Edited by Amanda Bittner, J. Scott Matthews, and Stuart Soroka, Foundations of Canadian Political Behaviour brings together an array of scholars exploring puzzles in Canadian political science, as well as international and comparative scholarship inspired by the work of Canadian political scientist Richard Johnston. The chapters are organized around three themes: “(1) the electoral system and the party system; (2) social foundations, in particular traditional questions in the contemporary context; and (3) campaigns and persuasion” (p. 5). While asking any text to serve as a “foundation” is a tall order, this book shines in its exploration and unsettling of key aspects of Canadian political behaviour, from the role of religion to how we measure political participation.
This volume was first conceived at a conference celebrating Johnston’s monumental career. It aims to explore elements of Canadian democracy in the twenty-first century while also paying tribute to Johnston’s body of research. Of particular relevance is Johnston’s 2017 book, The Canadian Party System: An Analytic History, featured in numerous chapters. Most of the scholarship in Foundations of Canadian Political Behaviour analyzes Canada in a comparative context, investigating how the country compares to other advanced democracies and where it is anomalous. In so doing, the authors spark important questions about the Canadian political system and behaviour. It is a text that could launch many journal articles and manuscripts.
As the editors note in the introduction, the arguments in this book are disparate and, as such, are hard to summarize overall. Where the book succeeds is in its empirical rigour and willingness to probe established knowledge. The methods and analysis sections of each chapter are exceptionally detailed and offer readers a clear view of the strategic choices the authors have made. Both students of Canadian political science and those seeking to improve their methodological and analytical skills would benefit from reading this book. Below, I highlight four chapters that encapsulate the strengths of this volume.
Chapter 3 by Matthew S. Shugart and Cory L. Struthers provides a compelling case for why Canada does not conform to “Duverger’s Law,” wherein single-member plurality systems, like Canada’s, tend to entrench a two-party system. The authors employ the Seat Product Model (SPM) in their analysis, which posits that the number of parties in a political system is a product of both the number of seats per district and the number of seats in the elected assembly, with larger assemblies predicting more parties, even in single-member plurality systems. They convincingly argue that Canada’s stable multi-party system is not anomalous but rather predictable using the SPM and replacing the assumption that voters coordinate at the district level with the observation that they instead consider “whole-of-electorate” information in making their voting decision. In chapter 7, Brenda O’Neill provides a needed intervention in exploring how the field conceptualizes and measures political participation. O’Neill highlights how limited measures that focus on formal political participation miss significant political activity, particularly among marginalized communities. Of note is O’Neill’s discussion of the tradeoffs between simplicity and nuance that every scholar must weigh. Simplicity is not an unalloyed good. Indeed, “striving for simple theories comes at a cost: the loss of the context” (p. 157).
Stuart Soroka and Keith Banting seek to answer whether polarization in partisans’ attitudes towards immigration in Canada was shaped predominantly by bottom-up (membership/public opinion) or top-down forces (party elites) in chapter 9. Using a dataset spanning 1980–2019, their analysis focuses on conservative parties as the drivers of polarization in views about immigration. They find that the shift from largely positive to increasingly negative attitudes since the 1980s came predominantly from the grassroots. Finally, chapter 13, by Fred Cutler, J. Scott Matthews and Mark Pickup, is a masterful work on the cognitive preconditions for direct poll effects. Using data from Ontario, Canada writ large, and the U.K., the authors explore the cognitive processes in four mechanisms of direct polling effects on voters: the bandwagon effect, cue-taking, cognitive responding and strategic voting. The authors note that the bandwagon effect is the least cognitively demanding, potentially applying to a sizeable minority of voters. Meanwhile, they suggest that strategic voting, despite its prominence in Canadian political discourse, is likely exceedingly rare among the populace.
In a book about the foundations of Canadian political behaviour, a reader may reasonably expect Canada to be the or at least a focal point of each chapter. This was not always the case, with some chapters paying passing or no attention to the country. This issue may arise because of the book’s dual goals of positioning Canadian political science in a comparative context and highlighting Richard Johnston’s contributions to the global field. Virtually every chapter references Johnston’s work, but the double focus sometimes means Canada is lost in the shuffle. Chapter 2, a solid analytic history of modern American politics and Chapter 11, which examines the persuasive effects of German media on national elections between 2005 and 2017, are illustrative. Neither chapter includes Canada nor connects their findings to the Canadian context. As a result, the reader must do more work to connect the chapters to the Canadian case.
A minor critique of this volume is that at times, the data is somewhat dated or limited given what the title promises as a foundational text for understanding Canadian politics in the twenty-first century. Chapter 4, for instance, uses data from six decades ago in discussing familial inheritance of partisanship. While the author articulates good reasons for doing so, it invites questions about whether the effects apply in the 2020s. Overall, better justification for using small and/or older datasets when more up-to-date or larger ones were available would have been welcome, though this doesn’t diminish the valuable contributions in this text.
Ultimately, this volume excels as an assortment of compelling pieces on Canada and other advanced democracies inspired by Richard Johnston’s stellar academic record. It provides a smorgasbord of research puzzles for future researchers to peruse. Canadian political scientists and students seeking to deepen their methodological skills would benefit from reading it. This edited volume demonstrates that perhaps the “foundations” of Canadian political science are never quite established, and, in Johnstonian fashion, it is the job of social scientists to continually re-examine what we think we know and how we seek to answer our questions.
