Political Behaviour/Sociology

F13(b) - Political Culture and Regional Identities / Culture politique et identités régionales

Date: Jun 4 | Time: 01:45pm to 03:15pm | Location:

Chair/Président/Présidente : Richard Johnston (University of British Columbia)

Discussant/Commentateur/Commentatrice : Richard Johnston (University of British Columbia)

A Tale of Two Liberalisms or a Story of Social Identities?: Edana Beauvais (Simon Fraser)
Abstract: Research suggests that holding liberal values has different consequences in Quebec than in the rest of Canada (Bilodeau et al 2019). In Canada outside of Quebec, liberal values—such as gender equality, state neutrality, and freedom of conscience—are associated with opposition to restrictions on wearing religious minority symbols. By contrast, in Quebec, liberal values are associated with support for restrictions on wearing religious minority symbols. Bilodeau et al. (2019) conclude that differences in liberal values explain the greater support for restricting minority religious symbols in Quebec. In this present work, I replicate Bilodeau et al.’s (2019) original research design but also include measures of important social identities absent from the original work—including partisanship and in-group identities—to clarify whether liberal values or social identities explain differences between voters’ preferences for restricting minority symbols in Quebec and the rest of Canada. It is possible that different social groups—for example, different political parties—mobilize issues related to gender equality, state neutrality, and freedom of conscience in distinct ways in Canada outside of Quebec and Quebec, and that partisans of these parties adopt party cues. I test whether liberal values still explain the differences in support for religious minority symbols between Quebec and the rest of Canada after accounting for social identities.

Second Class Citizens: Place-Based Resentment and Identity as Defiance in Plurinational Democracies: Jan Eckardt (Western University)
Abstract: Regional identities are often pronounced in regions with grievances of an institutional, economic or cultural nature. However, the interplay between these identities and political outcomes, as well as the role different types of grievances play in shaping this relationship, remains underexplored. This study aims to contribute to the literature in two key ways: First, we seek to examine whether local identities in such regions serve as expressions of political resentment against the federal authority. Specifically, we examine whether stronger regional identities in these regions, compared to those of the majority group, are associated with lower levels of trust in federal institutions. In a second step, we examine whether these differences are shaped by cultural and economic grievances, and how the importance of these elements varies across cases. To address these questions, we conduct a comparative study using public opinion data from the U.K., Germany, Spain and Canada. This approach allows us to examine a diverse set of historically marginalized regions: Wales, Scotland, East Germany, Catalonia, and Quebec. We find that, with the exception of Wales and, to a lesser extent, Scotland, where the effect is less consistent, stronger regional identities are associated with lower trust in federal institutions. In line with expectations, the relative importance of cultural and economic grievances in shaping these dynamics varies across cases.

Provincial Party Systems: Assessing Programmatic Polarization: Shanaya Vanhooren (University of Western Ontario)
Abstract: Since the 1980s, very limited attention has been paid to provincial party systems. While there are broad descriptions of provincial party system dynamics (e.g., Stewart et al., 2016), there have been few attempts in recent years to systematically map these dynamics over time and compare across provinces (for an exception, see Wesley & Buckley, 2021). This is unfortunate as many provincial party systems have undergone significant changes in the postwar period, such as emergence of the Saskatchewan Party, the revitalization of the British Columbia Liberal Party and the first NDP governments in Alberta, Ontario and Nova Scotia. Existing literature tends to focus on describing the electoral dimension of party systems (e.g., number, size, and strength of parties) and devotes only limited attention to empirically mapping programmatic or policy issue competition. In this paper, I revisit the literature on Canada’s provincial party systems and bring new data to bear on the question of: how should we characterize the nature of competition in provincial party systems over the post-war period? I rely on scaling techniques to analyze a recently assembled dataset of provincial party election platforms from 1945 to 2020 that are coded for different policy issues. I characterize party competition in each province by examining the issues that divide parties in each system, and place parties in latent space to examine programmatic polarization over time.

Torn Between Worlds? The Electoral Geography of Canada's Two Political Worlds: Matthew Taylor (Université de Montréal)
Abstract: Canada’s federal and provincial politics have long been held to be entirely different worlds due to the vast gulf that exists between party politics at the two levels. This paper employs an ecological inference approach to examine whether, regardless of inter-arena differences, ideologically similar parties achieve comparable electoral results both federally and provincially. Using data on candidates at both levels in a manner similar to Rivard et al. (2024), I will first identify which parties share the most candidates allowing for me to establish a proxy measure for party similarity between federal and provincial parties. Taking advantage of the fact that Elections Canada has provided results at the level of the polling division since the 1997 federal election; I will subsequently employ weighted areal interpolation (Lucas 2022, Prener and Revord 2019) to map federal election results onto provincial ridings for all elections since 1997. I will test the hypothesis that: when a party sees its vote share rise (decline) at the federal (provincial) level in a riding its counterpart at the other level should see its vote share rise (decline) in subsequent provincial (federal) elections. This article serves as a double contribution to the existing literature providing both a more objective measure of party similarity and additionally interrogating the question of similarities in federal-provincial party performance over almost three decades of elections.