVol. 12, no. 4 June 2006 ISSN 0711-0677 www.irpp.org
Strengthening Canadian Democracy
The Shifting Place of Political Parties in Canadian Public Life
R. Kenneth Carty
Are Canadian PoliticalParties Empty Vessels?
Membership, Engagementand Policy Capacity
William Cross and Lisa Young
F ounded in 1972, the Institute for Research onPublic Policy is an independent, national,nonprofit organization.
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F ondé en 1972, l’Institut de recherche enpolitiques publiques (IRPP) est un organismecanadien, indépendant et sans but lucratif.
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To cite these documents:
Carty, R. Kenneth. 2006. “The Shifting Place ofPolitical Parties in Canadian Public Life.” IRPPChoices 12 (4).
Cross, William and Young, Lisa. 2006. “AreCanadian Political Parties Empty Vessels?Membership, Engagement and Policy Capacity.”IRPP Choices 12 (4).
The opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of IRPP or its Board of Directors.
These papers were presented at a conference heldby the Institute for Research on Public Policy andthe Trudeau Foundation, entitled “Responsibilitiesof Citizenship and Public Service: Crisis orChallenge?” at Glendon College, York University, inNovember 2005. They are part of a series from thisconference to be published by the IRPP.
About the Authors
R. Kenneth Carty is a professor of political science andthe Brenda and David McLean Chair in CanadianStudies at the University of British Columbia. A pastpresident of the Canadian Political Science Association,he was Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the PeterWall Institute of Advanced Studies. Professor Carty hasbeen a consultant to national and provincial Royalcommissions of inquiry, the CBC ombudsman and thechief electoral officer of Canada. He served as a memberof the last federal Electoral Boundaries Commission forBritish Columbia and, during 2003-04, was the directorof research for the BC Citizens’ Assembly on ElectoralReform. His scholarship has been primarily concernedwith political parties and electoral systems, and he haspublished widely on politics in Canada, Europe andAustralia. His most recent book is Politics is Local:National Politics at the Grassroots.
William Cross is an associate professor in the Departmentof Political Science at Carleton University. He is astudent of Canadian and comparative political partiesand election campaigns. He is particularly interested inhow public institutions facilitate the participation ofcitizens in democratic decision-making. His recent booksinclude Political Parties; Political Parties, Representationand Electoral Democracy in Canada; and RebuildingCanadian Party Politics (with Lisa Young and KenCarty). Dr. Cross served as director of research for theNew Brunswick Commission on Legislative Democracyin 2004-05.
Lisa Young is an associate professor in the Department ofPolitical Science and also teaches at the Institute forAdvanced Policy Research at the University of Calgary.She is the author of several books and articlesexamining Canadian political parties, interest groupsand women’s participation in politics. Her currentresearch focuses on Canadian parties’ adaptation to thenew financing rules and on youth engagement inpolitical parties and advocacy groups.
Contents
The Shifting Place of Political Parties in Canadian Public LifeR. Kenneth Carty
5 Canadian Political Parties
7 Canadian Party Competition
8 The Liberals
9 A Party Country
12 Notes
13 References
Are Canadian Political Parties EmptyVessels?Membership, Engagement and Policy Capacity
William Cross and Lisa Young
14 Introduction
15 Parties without Members — The ComparativeContext
16 Party Membership in Canada: An Overview
19 Why Do Canadians Join Political Parties?
21 Are Party Members Satisfied with Their Role?
22 Engaging Party Members
25 Conclusion
27 Notes
28 References
Strengthening CanadianDemocracy / Renforcer ladémocratie canadienneResearch Directeur / Directrice de rechercheGeneviève Bouchard
S ince the 1960s, increased levels ofeducation and changing social valueshave prompted calls for increased
democratic participation, both in Canadaand internationally. Some modest reformshave been implemented in this country, butfor the most part the avenues provided forpublic participation lag behind the demand.The Strengthening Canadian Democracyresearch program explores some of the dem-ocratic lacunae in Canada's political system.In proposing reforms, the focus is on howthe legitimacy of our system of governmentcan be strengthened before disengagementfrom politics and public alienation acceler-ate unduly.
D epuis les années 1960, le relèvementdu niveau d'éducation et l'évolutiondes valeurs sociales ont suscité au
Canada comme ailleurs des appels en faveurd'une participation démocratique élargie. Siquelques modestes réformes ont été mises enœuvre dans notre pays, les mesures envi-sagées pour étendre cette participation restentlargement insuffisantes au regard de lademande exprimée. Ce programme derecherche examine certaines des lacunesdémocratiques du système canadien et pro-pose des réformes qui amélioreraient la par-ticipation publique, s'intéressant par le faitmême aux moyens d'affermir la légitimité denotre système de gouvernement pour contrerle désengagement de plus en plus marqué dela population vis-à-vis de la politique.
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Parties are responsible for what voters are mostdissatisfied with in their politics. The evidence isclear that Canadians find their politics overlyelite dominated, insufficiently responsive to theirviews, and lacking in opportunities for them toinfluence policy outcomes.
William Cross, 2004
I n the spring of 2003 the premier of BritishColumbia moved to keep a campaign promise thathad the potential to dramatically reshape the
province’s electoral competition and the political par-ties that drive it. In seeking office, Premier Campbellhad committed to convening a citizens’ assembly onelectoral reform, that would be charged with assessingthe familiar first-past-the-post electoral system andthen deciding whether a better one might be available.This initiative was part of a wider democratic agendathat included the first fixed election dates in Canadaand open (televised) cabinet meetings. The premierargued that electoral systems were so fundamental todemocracy that it was the province’s citizens — notparty politicians with their obvious conflict of intereston the subject — who ought to decide how to electtheir legislature.1 Thus any recommendation forchange from the randomly chosen group of ordinaryvoters making up the citizens’ assembly was to gostraight to the electorate in a definitive referendum.
This initiative was surprising. We do not expectparty elites, and particularly the principal beneficiariesof a particular institutional regime, to take the lead inpromoting an agenda for change that is likely to con-strain their activity or weaken their political position.And more specifically, given the importance of elec-toral rules in determining the framework for the struc-ture and activities of political parties, we do not expectparty politicians to recuse themselves from decidingwhat those rules should be. Such an approach to thereform of party competition is simply unprecedented.
Yet all this happened in British Columbia, and then,in the face of an ambivalent referendum result in Mayof 2005, the premier announced there would beanother one — better prepared and publicly financed.2
The Shifting Place ofPolitical Parties inCanadian Public Life
R. Kenneth Carty
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competitive politics. It is to develop the institutionalincentives to build political parties that are open andresponsive to ordinary voters and that will stimulatepositive and constructive electoral competition, offer-ing voters choices that enhance their ability to directtheir representatives and shape their governments.
Members of British Columbia’s Citizens’ Assemblyepitomized the very model of an engaged democraticcitizenry. Plucked at random from the voters’ list,those 160 individuals came together in the Assemblyknowing little about electoral systems — manyclaimed not to know or care much about politics gen-erally. However, they responded eagerly to the oppor-tunity to participate in a process designed to rethinkthe public life of their provincial community. Givingup 30 to 40 days of their year, they absorbed a coursein electoral systems, listened to their fellow citizens inan extensive set of public hearings, and then engagedin a sophisticated modelling exercise. This processculminated in a debate during which they reasonedwith one another in a genuine effort to decide whatwas best for the province.10 The extraordinary com-mitment and involvement of Assembly membersbelies any notion that ordinary citizens are eitheruninterested in, or incapable of, participating in pub-lic decision-making. It confirmed the proposition thatreal deliberative debate is possible, and reinforced theview that the adversarial wrangling among politicalparties that passes for our electoral and legislativepolitics only frustrates constructive discussion of pub-lic issues and inhibits citizens from engaging in politi-cal life.
One of the greatest surprises of the British ColumbiaCitizens’ Assembly experience was the group’s conclu-sion. Most observers probably expected some recom-mendation for change. Many anticipated that it wouldbe some form of mixed member proportional (MMP)electoral system. That kind of system has recently beenadopted in New Zealand, Scotland and Wales and hasbeen enthusiastically endorsed by the Law Commissionof Canada.11 And while the Assembly carefully consid-ered an MMP system, it ultimately opted (by 4:1) torecommend the far less well-known single transferablevote (STV) electoral system, whereby people can ranktheir choices among candidates and parties. Few coun-tries use STV to elect their national legislatures, and itis worth reflecting on why these citizens ultimatelychose it, by 20:1, over our current, familiar single-member plurality system.
There was a real tension in the Assembly on thequestion of the role that political parties should play in
Equally fascinating is the fact that four otherprovinces have been seriously considering electoralreform. In each case the premier, in office as leader ofthe party rewarded by the current electoral system,has been a key player in the process. Prince EdwardIsland’s Pat Binns provided for a plebiscite inNovember 2005 to allow the voters a say on the pro-posal made by an independent commission and fine-tuned by the Commission on PEI’s Electoral Future3;New Brunswick’s Bernard Lord initiated a wide-ranging, representative Commission on LegislativeDemocracy, which was instructed to recommend aproportional electoral system4; Quebec’s Jean Charesthas seen a major electoral reform bill introduced inhis province’s National Assembly5; and Ontario’sDalton McGuinty has announced a citizens’ assemblyon electoral reform for his province.6
For much of the last decade and a half, electoralreform has been on the agenda of a large number ofpolitical systems around the world.7 However, electoralreform in Canada has long been regarded as an oxy-moron, and it has been generations since the issue wasdebated seriously by leaders of our major nationalpolitical parties.8 There are competing explanations as towhy, after so many years of benign neglect, the subjectshould suddenly emerge in this country (Carty 2004;Cross 2005). Whatever our intuitions, it is important thatwe not overlook the central role that party leaders haveplayed in this turn of events. It would appear that eachleader has recognized a deep public disaffection withpolitical parties and the wider electoral process — thevery institutions at the centre of their political existence— and has been moved to respond to it.
Certainly much of that disaffection became clearas the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly wentabout its work.9 Over fourteen hundred ordinary citi-zens wrote to it, approximately three thousand cameout to the 50 public hearings held from one end ofthe province to the other, and the Assembly’s owndiscussions and research all echoed a recurringtheme: our contemporary electoral and parliamentarypolitics do not function in a manner that allows citi-zens to see their concerns and issues represented,reflects their values and aspirations for their society,fosters public discussion on the day-to-day realitiesof their lives, or permits them to influence the direc-tions of their governments. Canadians see, at theheart of this syndrome, a set of political parties and apattern of party competition that are essentially dys-functional. The hope of electoral reform is not toabolish partisanship as a central dynamic in a freely
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logical perspectives or ideas of the good life, such partiesare the active and quite deliberate instruments of divi-sion and conflict. Their task is to mobilize distinctivegroups in an effort to advance their claims, promotetheir interests and win them benefits. Voters can readilyidentify which party speaks for them, and in this sensepolitical parties provide a vehicle for their citizen clien-teles to participate in a clearly defined, democratic elec-toral struggle. It does not work this way in Canada; it isnot even supposed to.
From the very beginning, the major Canadian partieswere designed to obfuscate rather than articulate inter-ests, blur rather than sharpen divisions. The implicitproposition is that Canadian society is so inherently frag-ile that political disintegration is something politiciansdare not risk by championing the conflicting interests ofa single region, linguistic group, religious community oreconomic class. The result is that politicians who are gen-uinely nationally minded need to build broad-tent partiesthat offer a place for any and all Canadians. This is thefamous brokerage theory of Canadian politics, shaped byparties that necessarily operate quite indiscriminately (seeCarty 1995, 195). In an ideal brokerage world there needbe only two such parties, ensuring that elections providevoters with a choice of government. Such parties willinevitably be drawn to the median voter and will feel freeto steal policies and programs from one another in orderto do so. The result will be a pair of major parties thatdiffer little in what they offer the electorate or in theopportunities they offer citizens. And for our entire his-tory two such parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives,have, in uneven turn, pre-empted our political lives andnational governments.
Of course, Canadians have actually had a good deal ofexperience with what Siegfried recognized as “natural”parties — those that represent distinctive clienteles. There isa long history of such parties rising in protest against thetwo oldest national parties — in protest against the verynotion of brokerage organizations and their accommoda-tive politics. Some have sought to represent a distinctiveinterest — McCarthyites, United Farmers, the CooperativeCommonwealth Federation and, later, the New DemocraticParty; some have arisen to articulate the claims of a partic-ular region — Social Credit, the Bloc Québécois. In eachcase, they have reflected the frustrations of voters unableto find in the brokerage parties a politically acceptablemechanism for meaningful representation and participa-tion. But, shut out of national office by an electoral systemthat favours the brokerage parties, they have been con-demned to play a secondary role on the oppositionbenches in a government-dominated Parliament and so
our democratic life. On the one hand, membersgenerally believed that disciplined parties get in theway of a genuine representation of their views, thatpoliticians quickly lose touch with those who haveelected them, and that their party system does notpresent clear choices on issues. On the other hand,they saw political parties as necessary for “true democ-racy” but regarded as fundamentally “unacceptable”an electoral system in which a party can win a majori-ty of seats without a majority of votes and in whichseat shares do not reflect vote shares.12 Thus Assemblymembers were seeking an electoral system that wouldrecognize and even enhance the centrality of politicalparties — hence the insistence on proportional repre-sentation — and at the same time transform, or at leastmitigate, the highly centralized and disciplined charac-ter of Canadian parties, centred as they are on domi-nant leaders. They recommended an STV electoralsystem precisely because it combines the proportionalrepresentation of political parties with increased voterchoice and enhanced local accountability.
What is striking about these views of members ofthe British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly is that theyare not in the least surprising. Survey work done forthe Lortie Royal Commission on Electoral Reform andParty Financing in the early 1990s, and repeated bythe Institute for Research in Public Policy 10 yearslater, show exactly the same set of electoral valuesand opinions about political parties among the widerpublic (Blais and Gidengil 1991; Howe and Northrup2000). Canadians believe they need political parties,but they do not like or trust them. If given a choice,they want an electoral system that will treat partiesmore “fairly.” This leads me to a consideration of justwhat kind of political parties we have in Canada, andwhat they offer ordinary citizens.
Canadian Political Parties
The pure and simple continuation of their ownexistence becomes the principal preoccupation…the natural form of the political party risksbeing corrupted into an unwholesomecaricature, a machine for winning elections.
André Siegfried, 1906
C anadian political parties are unique institu-tions. In most democratic countries, politicalparties naturally exist to reflect and articulate
the society’s basic divisions — be they social, econom-ic, ethnic or geographic. Articulating distinctive ideo-
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relatively free to remove an MP whom they believehas not been representing them effectively. And thereare cases of this happening in every election. Partyleaders need not mind, for any new representativedelivered from a riding will be subject to the sameparliamentary discipline as the last. This separationbetween the opportunities for citizen participationand the practices of institutional representationproves, ultimately, to be an unsatisfactory way toengage in democratic politics. Some MPs simplyleave after a short electoral career, deprivingParliament of much needed experience (Docherty1997); and some voters abandon the parties in aneffort to find a political alternative in one of the non-brokerage parties. And every few decades the dys-functions and frustrations of such an unresponsivepattern of party politics grow so intense and so wide-spread that the whole system collapses, as it did inthe 1920s, 1960s and 1990s.
In the dying days of the Chrétien government,Parliament passed a law (C-24) that was intended toreshape the financial and organizational bases of thecountry’s national political parties. The law will do thisby severely limiting the parties’ access to money fromcorporate and trade union sources and replacing thatmoney with substantial (and regular) subsidies fromthe state. Parties are being transformed from popularorganizations through which active citizens can con-trol the state, into centralized institutions, independentof their supporters and dependent on parliamentarians’willingness to give them access to the state’s purse. Inaddition, this statute has broken the old franchise bar-gain that has structured local-centre relationships inCanadian parties for over a century. It gives partyleaders much greater control over the local associa-tions, which now must register annually with the statebut need the leader’s imprimatur to do so. This tilts thebalance of power within the parties, to the consider-able advantage of the leader, and threatens partisans’longstanding autonomy and authority within theirown local associations.
This portrait of the dominant Canadian political par-ties shows clearly that they remain, as they havealways been, the underdeveloped institutions of a polit-ical elite playing a highly personalized game of elec-toral politics: they are not the instruments of anengaged or even interested citizenry. Yet our constitu-tional theory assigns them a central place in our demo-cratic politics. If, for many, the very existence ofelectoral competition between the parties, no mattertheir internal character and practices, was once suffi-
most have had a limited lifespan.13
This is not to say that individual supporters ormembers of brokerage parties have had any signifi-cant role to play in defining the key orientations andmessages of their political parties. Brokerage is, by itsvery nature, an elite activity. It needs strong andactive party leaders able to stitch together a suffi-ciently broad blanket of often internally contradic-tory values and policies to attract the supportnecessary to dominate in a first-past-the-post elec-toral regime. As a consequence, Canadian partieshave been primarily distinguished by their leaders,“whose mere name,” as Siegfried put it a hundredyears ago, “is a programme in itself” (1966, 136). Inleader-centred, leader-dominated parties there is littleroom for individual partisans to do much more thanshow up at the polls on election day. Canada’s bro-kerage parties allow their members and supporters todecide who, but rarely what, to vote for.
The building and sustaining of brokerage organiza-tions has not been an easy task. The very rationale forthe existence of such organizations — the great diver-sity of communities and interests in the country —militates against unified and disciplined mass mem-bership. The solution has been the franchise-styleorganizational model adopted by Canadian parties(Carty 2002). In this model, parochially oriented partyassociations of volunteers in each electoral district arefree to manage and control their own affairs, includ-ing the selection of local candidates and the conductof constituency-level election campaigns. For its part,the parliamentary caucus of professional politicians(effectively dominated by a leader they have not cho-sen) disciplines its members and articulates party pol-icy. This is a structural arrangement that gives localpartisans a strong sense of ownership and an institu-tional base from which to participate in the system.Party leaders live with it because it keeps them out ofthe particularistic idiosyncrasies of individual con-stituency-level politics and thus gives them the free-dom to define and pursue wider partisan interests.
Individual partisans may own their local candi-dates and representatives, but they have no effectivemeans of directing them. When Members ofParliament go off to Ottawa, they come under thesway of the leadership and take their voting instruc-tions from the parliamentary top of the party, not thegrassroots bottom. Of course, unlike the case in manyparliamentary systems, the franchise bargain ofCanadian parties — local autonomy for parliamentarydiscipline — means that constituency partisans are
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tion has rendered large areas of the country uncompet-itive for long periods. The impact of that pattern ofpolitics is to deprive many citizens of real choice andto divest national competition among the brokerageparties of much of its dynamism and authority. Overmuch of the twentieth century, voters in Quebec andAlberta had little real electoral power, as the effectivechoices of their representatives were exercised in theunregulated and often highly manipulated privatenomination practices of the parties. Decades of partisandominance in Quebec led the Liberal Party in thatprovince to confuse, and equate, its partisan interestwith public service in the wider national interest. InAlberta, the consequence of the pattern of highlyregionalized electoral competition has been the exclu-sion of its representatives from meaningful participa-tion in government. On only three occasions since theintroduction of universal suffrage in 1920 have amajority of Alberta’s MPs sat in the House of Commonsas part of a majority government. In this sense, Albertahas really been Canada’s politically distinct society, andAlbertans might rightly feel that their partisanship hasexcluded them from the process of defining nationalgoals and programs.
This pattern of electoral competition has ultimatelybeen both deceptive and destructive. Driven by partiesdetermined to smother differences and conflicting inter-ests, successive elections saw partisanly colouredregions gently rubbing up against one another like greattectonic plates. At any one moment, the political land-scape looked little changed as the country lived throughdecades of highly predictable election outcomes thatconfirmed the position of the dominant “governmentparty.” But tectonic plates do not rub against each otherindefinitely; the accumulating physical stresses eventu-ally find an explosive outlet. And so it has been inCanadian political life, with a pattern of electoral com-petition that has allowed our regionally defined politicalstresses to continually build. The inevitable outcome hasbeen a series of electoral earthquakes of a magnituderarely seen in any other democratic system. In 1921, in1958 and again in 1993, the carefully crafted politicalbalances of the national party system proved unable tocontain the country’s internal tensions, and a massiveelectoral explosion shook and restructured the partisanlandscape. It took most of a decade, after each of thesepolitical earthquakes, for the parties, and the party sys-tem, to rebuild, and for a new political equilibrium toassert itself. Each time, the political destruction stimu-lated the emergence of new patterns of partisanship,and with them new organizational frameworks to struc-
cient to guarantee a socio-political dynamic that valuespublic participation and service, this is no longer thecase. This leads us to consider the cast and consequenceof the country’s patterns of party competition.
Canadian Party Competition
There can be few countries in the world inwhich elections arouse more fury andenthusiasm than in Canada.
André Siegfried, 1906
C anada’s elections, like its national game, havetraditionally been hard-hitting contestsbetween two teams more concerned with the
moment than with its meaning or consequence. Itcould hardly be otherwise, given that two large bro-kerage parties dominate our politics and the logic oftheir existence focuses their ambitions on officerather than on policy or program. On occasion,national elections will be fought over seeminglymajor policy differences, but the alacrity with whichparties are prepared to adopt policies they onceenthusiastically denounced continues to amaze for-eign observers. In our time, Chrétien’s Liberals wereas content to live with the trade and tax policies theyhad recently opposed as were Laurier and his col-leagues a century earlier.14
The first-past-the-post electoral system, whichprivileges the imperatives of geography over otherbases of popular mobilization, has been central to thepersistence of this pattern. Based on a winner-take-allprinciple, and offering the prospect of single-partymajorities, it rewards the vote-vacuuming strategies ofbrokerage parties and discriminates against those thatseek to articulate and represent the clearly definedinterests of a particular social group. Parties with aspecifically regional appeal are the obvious exception,for the geographic bias of the electoral system oftenover-rewards them — as revealed by the parliamentaryhistory of Social Credit (whether in its Alberta or itsQuebec manifestation) or the current strength of theBloc Québécois. Indeed, in rewarding regional electoralappeals, and thus strengthening the claims of the bro-kerage parties that they are needed to fight its disinte-grative effects, the electoral system lies at the heart ofa politics that gives priority to the claims of regional-ism (Cairns 1968). And it surely impedes those whowish to engage in national politics on other terms.
Canada’s politics of regionalized electoral competi-
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long rested upon carefully constructed and nurturedinter-regional balances and accommodations, thistransformation of the Canadian party system markedthe ultimate triumph of the centre over the regions.
In each of these periods, the essential partisanshape of the country changed. The shifting balancealtered the partisan political terms that regulatedaccess to power and hence the ability of individualCanadians to find a place in national political lifethrough participation in a national party. Whatseemed to hardly change was the predominance ofthe Liberal Party, and so to it we must now turn.
The Liberals
Even if the last century did not belong toCanada, Canada turns out to have belonged tothe Liberal party.
Stephen Clarkson, 2005
T he Liberal Party of Canada has been one of thedemocratic world’s most successful politicalparties, with a record of electoral victories
matched by few others. This suggests that the party,and its leadership, may have been better than itsConservative opponents at brokering broad coalitions.But in this the Liberal Party was certainly helped bythe electoral lock it put on Quebec during the FirstWorld War (in the 20 elections that followed, Quebecdelivered more seats to the Liberals than the largerprovince of Ontario on all but four occasions) and thepreference that English-speaking Roman Catholicshave shown for the party (Blais 2005). Whatever theexplanation for the Liberals’ dominance, their longyears in power meant that few could doubt that theprincipal route to government participation inCanada was through this party. Public service — atleast government service — had a partisan colour.
For the Liberals, their continuing easy successexacted a heavy price. Long years in office turnedpartisan politicians into government administrators,and the party found itself being devoured by the state.With a depoliticized Liberal Party transformed into theelectoral arm of the government of Canada, the poli-tics of the dominant party became preoccupied withadministrative issues rather than fundamental ques-tions of political values and social mobilization (seeWhitaker 1977). One became a Liberal activist asmuch to get ahead as to serve the public interest.
Of course, permanent government had its corollary
ture political life.15
Any shift in the partisan alignments of the electorallandscape inevitably alters the political balances under-lying the governing equations that structure nationalpower and participation. In the decades after the 1921breakdown of the limited-suffrage, post-Confederationpolitical world, Mackenzie King’s Liberals establishedan easy hegemony and became the country’s naturalgoverning party. They did so by forging a political basethat rested on the twin pillars of Quebec and prairieSaskatchewan (from 1921 to 1951 the country’s thirdmost populous province), supplemented by support inother regions. This was an era in which Canadiannational party politics was essentially uncompetitive.The predictability of the pattern made it clear who wasin and who was out and it provided a rigid partisanframe that ordered the modalities of citizenship.
By realigning the Prairies, the Diefenbaker revolu-tion of 1958 fundamentally changed the competitivecast of Canadian electoral politics. Neither Quebec norAlberta (newly emerged as the dominant Prairieprovince) became any more competitive, nor did theircitizens get to choose most of their representatives ingeneral elections;16 but the system did offer the countryas a whole the prospect of regular electoral change. TheLiberals could win a majority if they could marry theirQuebec base to Ontario; the Progressive Conservatives’prospects were dependent on a Prairie-Ontario partner-ship. So precariously balanced was this system that noparty leader between the Liberal St. Laurent in the1950s and the Conservative Mulroney in the 1980s wasable to win a successive majority government. It wasthe most open, permeable and dynamic period of thecentury, one in which public service was fully openedto members of both linguistic communities, immigra-tion shaped a new multicultural social fabric, and theCharter of Rights in a repatriated Constitution providednew avenues for engaging the system and establishedthe courts as an alternative arbiter of the public good.
The temporary destruction of the Conservatives as asignificant brokerage alternative to the Liberals in 1993once more shattered the country’s underlying electoralequations and reshuffled the patterns of local represen-tation in Parliament. The party system again becameuncompetitive, and the Liberal government seemed togo unchallenged as the party won four elections in arow. However, the basis for that dominance hadchanged. The party’s success now rested on its easy andvirtually complete command of Ontario, a province thathad only once in three decades delivered half its votesto Mr. King. In a country where partisan politics had
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the party’s political coalition has also been increasinglynarrowed. As a brokerage party, the face that it pres-ents to the public, the voices heard in its senior coun-sels and the doors that it opened to influence areheavily structured by the makeup of its parliamentarycaucus. And even a quick look at the changing cast ofthe Liberals’ national caucus speaks to the impact onthe party of the shifting balance of the regional basis ofparty competition and the emergence of Ontario as thelinchpin of national electoral politics. During the King-St. Laurent era, when the Liberals still commandedcomparatively high levels of support and effortlesslywon majorities, Ontario MPs averaged just 24.8 percentof the party’s House of Commons caucus. This propor-tion jumped to 36.5 percent during the more turbulentPearson-Trudeau years when, as a harbinger of thingsto come, on three occasions Liberal MPs from Ontariooutnumbered partisan colleagues from Quebec. The1993 turn of the electoral wheel sharply acceleratedthis trend, leaving the Chrétien-Martin Liberal govern-ments dominated by Ontario MPs: on average 58.5 per-cent of their caucuses came from that province.17 At thebeginning of the 21st century Canada may have stillbelonged to the Liberal Party, but the Liberals belongedto Ontario.
This restructuring of the party system, with its con-comitant triumph of the centre in Canadian electoralpolitics, and the emergence of the Liberals as a smaller,narrower, but still governing party, went hand-in-hand.The result has been to leave Canadians trying to (orpretending to) practise brokerage politics without anygenuine brokerage parties. At the same time, the single-member plurality electoral system that produces electeddictatorships continues to deny the logic of this patternof partisanship and so misrepresents it in Parliament.This shrinks the prospect that the party system mightbe seen as an effective agency through which citizensmight hope to make a contribution to the public life oftheir society.
A Party Country
Parties are still among the few relatively genuinenational forces in Canada.
John Meisel, 1963
C anada is a county of regions — imperfectly bal-anced, unequally resourced and unevenly com-mitted. It was put together, and then expanded
over the subsequent decades, through a series of explicit-
in permanent opposition. George Perlin (1980, 198-200) has written about the frustration, internalconflict and political ineffectiveness of theProgressive Conservatives, the result being domina-tion by individuals with an “opposition mentality.” Tomany, the very idea that one might make a contribu-tion by participating in the opposition party musthave seemed risible. Thus, rather than opening upalternative avenues to public life, partisanship of anycolour became a constricting force in the system.
If the dominance of the Liberals has long been thedefining reality of national political life in Canada, it isimportant to acknowledge how the party itself haschanged over time. Its long, relentless series of electoralvictories too easily obscures the ongoing transforma-tion of the party, which reflected more deep-seatedshifts in the party system and its underlying politicalground. We have already noted the centralizing impactof the Chrétien government’s party finance legislation.Two other changes are particularly important, and bothserved to dramatically shift the locus of access andinfluence in the party, and hence the country.
The first notable change was the continual shrink-age of the Liberal base: it just kept getting smaller. InLaurier’s (pre-universal franchise) heyday, the partyaveraged over 47 percent of the vote, albeit in contestsin which the only serious opponent it generally had toface was the Conservatives. Over the King-St. Laurentera, a period in which a series of minor partiesappeared on the electoral map, the party’s averagenational vote dropped a few points, to 44.6 percent,still sufficient to ensure majority governments. Withthe Diefenbaker realignment of western Canada, theparty’s vote share dropped again, so that during thePearson-Trudeau era it averaged just 41.7 percent. Thatwas never enough to guarantee single-party majorities,and under both leaders the party had to endureepisodes of minority government. During the mostrecent period, the Chrétien-Martin era, the Liberal votedropped even further, so that it averaged only 39.2percent over the four elections following the 1993political earthquake. At this level, the party is almostcompletely dependent on the vagaries of the electoralsystem to return it to office. Perhaps even more alarm-ing, for Liberals and those concerned with governmentlegitimacy, has been the simultaneous collapse of voterparticipation. With electoral turnout percentages nowin the low 60s (of those registered), Liberal govern-ments were being returned with the active electoralsupport of only about one-quarter of the electorate.
While the Liberal base has been steadily shrinking,
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cally structured electoral system. Their provincialreform processes, functioning independently of oneanother, have produced sharply different proposalsfor changing their respective electoral systems.Though all the current reform proposals call for someform of proportional representation, they wouldresult in distinctly different patterns of party compe-tition managed by political parties working very dif-ferently (Carty 2006). But a set of provincial-levelreform experiments may teach us much about theconsequences, for the organization and activities ofCanadian parties, of changing the electoral system.
One predictable result of adopting those reformswould be fragmentation of the respective party sys-tems, making single-party majority governments farless common. While that might well alter the govern-ing dynamics of individual provinces, it would cer-tainly have consequences for the character andfunctioning of Canadian federalism as it has devel-oped over the last half century. With first ministersno longer sure about their ability to commit theirgovernments and legislatures, the practices of execu-tive federalism would be undermined and newmodalities for decision-making and public adminis-tration that cross jurisdictional lines would have tobe created. In an earlier era, the Liberal Party man-aged this through a network of regional bosses (seeWhitaker 1977). However, with the subsequent sepa-ration of national and provincial party organizations,and the transformation of the national parties them-selves, there is little prospect that the political partiesare still capable of serving as instruments of inter-governmental integration.
National electoral reform poses a distinctive set ofchallenges that need to be carefully thought out. Asin the provinces, a proportional electoral systemwould likely lead to some fragmentation of the partysystem. There would undoubtedly be more small par-ties represented in Parliament (and fairer representa-tion of some of those already there), but the largeparties might themselves break into pieces. Whetherthe current Conservative or Liberal Party could holdtogether under a proportional regime is an importantquestion. A case might be made for the propositionthat, but for the first-past-the-post electoral system,they would succumb to the disintegrating effects ofregionalism. After all, its imperatives were among themost powerful forces pushing the Alliance andConservative pieces of the old ProgressiveConservative Party back together. If national broker-age is desirable as the naturally Canadian way to do
ly political decisions made by working party politicians.As John Meisel has argued, one of the central tasksdemanded of the political parties has been to keep thecountry together and make it work. In this senseCanada is, unlike most countries, a party country inwhich the role and activities of a set of healthy, com-petitive political parties is central to its continuing exis-tence. Thus partisanship might be expected to be a vitalpart of citizens’ political identity, and the party a prin-cipal route to democratic public participation and serv-ice. But however much this is so, the stark reality isthat most Canadians no longer like, trust or joinnational political parties; they do not believe the partysystem offers them a tool for choosing or influencingtheir national government.
The dominant Liberal Party — the so-callednational party — has become narrower, smaller andmore centralized. Its long occupancy of power has ledit to confuse partisanship with patriotism and has cre-ated a cult of entitlement that repels citizens fromengaging in public service rather than inviting themto do so. Its failure to build a coherent, participatorymembership organization leaves it politically vulnera-ble and forces it, when challenged, to resort to usingthe resources of the state for narrowly partisan pur-poses.18 Ultimately, this not only threatens to de-legitimize public life but also reverses the naturalrelationship between citizen and state in a democracy.
With the political ascendancy of the centreprovince (itself increasingly driven by its own metro-politan centre), the party system no longer seems ableto strike acceptable accommodations capable of bal-ancing competing regional interests. For those in thecentre who win, partisan contests may no longerseem relevant to the process of acceptable collectivedecision-making. For those on the peripheries, parti-sanship, and the party activity it supports, are morelikely to lock them out than offer them an entry por-tal into meaningful public involvement. Whether therevival of the Conservatives as a viable brokeragealternative can undo this syndrome is still very muchan open question. The Diefenbaker and Mulroneyexperiences are not encouraging.
This failure of the major political parties, andhence the party system, to serve as the primary vehi-cle for public service is profoundly troubling for aparty country. Which brings us back to PremierCampbell and his colleagues, who appear to havedecided that one of the principal institutional under-pinnings of our current political malaise — describedin terms of a democratic deficit — is the geographi-
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party politics, then electoral reform must be assessedin terms of its capacity to support and sustain thepolitical parties that are able to engage in it(Courtney 1999, 2004).
Over time, the country’s political dynamics haveleft its major governing party narrower, smaller andmore centralized. Proportional national electoralreform seems likely to reinforce those tendencies andexaggerate the difficulties faced by political partiesstriving to practise brokerage politics. If the real chal-lenge is to find a way to restore this kind of nationalpolitical party, then electoral reform would becounterproductive. If, on the other hand, the evolutionof our parties leads us to conclude that old-stylenational brokerage parties are now a thing of the past,then electoral reform offers a way to usher in the newparty organizations that will reshape the competitivealignments necessary to allow Canadians to partici-pate in a new, democratic national public life.
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zensassembly.bc.ca. Mark Warren and Hilary Pearse(forthcoming) provide a sophisticated multi-perspective analysis of the Assembly experience.
10 For descriptive accounts of the Assembly’s work, seeRatner (2004, 2005).
11 The Law Commission of Canada’s (2004) report VotingCounts: Electoral Reform for Canada can be found athttp://www.lcc.gc.ca/about/voting_toc-en.asp. Therehave been second thoughts about the system in Wales,and the Commission on the Powers and ElectoralArrangements of the National Assembly for Wales(Richard Commission) has recommended it be aban-doned for a Single Transferable Vote electoral system.Its report can be found atwww.richardcommission.gov.uk/content/template.asp?ID=/index.asp
12 In a survey of Assembly members we conducted beforethey met, 65.8 percent agreed that politicians soon losttouch with their electors and just 31.6 percent thoughtthe British Columbia party system provided clear issuechoices; 68.4 percent believed outcomes should beproportional, only 8.1 percent thought it acceptablethat a party with less than a majority of the voteshould get a majority of the seats, and 60.4 percentagreed with the proposition that parties are necessaryfor democracy. We surveyed them after the Assemblysurvey and found little substantial change on any ofthese basic questions.
13 The social democrats (as the Co-operativeCommonwealth Federation or the New DemocraticParty) have survived longest by trying to establishthemselves as a national party, but in doing so havepaid a high seat-vote price.
14 Of course, the Liberals have not been alone in this. The Mulroney Progressive Conservative governmententhusiastically adopted North American free tradeeconomic policies in the 1980s despite the party’scentury-long opposition to it.
15 My original statement of this perspective on the devel-opment of the Canadian party system can be found inCarty (1988) and is elaborated in various ways in Carty(1995, 1997) and Carty, Cross, and Young (2000).
16 Most MPs from these two provinces knew that the realcompetition for their seat was focused on winningtheir party’s local nomination — Liberal in Quebec,Progressive Conservative in Alberta.
17 Ontario’s share of the Commons varied very little overthe century, oscillating between 32 and 34 percent.
18 On the limits of Canadian party organization, see Cartyand Cross (Forthcoming). The Commission of Inquiryinto the Sponsorship Program and AdvertisingActivities (the Gomery Inquiry) provides much evi-dence of the Liberal’s willingness to use state resourcesfor partisan electoral aims.
NotesThis essay was written before the fall of the MartinLiberal government and its subsequent defeat, whichput the Liberals out of office for the first time since1993.
1 For an account (with excerpts) of the debate in the leg-islature authorizing the Assembly, see “The BritishColumbia Citizens’ Assembly: A Round Table” (2003).The full debate can be found in the British ColumbiaHansard for April 30, 2003.
2 The referendum was held at the same time as theprovincial general election, on May 17, 2005. It wassupported by 57.7 percent of the electorate and by atleast 50 percent of voters in 77 of the 79 provincialelectoral districts. The legislature had previously set adouble threshold of 60 percent support and a majorityin 60 percent of the districts, so the referendum wasdeemed to have failed. In light of public support forelectoral change, the newly re-elected Campbell gov-ernment announced its intention, in its Speech fromthe Throne on September 12, 2005, to hold anotherreferendum on the same proposal. The second referen-dum is to be supported by funds for information cam-paigns and will include an electoral map delineating aset of electoral boundaries for the proposed alternativesystem.
3 The proposal to shift to a mixed proportional type ofelectoral system was defeated in an uncharacteristi-cally low turnout of about 33 percent on November28, 2005. Precise turnout figures are unavailable as noenumeration to prepare an up-to-date voters’ list wasconducted. For an account of the conduct of theplebiscite, including the government’s decision to alterthe threshold for change during the campaign, see Lee(2006).
4 The Commission’s comprehensive report can be foundat www.gnb.ca/0100/FinalReport-e.pdf
5 The Draft Bill can be found athttp://www.assnat.qc.ca/eng/37legislature2/Av-pro-jets/04-aAVPL_LE.htm. Consideration of the billincludes work by a committee of citizens speciallyappointed to supplement the work of the committee ofthe National Assembly.
6 The Assembly is to start meeting in the fall of 2006.For further information, see the Web site of theDemocratic Renewal Secretariat: http://www.democra-ticrenewal.gov.on.ca/english
7 Examples include, in the world of established democ-racies, the United Kingdom, Italy, New Zealand andJapan; most of the countries of the former Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe; and a range of Third Worldnations as they struggle to establish democratic elec-toral politics.
8 The Liberal Party’s 1921 election platform included acall for the adoption of proportional representation.The House debated the electoral system in 1922 butvoted to maintain it.
9 A full account and documentation of the Assembly’swork, and its final report, can be found at www.citi-
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Howe, Paul, and David Northrup. 2000. “StrengtheningCanadian Democracy: The Views of Canadians.” IRPPPolicy Matters 1, no. 5.
Law Commission of Canada. 2004. Voting Counts: ElectoralReform for Canada. Ottawa: Minister of Public Worksand Government Services.
Lee, Jeannie. 2006. “The Prince Edward Island Plebiscite onElectoral Reform.” Canadian Parliamentary Review 29(1): 4-8.
Meisel, John. 1963. “The Stalled Omnibus: Canadian Partiesin the 1960s.” Social Research 30: 367-90.
Perlin, George. 1980. The Tory Syndrome: Leadership Politicsin the Progressive Conservative Party. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Ratner, R.S. 2004. “British Columbia’s Citizens’ Assembly: TheLearning Phase.” Canadian Parliamentary Review 27 (2):20-26.
_____. 2005. “The B.C. Citizens’ Assembly: The PublicHearings and Deliberations Stage.” CanadianParliamentary Review 28 (1): 24-33.
Siegfried, André. 1966 [1906]. The Race Question in Canada.Toronto: McClelland & Stewart.
Warren, Mark, and Hilary Pearse, eds. Forthcoming. DesigningDemocratic Renewal.
Whitaker, Reginald. 1977. The Government Party: Organizingand Financing the Liberal Party of Canada 1930-58.Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
ReferencesBlais, André. 2005. “Accounting for the Electoral Success of
the Liberal Party of Canada.” Canadian Journal ofPolitical Science 38 (4): 821-40.
Blais, André, and Elisabeth Gidengil. 1991. MakingRepresentative Democracy Work: The Views ofCanadians. Toronto: Dundurn Press for the RoyalCommission on Electoral Reform and Party Financing.
“The British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly: A Round Table.”2003. Canadian Parliamentary Review 26 (2).
Cairns, Alan C. 1968. “The Electoral System and the PartySystem in Canada: 1921-1965.” Canadian Journal ofPolitical Science 1: 55-80.
Carty, R. Kenneth. 1988. “Three Canadian Party Systems:An Interpretation of the Development of NationalPolitics.” In Party Democracy in Canada, edited by G.Perlin. Scarborough, Ont.: Prentice-Hall.
_____. 1995. “On the Road Again: ‘The Stalled Omnibus’Revisited.” In Canada’s Century: Governance in aMaturing Society. Essays in Honour of John Meisel,edited by C.E.S. Franks, J.E. Hodgetts, O.P. Dwivedi,Doug Williams, and V. Seymour Wilson. Montreal:McGill-Queen’s University Press.
_____. 1997. “For the Third Asking: Is There a Future forNational Political Parties?” In In Pursuit of the PublicGood. Essays in Honour of Allen J. MacEachen, editedby T. Kent. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
_____. 2002. “The Politics of Tecumseh Corners: CanadianPolitical Parties as Franchise Organizations.” CanadianJournal of Political Science 35 (4): 723-45.
_____. 2004. “Canadians and Electoral Reform: An Impulseto Doing Democracy Differently.” Representation 40:173-84.
_____. 2006. “Regional Responses to the Challenges ofElectoral Reform.” Canadian Parliamentary Review 29(1): 22-26.
Carty, R. Kenneth, and William Cross. Forthcoming. “CanStratarchically Organized Parties be Democratic? TheCanadian Case.” Journal of Elections, Public Opinion,and Parties.
Carty, R. Kenneth, William Cross, and Lisa Young. 2000.Rebuilding Canadian Party Politics. Vancouver:University of British Columbia Press.
Clarkson, Stephen. 2005. The Big Red Machine: How theLiberal Party Dominates Canadian Politics. Vancouver:University of British Columbia Press.
Courtney, John. 1999. “Electoral Reform and Canada’sParties.” In Making Every Vote Count: ReassessingCanada’s Electoral System, edited by H. Milner.Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press.
_____. 2004. Elections. Vancouver: University of BritishColumbia Press.
Cross, William. 2004. Political Parties. Vancouver:University of British Columbia Press.
_____. 2005. “The Rush to Electoral Reform in the CanadianProvinces: Why Now?” Representation 41: 75-84.
Docherty, David. 1997. Mr. Smith Goes to Ottawa: Life inthe House of Commons. Vancouver: University ofBritish Columbia Press.
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Introduction
I n the period just after Confederation, the notionthat membership or involvement in a Canadianpolitical party was a form of public service would
have been considered quite peculiar. More accuratewould have been the idea that activism on behalf of apolitical party was a route into the public service, ascivil service jobs were awarded to the loyal support-ers of the governing party. In the contemporary era,with fewer opportunities for political parties to dis-pense patronage, it is more plausible to think aboutparty membership as a form of public service, as mostparty members are volunteers motivated by a desireto play a role in political life.
In fact, drawing on the Study of Canadian PoliticalParty Members, our 2000 survey of members of whatwere then Canada’s five major political parties,1 wefind that individuals are drawn to party membershipnot by a desire to further their personal interests butrather by support for their party’s policy stance and asparticipants in intraparty personnel contests. Thisconforms to a notion of public service as volunteerismmotivated by a desire to participate in or influencediscussions of public policy and party affairs. Volun-teers have traditionally played a significant role inCanadian political parties, as campaign workers, sup-porters of candidates for party leadership or nomina-tion, and local organizers. In the contemporary era ofprofessionalized, media-oriented politics, however, thealready circumscribed role of the Canadian partymember has been limited even further. In our survey,we found that party members are not satisfied withtheir ability to shape party policy and are particularlyresentful of the extent to which political professionalshave usurped the role of the party member.
To the extent that party membership in Canada isa form of public service and thus contributes to thevibrancy of political life in the country, we should beconcerned that the rates of party membership appearto be dropping, the average party member is nearingretirement age and is not being replaced, and rates ofactivism within parties are relatively low. All of thesetendencies are products of complex social change,
Are Canadian PoliticalParties Empty Vessels?Membership, Engagement and Policy Capacity
William Cross and Lisa Young
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gEven if the decline in rates of party membership is
somewhat exaggerated by the basis for comparison,there remains the question of why membership ratesbegan to fall after reaching these unprecedented highsin the postwar era. Norris’s (2002) cross-nationalanalysis makes it clear that this is a phenomenon ofaffluent established democracies; in fact, she finds thataffluent countries generally have lower rates of partymembership than other democracies. This finding lendsgeneral support to the modernization thesis, whichholds that various aspects of the modern social andpolitical order in advanced industrialized nations leadto a weakening of the bond between the public andpolitical parties (Dalton and Wattenberg 2000, 10-11).
More specifically, the modernization thesis suggeststhat increases in education, changing values held bycitizens, changing modes of social organization, the riseof the mass media, tendencies toward professionaliza-tion and changes in technology all combine to weakencitizens’ attachment to political parties and to discour-age membership in party organizations. At the level ofthe individual citizen, higher rates of education result in“cognitive mobilization” of citizens. With greater intel-lectual resources at their disposal, these individualsbecome self-sufficient political actors who are less def-erential to political elites and less inclined to look toelites for political cues, opting instead to make theirown choices (Dalton and Wattenberg 2000, 10-11). Morecomplex patterns of social organization, when com-bined with this cognitive mobility, reduce the basis forgroup mobilization. Individuals in these postindustrialsocieties are less inclined to identify themselves asmembers of a social group — such as the working class— and are consequently less available to be mobilized asgroup members. Overall, these individual-level changesresult in a smaller supply of individuals who can bemobilized to partisan activity.
Aspects of social organization in modern societiesalso contribute to declining membership in politicalparties. In particular, the rise of the electronic massmedia supplants the role of party members in spreadingthe party’s message, and the rise of public opinionpolling reduces party leaders’ need to gather informa-tion about the mood of the electorate from party mem-bers. Norris (2002) finds empirical evidence for thisassertion. In her cross-national analysis, she finds thatrates of party membership are lower in countries thathave a high rate of ownership of television sets. Fromthis, she concludes that the electronic broadcast mediaact as a substitute for party mobilization in establisheddemocracies. Parties communicate with voters not
reinforced by institutional constraints that have his-torically limited the role of Canadian party members.As such, they defy easy solutions. We argue, however,that one approach that might encourage party mem-bership and help political parties to fulfill their rolesin public life would be to encourage parties todevelop policy foundations.
Parties without Members — TheComparative Context
S tudies of political party organization andmembership in Western Europe and NorthAmerica in recent years point to significant
changes in party organization, driven by decliningrates of membership in political parties. The mostnotable of these studies is a book entitled PartiesWithout Partisans (Dalton and Wattenberg 2000), thetitle of which telegraphs a key concern about thedevelopment of party organization in these estab-lished democracies. The consensus among politicalscientists who study political parties in establisheddemocracies is that rates of party membership havedeclined over the past three or four decades (Scarrow2000; Norris 2002; Heidar and Saglie 2003). Theextent of the decline and the rate at which it hasoccurred vary by country, but the overall trend is in adownward direction. Moreover, rates of activism tendto be very low, and in many cases declining, amongparty members in these industrialized democracies(Scarrow 2000; Norris 2002; Heidar and Saglie 2003;Gallagher and Marsh 2002; Whiteley and Seyd 2002).
Although these findings have profound implica-tions for the role of political parties in moderndemocracies, they must be placed in context. Whenmeasuring numbers of party members or the rate ofparty membership in the electorate, the initial basisfor comparison is usually the 1950s or 1960s. SusanScarrow (2000, 94-5) points out that “it was only inthe 1950s and 1960s that many countries had partiesof both the left and the right successfully pursuingmass enrolment strategies. Before and after thisperiod, parties exhibited an uneven pattern of com-mitment to, and success in, enlisting supporters inpermanent organizations.” As Scarrow points out, theperiod from the Second World War until the 1970swas a historical anomaly, with unusually high ratesof membership. Using this time as a basis for com-parison overstates the magnitude of the decline.
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allows them to purchase the services of professionalsto maintain party organization (Katz and Mair 1995;van Biezen 2004). Increasingly, political parties areportrayed in both academic and political discourse as“public utilities” that perform services that are neces-sary to electoral democracy and that must be sup-ported financially by the state. Certainly, with theadvent of quarterly funding for Canadian politicalparties at the federal level, we can see that Canadianparties have, to varying degrees, adopted this strategy(Young et al. 2005). If state funding reduces a party’sneed to maintain an active base of members and sup-porters, it may exacerbate tendencies toward partyorganization in which members play a minimal role.
Party Membership in Canada: AnOverview
H ow does Canada fit into this picture ofdeclining party memberships? On one hand,there is little evidence that rates of member-
ship in Canadian parties have declined substantially.In her comparative analysis, Scarrow (2000, 88)observes that the United States and Canada “do notsupport the picture of ‘decline,’ though they do matchthe picture of contemporary parties as lacking strongmembership bases.” In essence, the golden era of themass membership party never dawned in Canada.
Few Canadians choose to belong to political partieson an ongoing basis. An Institute for Research onPublic Policy study by Howe and Northrup (2000, 89)found that 16 percent of respondents claim to havebelonged to a political party at some point in theirlives. This figure probably includes a significant num-ber of “partisans” of a party who have never formallyheld membership. Our best estimate, from an examina-tion of membership patterns over time, is that between1 and 2 percent of Canadians belong to a politicalparty on a year-to-year basis. This places Canada atthe bottom of the list of Western democracies.
Moreover, Canadian party members are much olderthan the general population. In our survey, we foundthat the average age of party members was 59. Almosthalf our respondents were senior citizens, and only onein 20 was under age 30. Some of this age distortionmay be explained by respondent bias, as seniors aremore likely to participate in mail surveys than are theiryounger counterparts. However, this factor alone can-not explain the degree to which Canadian political
through volunteers who spread the word but via care-fully crafted television advertisements.
Along with the rise of electronic media and opinionpolling comes a professionalization of parties, in whichfundraisers, pollsters and communication consultantscome to fill the functions that were once the preserve ofmembers of political parties. As a consequence, theconduct of politics goes from a labour-intensive under-taking in which volunteer labour was a necessity for anelectorally competitive party, to a capital-intensiveactivity in which money, rather than volunteer labour,is essential to electoral success. In essence, technologi-cal changes have reduced parties’ demand for activemembers in these affluent, established democracies.
Given these trends, it would be reasonable to pre-dict that political parties may one day become organ-izations without members. If party leaders do notneed members to run election campaigns, maintainparty organization and serve as informational con-duits between the electorate and the party leadership,then why should they continue to recruit party mem-bers? In considering this question, it becomes clearthat party members serve functions other than thoselisted above. First, parties gain legitimacy from theirmembership; if they are not able to point to somemembership base, they may lose credibility in theeyes of the electorate. The existence of a membershipbase lends an air of legitimacy to decisions made bythe party, not the least of which are the selection of aleader and the choice of candidates for legislativeoffice. Second, members can be important assets inintraparty battles (Scarrow 2002, 100). As long asparty constitutions give party members a voice inselecting party leaders, there will be an incentive foraspirants to mobilize members into the party to sup-port their quest for the leadership.
This raises the question of how parties can recruitnew members from the cognitively mobile and atomizedsocieties that we find in most established democracies.Comparative studies show that parties have respondedto this challenge in large part by moving in the direc-tion of “plebiscitary” party organization, in which mem-bers are accorded direct votes in the selection of partyleaders and on selected matters of party policy anddirection (Scarrow 1999; Seyd 1999; Whiteley and Seyd2002, 213). In their research in Britain, Whiteley andSeyd (2002) conclude that such techniques may increasethe size of a party’s membership but do not increase therate of activism within the party.
A strategy that parties facing such challenges oftenadopt is to turn to the state for financial support that
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contests and in national leadership contests are thetwo significant entitlements that accompany member-ship in a Canadian political party. It is not surprising,then, that levels of membership in Canadian politicalparties follow a cyclical pattern. The number of mem-bers who belong to each party can double or eventriple in election years and in years when the party isselecting a leader. Table 1 shows the dramatic increasein Liberal Party membership in each of the four largestprovinces in the run-up to its 2003 leadership vote.Candidates seeking either the party’s nomination or itsleadership mobilize supporters into the party, bolster-ing the membership ranks. However, after the contestis over, many of these individuals drop out of theparty, leaving the stalwarts who maintain the partyorganization between elections. The vast majority ofthese members take no further part in party activities.This cyclical pattern suggests that voters are willing tojoin a party when they see some value offered inexchange for their taking out membership: a vote inthe party’s leadership or nomination contest. Whenthese contests are not imminent, however, these indi-viduals let their membership lapse.
This raises the important question of why voterswho are open to the possibility of participating in partypolitics will not maintain ongoing memberships. Wesuggest that the answer to this question is, at least inpart, that voters do not see membership in politicalparties as a way of influencing the country’s politics(aside from personnel selection). The Howe andNorthrup survey (2000) offers some evidence of this.They find that, by a three-to-one margin, Canadiansbelieve that belonging to an interest group is a moreeffective way of influencing public policy than is par-ticipation in a political party. This public perception isnot erroneous, as even the parties’ core group of con-sistent members are largely dissatisfied with the rolethey play in ongoing party decision-making. (We dis-cuss this in some detail below.)
party membership appears to be “greying.” Similarfindings are reported in a study conducted by the IRPPin 2000, which found that only 5 percent of Canadiansaged 18 to 30 have ever belonged to a political party(either federal or provincial), compared with one-thirdof those over age 60 (Howe and Northrup 2000). Thesame question was asked in a survey conducted in1990; at that time, 10 percent of respondents aged 18to 30 reported having belonged to a party. This declineover time in the rate of party membership among youthlends some credence to the idea that Canadian politicalparties, as membership organizations, are in decline.
No Canadian political party has achieved the kindof mass membership enrolment that characterizedmass parties of the mid-twentieth century. The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and thenthe New Democratic Party (NDP) represented an effortto build a mass-type party in Canada, but neitherparty was able to achieve the kind of social encapsu-lation that leftist parties in Western Europe achieved.This may in part reflect the limited salience of classidentities in the Canadian context, but it is also aproduct of the unique circumstances of Canadianpolitical parties. R.K. Carty (2002, 729) notes thatCanadian parties must accommodate differencesamong diverse and shifting coalitions of supporters,and have “little in the way of the material or idea-tional glue that traditionally holds political partiestogether.” As a consequence, “the conventional modelof a centralized, disciplined mass membership party,speaking with one voice, and committed to offeringand delivering an integrated and coherent set of pub-lic policies has never been the way to do this success-fully” in the Canadian experience (Carty 2002).
Although the Canadian party system did notexperience the full effects of the rise of the massparty in the mid-twentieth century, the formation ofthe NDP and changing expectations about internaldemocracy did provide a stimulus for the two tradi-tional brokerage parties to increase the influence oftheir members. During the 1960s and 1970s, thegrassroots party memberships gained greater influ-ence over the selection of the party leader, gainedthe power to oust a party leader and won someinfluence over setting party policy (see Carty, Cross,and Young 2000, 110-11). As a result of these devel-opments, the traditional influence of Canadian partymembers at the local level, especially in controllinglocal party affairs and selecting candidates, wasenhanced by a new influence over the selection ofthe leader at the national level.
Table 1Number of Members of the Liberal Party of Canadain the Four Largest Provinces, 2002 and 2003
2002 2003 % increase
Ontario 38,000 126,000 232Quebec 28,000 65,000 132British Columbia 4,500 38,000 744Alberta 4,000 22,000 450
Source: R. Kenneth Carty and William Cross, “Can Stratarchically OrganizedParties Be Democratic: The Canadian Case,” Journal of Elections, Public Opinionand Parties 2006, 16 (2): 93-114, 103.
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chap. 6). The move toward plebiscitary democracy inCanadian parties had its greatest momentum in the1990s, but the majority of reforms implemented duringthis period remain in place. While the merits and thesuccess of these initiatives are subject to debate, theirexistence is a clear sign that the leaders of Canadianparties continue to see a value in trying to recruit andretain party members outside of leadership contests.
Not only do few Canadians belong to parties, butthose who do are not particularly active. Our data,collected during a non-mobilization period when wesuspect only the most stalwart of party supportersmaintained their memberships, indicate that fewerthan half of these party members engage in ongoingparty activity. Our survey shows that 4 in 10 membersreport spending no time on party activity in a typicalmonth, and an additional 2 in 10 commit less thanone hour per month. As shown in figure 1, we foundsignificant variance among the parties in this regard,with the Liberal and Progressive Conservative partieshaving fewer members who are disengaged from partyactivity than do the newer parties. This may be a gov-erning party effect with activists more likely to partic-ipate in a party that has access to the levers ofgovernment and the accompanying patronage powers.
Similarly, 4 members in 10 report not havingattended a single party meeting during the past year,and fewer than 4 in 10 attended more than two meet-ings. And, as illustrated in figure 2, almost one-quarterof members report that they have never attended ameeting of their local party association or volunteered
The cyclical pattern of membership numbers sug-gests that party members remain a valued resource forparty leaders in intraparty contests. The same modern-izing factors that have decreased party leaders’ demandfor party members in other industrialized democraciesare also at work in Canada, however. Canadian politicalparties have availed themselves of the services of opin-ion pollsters for checking the public mood, and use tel-evision and other electronic media as their primarymeans of communicating with voters. Canadian partieshave become professionalized organizations in whichvolunteer labour is simply less necessary than it oncewas. In short, members remain valuable to Canadianparties primarily as a source of public legitimacy and asa resource in intraparty contests.
When we examine organizational changes in themajor political parties over recent decades, we findclear signals that parties continue to seek members as asource of legitimacy. Led by the Reform Party/CanadianAlliance, Canadian parties have shifted their organiza-tional modes in the direction of plebiscitary models ofinternal party democracy (Young and Cross 2002b). Theclearest manifestations of this are the move to giveevery party member a direct vote in the selection ofparty leader, the moves of three of the major parties(the Canadian Alliance, the Progressive Conservativesand the Bloc Québécois) away from decentralized formsof party membership in favour of a national party listand the occasional use of referendums within parties oncrucial policy issues (see Carty, Cross and Young 2000,
Figure 1Proportion of Members Participating in PartyActivity in a Typical Month, Canada, 2000 (percent)
Source: “Study of Canadian Political Party Members,” 2000.Note: The figures for the Liberal Party exclude respondents from Quebec to cor-rect for a sampling problem in that province.
BQ
16
72
CA
13 13
71
LIB
33
49
NDP
75
PC
14
56
< 1 hr
> 3 hrs
Perc
ent
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
Figure 2Proportion of Members Who Have “Ever” Participatedin Party Activities, Canada, 2000 (percent)
Source: “Study of Canadian Political Party Members,” 2000.
Attended nominationmeeting
Attended localmeeting
Displayed electionsign
Contributedfunds
Percent
Volunteered inelection 72
74
79
81
89
40 50 60 70 80 90 100
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gparticipating in the campaign. In the context of politicalparty activism, the question is this: If party involvementprovides only collective benefits, what incentive does anindividual have to join a political party?
Although there have been no comprehensive studiesof the motivations for Canadians to join political parties,much of the literature suggests that supporting a candi-date for the leadership of the party or for the party’snomination in an electoral district is seen as one of thesignificant reasons for joining a party. In his study ofCanadian parties’ constituency associations, Carty (1991,38) found clear evidence that the Liberal and ProgressiveConservative parties’ membership numbers fluctuatedvastly between election years and non-election years,leading him to conclude that “when party elections areto be held — to nominate a candidate in an election, orselect delegates for a leadership contest — membershiptakes on its meaning and worth, and individuals aremobilized for these contests with little concern forlonger-term involvement or participation.” This patterndid not hold for the NDP, which Carty found to have amore stable pattern of party membership.
In their study of members of the Reform Party in1993, Clarke et al. (2000) found that collective incen-tives most commonly motivated party membership.When members were asked what was their most impor-tant reason for joining the party, the most frequentresponses were concern with the deficit or economicproblems (31 percent), concern with moral principles ingovernment (29 percent), dissatisfaction with the then-governing Progressive Conservative Party (22 percent),concern that the province of Quebec was too powerful(17 percent), and a desire for individual freedom andless government (16 percent). A mere 2 percent ofrespondents cited material incentives, either businesscontacts or a desire to run for public office, as theirmost important reason, and only 1 percent indicatedthat their primary motivation was that friends or familyare party members. Respondents were not askedwhether supporting a candidate for the party’s nomina-tion or leadership was a factor in their decision.
RecruitmentTo what extent are individuals recruited intoCanadian political parties, and to what extent do theytake the initiative to join the party? Table 2 belowsummarizes responses to the question “Who firstasked you to join the ___ party?” It is clear that, atleast among the long-term or core members of thefive parties who responded to our survey, the majoritywere not recruited into party activity but rather took
in an election campaign. While participation rates of75 percent may seem high, it must be kept in mindthat the question asked of members was whether theyhad “ever” done each of the activities, and also that thepopulation being surveyed was the stalwart (interelec-tion) party members. On the other hand, 9 in 10 mem-bers report having contributed funds to the party.Many then appear to be what we might call “cheque-book” members, willing to contribute funds to theparty but not active in party affairs in any way thatmay be thought of as akin to public service.
Why Do Canadians Join PoliticalParties?
T heoretical accounts suggest three categories ofmotivation for belonging to a political party(Young and Cross 2002a). The first category —
material incentives — harkens back to the post-Confederation era of Canadian politics, when patron-age provided ample incentive for membership. Thebroad category of material incentives includes patron-age appointments and government contracts as wellas more general inducements like career advancement.The second category — social incentives — offerspotential participants the company of like-mindedindividuals and social or recreational opportunities.The third category — collective or purposive incentives— gives individuals an opportunity to assist in achiev-ing the party’s collective policy or ideological goals.
In most but by no means all industrialized democ-racies, material and social incentives have declined inimportance over time. Civil service reforms andchanging political values have reduced the practice ofpatronage, thereby reducing the parties’ ability tooffer material incentives to potential members. Asrecreational opportunities have expanded and thebases of social organization on which mass partieswere formed have eroded, parties have been less ableto offer social incentives to membership (Ware 1996).This leaves the category of collective incentives as theprimary set of motivators for partisan involvement.
If membership in a political party is a form of col-lective action, then it is subject to what Olson (1965)identified as the “free rider problem.” Olson argues thatpeople have no incentive to participate in politicalaction if they can benefit from the outcome withoutjoining in the mobilization. “Free riders” are individu-als who enjoy the benefits of a mobilization without
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party members. Fully 84 percent of respondents to thesurvey indicated that this reason was very important tothem. Although important, support for a candidate forthe party’s leadership or nomination lagged far behindpolicy as a reason for initially joining the party. Ofcourse, if we were to add the 45 percent of respondentswho indicated that supporting a candidate for the localnomination was very important to the 36 percent ofrespondents who indicated that supporting an individ-ual for the party’s leadership was very important, thiswould suggest that these personnel-related concernswere as important as belief in the party’s policies.However, on closer examination we find that these arefor the most part the same respondents: 72 percent ofrespondents who indicated that supporting a candidatefor the leadership was a very important reason for join-ing the party also indicated that supporting a candidatefor the nomination was very important. That belief inthe party’s policies outweighs personnel-related reasonsfor joining suggests that even though Canadian partieshave recruited a substantial portion of their members
the initiative to join the party themselves. This pat-tern is all the more evident in the two newest parties— the Bloc and the Canadian Alliance — in which 68percent and 71 percent of members, respectively,joined of their own initiative.
Incentives to membershipThese patterns of recruitment suggest that conventionalunderstanding of the importance of social networks andparticipation in leadership and nomination contests tojoining Canadian political parties may be overstated andof limited salience in explaining membership in themore ideologically oriented parties. To determine thiswith greater certainty, however, we need to examineparty members’ reasons for initially joining their party.Respondents were given a list of eight reasons for join-ing the party and were asked to rank each one as not atall important, somewhat important or very important.Responses were not mutually exclusive.
As table 3 demonstrates, belief in the party’s policiesis the reason for joining given the greatest weight by
Table 2Who First Asked the Member to Join the Party, Canada, 2000 (percentage of members)
All parties PC Liberal NDP BQ CA
No one; own initiative 59 59 47 51 68 71A relative 11 14 14 11 7 7A friend or neighbour 9 5 12 9 3 10A candidate for party’s 6 8 10 6 5 2
nominationA local party officer 6 5 6 8 8 5A member of Parliament 2 2 4 1 3 1A co-worker 2 1 2 4 1 1A candidate for the party’s 2 3 2 1 2 1
leadershipA group or association 1 0 1 4 2 1National party headquarters 1 0 0 1 2 0Other 2 2 1 5 1 1
Source: “Study of Canadian Political Party Members,” 2000.Note: Columns may not add up to 100 because of rounding.
Table 3Reasons for Joining a Party, Canada, 2000 (percentage of members)1
Not at all important Somewhat important Very important
I believe in the party’s policies 3 14 84To support a candidate for the local nomination 28 27 45To support a candidate for the party’s leadership 38 26 36I wanted to influence party policy on a particular issue 44 37 19A family member asked me to 81 12 7A friend asked me to 81 13 6I thought it would help my career 88 9 4I thought it would help me get a government job 95 3 2
Source: “Study of Canadian Political Party Members,” 2000.Note: Rows may not add up to 100 because of rounding. 1 The survey question was: “We are interested in knowing your reasons for originally joining the ____ party. Please indicate whether each of the following reasons wasnot at all important, somewhat important or very important to you.”
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gfreedom to set party policy” and “The leader shouldaccept policy set by members,” two-thirds of respon-dents chose the latter statement. While the results var-ied somewhat by party, a majority of members in eachof the five parties favoured the idea that the leadershould accept policy set by members. It is not surpris-ing, then, that the vast majority of members agreedwith statements to the effect that the party should domore to encourage local associations to discuss publicpolicy, or that regular members should play a greaterrole in determining their party’s national platform. Ineach of the five parties, including the populistCanadian Alliance, a sizable majority of membersagreed with the latter statement.
The data presented in figures 3 and 4 suggest thatparty members are acutely aware that their traditionalfunctions have been usurped by professionals. A major-ity of members of each party agree that these politicalprofessionals have too much influence over the partyleader, and that this influence is used to water downthe party’s platform. Figure 4 demonstrates party mem-bers’ perceptions of which groups lack influence andwhich have too much influence. Party members per-ceive that ordinary members and riding associationsare the most severely lacking in influence, while theybelieve that pollsters exert too much influence.
From this analysis, it is evident that members ofCanadian political parties are far from content withtheir role in the party. Keeping in mind that the partymembers surveyed are those who renew their
through such routes, the individuals recruited for themost part feel some attraction to the party’s ideologicalstance and are not merely joining in order to supportan individual.
Contrary to expectations that a substantial por-tion of party members are recruited by friends or rel-atives, only 6 and 7 percent of respondents,respectively, indicated these as very important rea-sons. However, recruitment through a social networkis related to support for a candidate for the nomina-tion. Among respondents for whom recruitment by afriend was very important, 65 percent indicated thatsupporting a candidate for the nomination was alsovery important; similarly, among respondents forwhom recruitment by a family member was veryimportant, 60 percent indicated that supporting acandidate for the nomination was very important. Tothe extent that recruitment through social networksoccurs, then, it appears closely tied to recruitmentfor nomination campaigns.
Finally, the very low percentages of respondentsindicating that they initially joined the party formaterial reasons — to help their career or get a gov-ernment job — indicate that material incentives havevery little power to attract individuals to Canadianpolitical parties. This is not particularly surprising,given the relative absence of patronage or other suchinducements available to Canadian parties.
In short, these findings support the notion thatparty membership in Canada is for the most partmotivated by a sense of public service. Relatively fewmembers join political parties in the hope of further-ing their careers or getting a government job,whereas many are motivated by support for theirparty’s policy stance. This signals a desire to influ-ence public policy, which is precisely the public serv-ice that we expect political parties to perform.
Are Party Members Satisfied withTheir Role?
M embers of Canadian political parties arelargely dissatisfied with the role they areaccorded in the development of party pol-
icy. As figure 3 shows, a majority of members of thefive parties believe that members should have greaterinfluence over party policy, while pollsters and advis-ers should have less. When given a choice betweenthe statements “The party leader should have the
Figure 3Members’ Views on Policy Development (ProportionWho Agree or Strongly Agree with the Statement),Canada, 2000 (percent)
Source: “Study of Canadian Political Party Members,” 2000.
Party should do moreto encourage local
associations to discusspublic policy
Regular party membersshould play greater role
in developing nationalelection platform
Pollsters go too far inwatering downparty platforms
Pollsters/advisers havetoo much influence
over party leader
Percent
Party leader shouldaccept policy set by
members67
89
73
76
54
40 50 60 70 80 90 100
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turned their backs on party politics. As discussedabove, when parties offer grassroots voters a mean-ingful role in important decision-making, Canadianshave shown a willingness to participate. This is evi-denced by the dramatic increase in member recruit-ment during periods of candidate nomination andleadership selection. These personnel decisions havetraditionally been left to the parties’ members.Knowing that their participation determines the out-comes of these contests, thousands of Canadians whootherwise shun participation in political parties areenticed to join them. However, we also know that thelarge majority of these recruited members do notmaintain an active presence in the party between per-sonnel recruitment contests. We cannot know for cer-tain why individuals drop out of active party life, butwe do know that those who remain are generally dis-satisfied with the decision-making role affordedthem. Put simply, they see decision-making powerbetween elections concentrated at the centre with lit-tle substantive role for grassroots members.
Too often, local party branches are ignored by thecentral offices and allowed to atrophy between elec-tions. Indeed, the central offices themselves often suf-fer dramatic decreases in budget and staff betweenelections, reducing their ability to invigorate theparty membership. The party in office dominates dur-ing these periods at the expense of input from theextraparliamentary membership. The elected partyneeds the membership party to wage successful elec-tion campaigns and to support personal ambitions inintraparty contests but finds little use for them other-wise. As we have argued elsewhere, this is part of atrade-off in which the extraparliamentary membersare given control over personnel recruitment inreturn for the elected party having near unchallengedauthority in setting a policy direction (Carty, Crossand Young 2000, 155-6).
We suggest that if parties are to attract moreCanadians as members and, more important, as on-going participants in their affairs, they need to offervoters more extensive opportunities to influenceparty stances on questions of public policy. Alongwith providing voters with an incentive to participatein party affairs, this would provide real benefits tothe parties themselves.
There are defensible reasons why Canada’s tradi-tional parties have not regularly provided their mem-bers with a meaningful role in determining partypolicy. The principal rationale reflects the brokeragepractice in Canadian politics. This is the notion that
membership in non-election, nonleadership-contestyears, the analysis leads us to believe that contempo-rary Canadian political parties are ill equipped tooffer inducements to membership adequate to engagesignificant numbers of Canadians.
Engaging Party Members
O ur story to this point is one of political partieswith few engaged members who are generallydissatisfied with their role in party life. In con-
sidering how our political parties might reinvigoratethemselves, there are several points that are central toour investigation. The first is that while Canadians’ sat-isfaction with their parties’ performances can be judgedto be only middling at best, they have not given up thebelief that parties are central to successful democraticpractice. When Canadians were asked to score the par-ties on a scale of 1 to 100, their mean ranking declinedby almost 50 percent between 1968 and 2000.However, at the same time, 7 in 10 Canadians agreewith the statement that “without parties, there can’t betrue democracy” (Blais and Gidengil 1991, 20).
Consistent with this, there is concrete, on-the-ground evidence that Canadians have not completely
Figure 4Members’ Perceptions of the Influence of CertainGroups, Canada, 2000
Source: “Study of Canadian Political Party Members,” 2000.Note: The differential is calculated for each respondent by measuring on a 7-point scale how much influence the respondent believes the group has, and thensubtracting from that figure the score on a seven-point scale of how much influ-ence the respondent believes the group should have. Negative numbers mean therespondent believes the group does not have enough influence and positive num-bers mean the respondent believes the group has too much influence.
Too little influence
Ordinary members
Riding association
Youth
Women
Visible minorities
0.32
1.68
Party leader
-1.56
-0.96
-0.96
-0.52
-0.39
Pollsters
Too much influence-2.0 -1.5 -1.0 -0.5 0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0
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gThe position of the parties’ leadership on this issue is
not without merit. Successive prime ministers havebeen correct in asserting that once in government, theyare there to serve all Canadians. And it is elected mem-bers who are accountable to voters, not the parties’activists. The data provided in the appendix to thispaper, describing the socio-demographic makeup ofparty members, also speak against allowing them adirect role in the making of public policy. They are notrepresentative of the total population. With few youngpeople, disproportionately few women and in most par-ties a lack of regional and linguistic balance, membersmay not be well positioned to reflect the varied inter-ests that need to be considered in making public policy.Of course, the parties’ elected caucuses regularly reflectthe same representational deficits. Nonetheless, thechallenge for parties is to create a role for their sup-porters in policy study and development while notabdicating the responsibility of the parliamentary partyto make final policy decisions. It is our view that theseare not intractable positions; parties can create anenvironment in which their grassroots members areinvited to contribute to policy study and developmentin a manner that assists, rather than threatens, theelected party’s policy-making responsibilities.
Two democratic reform commissions have recom-mended that parties establish ongoing policy founda-tions for these purposes: the 1991 Royal Commissionon Electoral Reform and Party Financing and the 2004New Brunswick Commission on Legislative Democracy.These commissions found Canadian parties lackingboth in the provision of participatory opportunities fortheir members in the development of party policy andin their capacity for ongoing study and development ofpolicy options in aid of their legislative caucuses.Parties in many Western European democracies haveestablished such foundations, allowing them to engagetheir grassroots supporters in the policy developmentprocess and to develop a series of policy alternativesfor consideration by the party in elected office.
One reason why Canadian parties have resisted thecreation of policy foundations is cost. Canada’s extra-parliamentary parties, wholly focused on campaignefforts, have traditionally husbanded their resources forthese electoral excursions and expended few resourcesbetween campaigns. Parties are reluctant to divert fundsto developing and maintaining a permanent policystructure if this is seen as taking away resources thatmight otherwise be available for campaign efforts. TheNew Brunswick commission recognized this concernand included in its recommendations partial public
the setting of public policy requires the accommoda-tion of many different parochial (often regional)interests. Accompanying this has been a belief thatonly a small elite, representing these varied interests,can successfully make the compromises necessary inshaping these factionalized interests into a nationalpolicy (Noel 1977). Consistent with this, party leaders,particularly when in government, have argued thattheir responsibility is to represent the interests of allvoters and not solely those of their active supporters.Party leaders must necessarily balance party mem-bers’ desire to affect party policy with considerationsof brokerage, representation and electoral viability.
It is not surprising, then, that we observe that thecloser parties come to government, the more elite-concentrated their decision-making on policy issuesbecomes. Parties far from government often positionthemselves as more participatory and democraticthan their governing counterparts and, as proof ofthis, attempt to involve their active members in pol-icy discussion and decision-making. The fledglingfarmers’ parties of the 1920s, occasionally the CCFand the NDP, and the Reform Party of the early 1990sare all examples of this. Similarly, former governingparties that find themselves mired in the oppositionbenches often try to reinvigorate themselves bypromising their grassroots supporters a greater voicein rebuilding the party and setting its policy course.Unfortunately, these promises rarely last after theparty comes close to, or achieves, power. The federalLiberals of the 1960s and 1970s and the Ontario NewDemocrats of the 1990s provide examples of thesephenomena (Clarkson 1979; Cross 2004, 37-9). Theparticipatory enthusiasm sparked by the Liberals’Kingston Conference and subsequently by the earlydays of Trudeaumania were quickly replaced with adisillusioned membership that once again felt isolatedfrom important party decision-making. Similarly, theOntario New Democratic Party under the leadershipof Bob Rae faced strong criticism from its activistbase when the party suddenly found itself in govern-ment and decreed, against long-standing party prac-tice, that the parliamentary party (and thus thegovernment) was not bound by the policy dictates ofthe extraparliamentary party. The result is that votersmight be encouraged by perpetual opposition partiesand wounded former governing parties to participatein policy debates, but should their preferred party getclose to government, this participatory ethos is likelyto evaporate. Once burned, voters are unlikely tocome back for a second round of disappointment.
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Not surprisingly, then, voters interested in influenc-ing public policy issues are not attracted to parties.
The cost to our democracy comes from the fact thatparties, not interest groups or policy forums, arecharged with brokering the various parochial concernsand forging national interests. If parties are absent inthe field of policy study and development, this task ismade all the harder. Their absence is filled by advo-cacy and interest groups that typically represent spe-cific socio-demographic segments of our populationand are not charged with finding policy alternativesthat serve a national interest. The civil service alsoplays a role in developing government policy, butthere is often little opportunity for ordinary citizens toinvolve themselves in these processes.
When the legislative parties become involved inpolicy issues, not only are they ill served by their con-cern with short-term electoral issues, they are ham-pered by the representational deficits found within allof the elected caucuses. Liberal caucuses regularlyinclude few members from the Prairie provinces, justas Conservative caucuses have few members fromQuebec; and all the parties’ caucuses have a shortageof female and visible-minority members.
Party-policy foundations can help to address theseconcerns by serving as a vehicle for grassroots sup-porters and substantive experts to participate in thestudy and development of policy options within eachparty’s broad ideological framework. Foundations canensure that voices not found in a party’s legislativecaucus are heard in their work. In this sense, they canassist rather than detract from the accommodativework incumbent upon the national parties. Almost acentury ago, the federal Liberal Party changed itsmethod of leadership selection at least partly out ofconcern that its Quebec-dominated caucus did notreflect the diversity of views that should be heard inthe selection of their leader (Courtney 1995, 5).Accordingly, it opened up the process to include itsextraparliamentary members from across the country.Our current parties would similarly benefit from anopening up of the policy development process toinclude their activists and invited experts from allparts of the Canadian community.
Well-functioning policy foundations would pro-vide the legislative parties with a vehicle for the gen-eration of new ideas and for longer-term planningthan is currently possible. This might be particularlyhelpful in assisting parties in making the adjustmentfrom opposition to government. Operating at somedistance from the cut and thrust of daily political
funding for both the start-up and ongoing operationsof party policy foundations. This is consistent with thepractice in many of the European countries with partypolicy foundations.
At the federal level, the 2003 changes to the CanadaElections Act provide the parties with ongoing finan-cial support between elections ($1.75 per vote on anannual basis). All of this public funding goes to theparties’ central offices. The central parties also rou-tinely claw back all, or a significant portion, of thepublic funding provided to constituency candidates.Thus, few if any of these taxpayers’ dollars are used tosupport grassroots activity within the parties. There isno reason that Parliament could not require that a por-tion of these public subventions be directed toward apolicy foundation. The tax credit currently availablefor contributions to federal parties might also beextended to cover additional contributions to policyfoundations. Parties may well resist such initiatives, astheir emphasis on electoral readiness encourages themto direct their financial resources accordingly.Moreover, parties have traditionally resisted suchincursions by the state into their internal affairs. Weargue, however, that requiring parties to engage inpolicy development is not unreasonable, given theextent of the public funds they are receiving. Manyparty insiders bemoan the decline of Canadian partiesas generators of new policy ideas (see Fox 2005); regu-lations giving parties incentives to reverse this trendwould arguably address such concerns.
It is our view that, in the long term, the establish-ment of vigorous party-policy foundations would notonly help to address the concerns of voters about thelack of a meaningful role for them in party politicsbut also strengthen our parties and our democracymore broadly. At present, our parties have littlecapacity for generating new policy alternatives. Theparliamentary parties are necessarily concerned withthe immediate issues of the day, and the extra-parliamentary parties have few resources for any-thing other than election preparation. The result isthat our elected officials are largely dependent onother organizations for policy innovation. The RoyalCommission on Electoral Reform and Party Financingcaptured the essence of this when it concluded: “Thedilemma is that the core of the party organization isconcerned primarily with elections; it is much lessinterested in discussing and analyzing political issuesthat are not connected directly to winning the nextelection, or in attempting to articulate the broadervalues of the party” (Royal Commission 1991, 292).
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gtive for individuals to join political parties and main-tain their membership. The evidence is clear that votersdo not see participation in parties as an effective wayof influencing public policy. Rather, they preferactivism in interest and advocacy groups, leaving theparties with an aging and often dispirited membership.Parties still rely on their grassroots members for activi-ties such as local election organization and fundraising,so a reinvigorated base of grassroots supporters maywell provide electoral dividends.
More important, however, the development of on-going policy study capacity would better equip the par-ties to fulfill the responsibilities of the central role theyplay in Canadian politics. Parties are meant to providea link between civil society and government. In a sensethis is part of the public service role they are meant toplay, and for which they are increasingly well fundedfrom the public purse. Central to this task is the collec-tion and brokering of policy interests from amongcompeting groups of voters. Their ability to performthis task is compromised when voters do not engagewith them in the policy realm. The establishment ofpolicy foundations would provide an opportunity forparties to hear from civil society interests and policyexperts in regions and from socio-demographic groupsthat are not included in their parliamentary caucuses.In doing so they would be better equipped for theaccommodative role required of our national parties.
It is both our parties and the character of ourdemocracy that suffer when parties are not fullyengaged in the policy study enterprise. The solution isnot to strengthen the policy capacity of the leaders’offices or of the Prime Minister’s Office. While such anapproach might enrich the policy offerings of the par-ties, it would do little to reinvigorate the connectionsbetween parties and citizens. We end then by recallingthat while Canadians are largely dissatisfied with theoperations of their political parties, they believe themto be key instruments of their democratic practice.Voters have not given up on parties. Let us hope that,at least in the realm of policy study, parties have notgiven up on voters.
debate, foundations can take a longer-range perspec-tive and can prepare policy options outside the con-stant glare of the media and political adversaries thatare the reality for their legislative caucuses.
Conclusion
O ver the past century, political party member-ship in Canada has evolved from a route intothe public service to a legitimate and impor-
tant form of public service. A broad, active and rep-resentative membership base connects a politicalparty to its societal base of support and enables it tomobilize support between and during election cam-paigns. However, Canadian political parties havenever been particularly robust membership organiza-tions, and there is some evidence that they face alooming crisis in their ability to recruit members. Tosome extent, this inability is the product of broadsocial forces far beyond the control of the parties.
That said, parties are able to conduct their internalaffairs in a manner that encourages individuals tojoin parties in order to engage in meaningful policydiscussions and contribute in some small way to pol-icy formulation. Knowing that policy interest moti-vates party membership in Canada, and that stalwartparty members are not content with their circum-scribed role in policy development within their party,we see clear potential for parties to involve theirmembers more fully in policy discussions. In an erawhen Canada’s federal political parties are fundedlargely by the public treasury, it is all the moreimportant that they find ways to engage meaning-fully with segments of Canadian society. Moreover,public funding can be structured in a manner thatcreates incentives for parties to speak directly withcitizens on matters of public policy.
Our parties are often criticized for not presentingvoters with competing, detailed policy prescriptions. Atleast in part, this results from a situation in which nobranch of the parties’ organization is charged with thetask of long-term policy study. The parliamentary par-ties are focused on the cut and thrust of daily politics,the party in central office is little more than an electionpreparation machine, and the party in the constituen-cies attract members who are interested in studyingpolicy but are denied any effective capacity to do so.
Policy foundations could benefit parties in severalways. First, they would provide an additional incen-
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AppendixDemographic Profiles of PartyMembers, Canada, 2000 (percent)*
Total Bloc CA Liberal NDP PC
Gender
Male 62 64 68 53 54 67Female 38 36 32 47 46 33
Age
Over 65 46 37 59 33 40 53Under 30 5 5 2 12 3 4
Education
High school or less 28 33 35 23 26 26College 16 15 24 11 17 13University 36 35 28 41 31 38Postgraduate 21 18 13 24 26 25
Family income
< $20,000 9 14 9 9 10 6> $100,000 15 11 13 19 10 21
Mother tongue
English 71 0 88 61 83 87French 19 99 1 28 4 6Other 10 1 11 11 13 7
Ethnicity
Born outside 13 3 14 14 20 12Canada
Source: “Study of Canadian Political Party Members,” 2000.Note: N = 3,872* Columns may not add up to 100 due to rounding.
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gNotes1 The Study of Canadian Political Party Members is a
mail-back survey of randomly selected members of thefive major Canadian political parties conducted fromMarch to May 2000. The survey was mailed to aregionally stratified random sample drawn from themembership lists of the political parties. The regionalsampling process varied by party. Where possible, aregional weighting variable was created. This was notpossible for the Liberal Party or the Bloc Québécois. Atotal of 10,928 surveys were mailed to partisans, and3,872 completed surveys were returned, yielding anoverall response rate of 36 percent. All 3,872 surveysreturned were usable. Results regarding rates of partyactivism in Quebec suggest that the Quebec samplewas drawn from a list of activists, not members, soQuebec Liberals are excluded from all analyses of ratesof activism to avoid overstating such rates.Membership in Canadian political parties fluctuatessignificantly over the course of an election cycle, sothe timing of the survey is significant. Because thestudy was undertaken during a period when there wasno election anticipated and no leadership contestsunderway, we expect that the members sampled arelonger-term, more active members than would be cap-tured had the survey been conducted when leadershipor nomination contests were under way. The CanadianAlliance did have a leadership contest beginning inMay 2000, but the list from which the sample wasdrawn was closed before the beginning of that leader-ship contest. This ensured that none of the membersrecruited by leadership candidates were included in thesurvey. The survey was funded by a Standard ResearchGrant from the Social Sciences and HumanitiesResearch Council of Canada.
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_____. 2000. “Parties without Members? PartyOrganizations in a Changing Electoral Environment.”In Parties without Partisans: Political Change inAdvanced Industrial Democracies, edited by Russell J.Dalton and Martin P. Wattenberg. New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 79-101.
Seyd, Patrick. 1999. “New Parties/New Politics? A CaseStudy of the British Labour Party.” Party Politics 5 (3):383-405.
Seyd, Patrick, and Paul Whiteley. 1992. Labour’s GrassRoots: The Politics of Labour Party Membership.Oxford: Clarendon.
van Biezen, Ingrid. 2004. “Political Parties as PublicUtilities.” Party Politics 10 (6): 701-22.
Ware, Alan. 1996. Political Parties and Party Systems.Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Whiteley, Paul, and Patrick Seyd. 2002. High-IntensityParticipation: The Dynamics of Party Activism inBritain. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Whiteley, Paul, Patrick Seyd, and Jeremy Richardson. 1994.True Blues: The Politics of Conservative PartyMembership. Oxford: Clarendon.
Young, Lisa. 2000. Feminists and Party Politics. Vancouver:University of British Colombia Press.
Young, Lisa, and William Cross. 2002a. “Incentives toMembership in Canadian Political Parties.” PoliticalResearch Quarterly 55 (3): 547-69.
_____. 2002b. “The Rise of Plebiscitary Democracy inCanadian Political Parties.” Party Politics 8 (6): 673-99.
Young, Lisa, Anthony Sayers, Harold Jansen, and MunroeEagles. 2005. “Implications of State Funding for PartyOrganization.” Paper presented at the annual meetingof the American Political Science Association,September 1-4, Washington, DC.
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_____. 2002. “The Politics of Tecumseh Corners: CanadianPolitical Parties as Franchise Organizations.” CanadianJournal of Political Science 35: 723-45.
Carty, R. Kenneth, William Cross, and Lisa Young. 2000.Rebuilding Canadian Party Politics. Vancouver:University of British Colombia Press.
Clarke, Harold D., Allan Kornberg, Faron Ellis, and JonRapkin. 2000. “Not for Fame or Fortune: A Note onMembership and Activity in the Canadian ReformParty.” Party Politics 6 (1): 75-93.
Clarkson, Stephen. 1979. “Democracy in the Liberal Party:The Experiment with Citizen Participation under PierreTrudeau.” In Party Politics in Canada, 4th ed., edited byHugh G. Thorburn. Scarborough, ON: Prentice-Hall.
Courtney, John. 1995. Do Conventions Matter? ChoosingNational Party Leaders in Canada. Montreal, Kingston:McGill-Queen’s Press.
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Dalton, Russell J., and Martin P. Wattenberg. 2000.“Unthinkable Democracy: Political Change inAdvanced Industrial Democracies.” In Parties withoutPartisans: Political Change in Advanced IndustrialDemocracies, edited by Russell J. Dalton and Martin P.Wattenberg. New York: Oxford University Press, 3-18.
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politique des partis mais aussi à renforcer les partis eux-mêmes et, de façon plus générale, la démocratie. Àl’heure actuelle, l’aptitude des partis à développer de nou-velles orientations politiques est faible. Les partis par-lementaires tendent forcément à se limiter aux questionsimmédiates tandis que les partis extraparlementaires ontpeu de ressources à consacrer à des activités autres que lapréparation aux élections. C’est pourquoi nos élus s’enremettent largement à d’autres organisations pour l’inno-vation politique. La création et le maintien, par les partispolitiques, de fondations qui se consacreraient à la for-mulation de politiques donneraient à la base la possibilitéd’influencer leur orientation politique en même tempsqu’ils donneraient aux partis parlementaires lesressources nécessaires pour définir leurs politiques.
Les auteurs constatent que c’est l’intérêt envers lesenjeux politiques qui motive l’adhésion aux partis et quemême les partisans les plus ardents sont insatisfaits durôle limité qu’on leur accorde dans le développement despolitiques de leur parti. Ils estiment donc que les partis nedevraient pas avoir de problème à amener leurs membresà prendre part aux discussions sur les politiques. Commeles partis fédéraux tirent une part importante de leurfinancement des fonds publics, il est d’autant plus impor-tant qu’ils engagent des échanges fructueux avec diverséléments de la société canadienne. En outre, ce finance-ment public pourrait être structuré de façon à inciter lespartis à dialoguer directement avec la population au sujetdes enjeux de la politique publique.
centralisé, alors que sa base populaire diminuait et deve-nait de plus en plus étroite. Les équations fluctuantes quiont structuré la situation des différents partis ont fini parmener à la prédominance du centre du pays (l’Ontario),mais, ce faisant, elles ont aussi transformé le Parti libéralen parti régional (le « parti de l’Ontario »), comme sesopposants. Le Canada se retrouve donc réduit à faire fonc-tionner un système de partis d’accommodement sans qu’ily ait véritablement de partis en mesure de jouer ce rôle.
Quel type de partis politiques voulons-nous ? Queltype de compétition souhaitons-nous entre ces partis ?Voilà ce qui est au centre de la question de la réformeélectorale au Canada. Plusieurs provinces se sont déjàlancées dans des projets de réformes électorales ; leurspremiers ministres semblent donc convaincus que denouvelles institutions sont nécessaires pour transformerla politique « de partis ». Il reste toutefois à convaincreceux qui croient qu’il faut rétablir notre système de par-tis d’accommodement. La question persistante de lanature et de la forme des partis politiques ainsi que deleur place dans les affaires publiques canadiennes est aucœur de ce débat.
RésumésR. Kenneth Carty (suite de la page 31) William Cross and Lisa Young (suite de la page 31)
30
extraparliamentary parties have few resources for any-thing other than election preparation. The result is thatour elected officials are largely dependent on otherorganizations for policy innovation. Formal policy foun-dations, organized and maintained by the political par-ties, would both provide opportunity for grassrootsmembers to influence a party’s policy direction and act asan ongoing policy resource for the parliamentary party.
Knowing that policy interest motivates party member-ship in Canada, and that stalwart party members are notcontent with their circumscribed role in policy develop-ment within their party, the authors see clear potential forparties to involve their members in policy discussions. Inan era when Canada’s federal political parties are largelyfunded by the public treasury, it is all the more importantthat they find ways to engage meaningfully with segmentsof Canadian society. Moreover, public funding can bestructured in a manner that creates incentives for parties tospeak directly with citizens on matters of public policy.
political competition have ultimately led to the triumphof the centre (Ontario) but in doing so have also led tothe emergence of the Liberals as a party of Ontario — aparty now as regional as any of its opponents. The resulthas been that Canada is left trying to practise brokeragepolitics with no genuine brokerage parties.
The question of electoral reform is really a question ofwhat kind of political parties we want and what kind ofelectoral competition we want them to engage in. The pre-miers, who have launched an electoral reform agenda inseveral provinces, seem convinced that new institutionsare needed to produce a new party politics. Those whobelieve that Canada’s distinctive brokerage politics mustbe restored remain to be convinced. At the heart of thisdebate is the continuing question of the nature, shape andplace of political parties in Canadian public life.
SummariesR. Kenneth Carty (cont. from page 32) William Cross and Lisa Young (cont. from page 32)
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L es bénévoles jouent depuis longtemps un rôleimportant au sein des partis politiques canadiens,que ce soit à titre de travailleurs de campagne élec-
torale, de supporters des candidats à la direction des par-tis ou à un poste de député, ou d’organisateurs locaux.Aujourd’hui, toutefois, la politique est dominée par lesprofessionnels et les médias, de sorte que le rôle déjà cir-conscrit des membres des partis est encore plus limitéqu’auparavant. Dans cet article où ils analysent les résul-tats d’un sondage effectué en 2000 auprès de membresdes cinq principaux partis politiques de l’époque, lesauteurs constatent que ceux-ci sont insatisfaits du peud’influence qu’ils exercent sur les choix de politiquesadoptées par les partis et sont particulièrement mécon-tents de voir que les professionnels politiques ont usurpéle rôle traditionnel des membres des partis.
L’adhésion à un parti étant une forme de service à lacollectivité qui, de ce fait, contribue au dynamisme de lavie politique, les auteurs affirment qu’il y a lieu de sepréoccuper du fait que le niveau d’adhésion semblediminuer, que la plupart des membres approchent l’âge dela retraite, qu’il n’y a pas de relève et que le niveau demilitantisme au sein des partis est relativement faible.Toutes ces tendances découlent de transformationssociales complexes et sont renforcées par des contraintesinstitutionnelles qui ont limité le rôle des membres despartis politiques par le passé. Aussi ne se prêtent-elles pasà des solutions faciles. Cross et Young estiment, néan-moins, qu’on pourrait favoriser l’adhésion aux partis poli-tiques et amener ceux-ci à remplir leur rôle dans la viepublique en les encourageant à donner aux membres dela base un rôle plus important dans l’élaboration de leurspositions en matière de politiques publiques.
Selon les deux auteurs, pour que les partis politiquescanadiens puissent accroître le nombre de leurs adhérentset, surtout, pour qu’ils puissent les amener à prendre partà leurs activités de façon régulière, ils doivent donneraux électeurs plus de possibilités d’influencer les posi-tions des partis touchant aux enjeux de la politiquepublique. Ils croient que, à long terme, la mise en placede fondations d’orientation aiderait non seulement lesélecteurs à s’engager dans la vie (suite à la page 29)
L es partis politiques jouent un rôle fondamental auCanada : leurs efforts quotidiens permettentd’obtenir les compromis nécessaires à la mise en
place des politiques publiques. En démocratie, la lutteélectorale que se livrent les différents partis exige queceux-ci engagent les citoyens à participer aux affairespubliques. Le constat, très répandu, selon lequel le payssouffre d’un déficit démocratique est donc en fait un juge-ment porté à la fois sur la place qu’occupent les partisdans la vie démocratique canadienne et sur le fait qu’ilsne jouent pas le rôle qu’exige la démocratie participative.C’est pourquoi plusieurs souhaitent une réforme électorale,dans l’espoir que la transformation des institutions quirégissent l’organisation et l’activité des partis politiquesposera les bases de partis renouvelés et rajeunis.
Le système de partis canadien est unique. Le modèlequi le caractérise — les partis politiques dits d’accom-modement cherchent en fait à concilier et à freiner lesintérêts plutôt que de les promouvoir et de les articuler —a conduit à une situation particulière qui réduit pratique-ment le rôle des citoyens à celui de simples votants, etoù les chefs de parti dominent les batailles électoralespersonnalisées et les joutes parlementaires.
Le type de compétition qui existe entre les différentspartis au Canada a été façonné par le système électoralmajoritaire uninominal, qui a transformé plusieursrégions du pays en fiefs de l’un ou de l’autre des partispendant de longues périodes. Par conséquent, de tropnombreux citoyens ne peuvent participer de façon signi-ficative aux affaires publiques, et la compétition entre lespartis est devenue en grande partie une affaire derégions. La stabilité créée par cette dynamique n’a pastoujours été à toute épreuve, et, à plusieurs occasions,des séismes électoraux ont restructuré le paysage poli-tique. La seule constante reste la domination exercée parle Parti libéral au cours du XXe siècle.
Toutefois, cette suprématie électorale apparemmentfacile des libéraux — l’un des partis politiques ayantconnu le plus de succès dans l’ensemble des pays démo-cratiques du monde — masque une transformation à longterme du parti. Au cours des dernières décennies, le Partilibéral s’est de plus en plus (suite à la page 29)
RésumésThe Shifting Place of Political Parties in Canadian Public LifeR. Kenneth Carty
Are Canadian Political Parties Empty Vessels? Membership, Engagement and Policy CapacityWilliam Cross and Lisa Young
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V olunteers have traditionally played a significantrole in Canadian political parties, as campaignworkers, supporters of candidates for party leader-
ship or nomination, and local organizers. In the contem-porary era of professionalized, media-oriented politics,however, the already circumscribed role of the Canadianparty member has been limited even further. In thispaper, the authors analyze the data of a 2000 survey ofmembers of what were then Canada’s five major politicalparties and find that party members are not satisfied withtheir ability to shape party policy and are particularlyresentful of the extent to which political professionalshave usurped the role of the party member.
Because party membership in Canada is a form of pub-lic service and thus contributes to the vibrancy of politi-cal life in the country, the authors argue that we shouldbe concerned that rates of party membership appear to bedropping, the average party member is nearing retirementand is not being replaced, and rates of activism withinparties are relatively low. All of these tendencies areproducts of complex social change, reinforced by institu-tional constraints that have historically limited the role ofCanadian party members. As such, they defy easy solu-tions. Cross and Young argue, however, that oneapproach that might encourage party membership andhelp political parties to fulfill their roles in public lifewould be to encourage parties to give a more meaningful,ongoing role in the development of their public policypositions to their rank-and-file members.
They suggest that if parties are to attract moreCanadians as members and, more important, as ongoingparticipants in their affairs, they need to offer votersgreater opportunities to influence party stances on ques-tions of public policy. It is their view that in the longterm, the establishment of vigorous party-policy founda-tions would not only help to address the concerns of vot-ers about the lack of a meaningful role for them in partypolitics but would also strengthen our parties and ourdemocracy more broadly. At present, our parties have lit-tle capacity for generating new policy alternatives. Theparliamentary parties are necessarily concerned with theimmediate issues of the day and the (cont. on page 30)
C anada is a party country, put together and sus-tained by the daily struggles of party politiciansas they seek to build the accommodations neces-
sary to support public policy. The challenges of demo-cratic electoral competition require that political partiesengage citizens in a way that provides for effective publicinvolvement and service. Thus, the widespread perceptionthat the country suffers from a democratic deficit is ulti-mately a judgment on the place of the party in Canadianpublic life and the failure of parties to meet the demandsof modern participatory politics. The result has been acall for electoral reform, in the hope that by transformingthe institutions that govern party organization and activ-ity we will provide the basis for a renewed and rejuve-nated party politics.
The reality is that the Canadian party system is unique.The famous brokerage pattern of Canadian politics — inwhich political parties are political brokers, accommodat-ing and stifling rather than advancing and articulatinginterests — has led to a distinctive organizational style inwhich active citizens are reduced to being merely votersand in which party leaders easily dominate personalizedelectoral and parliamentary games.
Competition between Canada’s brokerage parties hasbeen shaped by the first-past-the-post electoral system,which has rendered large regions of the country uncom-petitive for long periods. The result is that too many citi-zens are excluded from meaningful participation in theirnation’s business and competition is structured in highlyregionalized terms. The political balances created by thisdynamic have not been stable, and on several occasionselectoral earthquakes have restructured the political land-scape. The one constant of this party politics throughoutthe twentieth century was the role of the Liberals as thecountry’s dominant and governing party.
The apparently easy electoral supremacy of theLiberals — one of the democratic world’s most successfulpolitical parties — masks a long-term transformation ofthe party. Over recent decades the Liberal Party hasbecome more centralized, while its popular base hasgrown both smaller and narrower. The shifting politicalequations that have structured (cont. on page 30)
SummariesAre Canadian Political Parties Empty Vessels? Membership, Engagement and Policy CapacityWilliam Cross and Lisa Young
The Shifting Place of Political Parties in Canadian Public LifeR. Kenneth Carty