In Canada, federal elections are regional affairs. It is a maxim so well established that few scholars bother to interrogate it. For more than a generation, the Liberal party's base has remained fixed in Ontario and Atlantic Canada, while conservative parties of various labels have tended to dominate Western Canada. Of the two major parties, the one that wins the most seats in British Columbia and Quebec—or the one that benefits most from the strength of a minor party like the New Democratic party or Bloc Québécois—tends to form government. Seen most recently in 2015 and 2019, these aggregate-level results are so durable as to be taken for granted by most students of Canadian politics. The political science community is fortunate that the authors of Provincial Battles, National Prize are not among the majority, as they are the first to ask how and why Canadian elections are so regionalized.
In their book, Stephenson, Lawlor, Cross, Blais and Gidengil treat the 2015 federal election as a case study in regionalized party politics in Canada and beyond. They advance three hypotheses to explain the regionalization: that the parties were responsible (by campaigning on a regional basis), that the media were responsible (by framing the election through regional lenses) and that the voters were responsible (by virtue of holding different values, priorities and policy preferences).
The book begins with a comprehensive review of the concept of regional voting in Canada. This includes a critique of the region-as-artifact view. As the authors put it, “Regional variation in political preferences should only be considered true regional differences if they cannot be explained by variations in the social composition of the regions” (25). This is a point to which the authors return throughout the book, as their analyses demonstrate that “people sharing the same social background characteristics often vote differently from one region of the country to another” (26).
In search of explanations, the authors draw on theoretical frameworks concerning party campaign strategies (for example, positioning, selective emphasis, resource allocation) and media framing (for example, agenda-setting, framing). The authors test these theories with a unique combination of methods and novel data, using British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec—Canada's largest provinces—as their points of focus.
The simplicity of their findings masks the rigour behind them. Briefly put, the authors found that neither parties nor the media contributed much to the regionalized nature of the 2015 outcome. To measure party strategies, the authors employed content analysis of campaign materials (news releases, social media posts), an examination of leaders’ tours and an original survey of local candidates. They found that parties made sparing reference to individual provinces or regions in their news releases and social media posts and that leaders did not appear to appeal exclusively to regional interests on their tours of the country. This said, local candidates did campaign on a regionalized basis, adding their own personal and local spin on the election. On the second hypothesis, the authors mount an impressive content analysis of media framing of the 2015 campaign, examining both regional and national coverage in print and on television. As the authors emphasize, “Our data do not show that the media played a role in creating or emphasizing different views of the election issues” (123).
This left one potential explanation: that the voters, themselves, approached the election differently from province to province. The authors drew on a two-wave survey of voters in British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec. Their expert use of the block-recursive model reveals that the vote calculus is very different in each of the three provinces under examination. Language and sovereignty were most important in Quebec, for example, while the economy mattered more in Ontario. There, gender and the urban/rural divide appeared to explain more of the story of the Conservatives’ losses, while class mattered more in British Columbia. As the authors conclude: “Canadians are simply not the same from province to province. They care about different issues and evaluate candidates and parties according to different criteria” (169).
The authors close by inviting future research into the “longer-term variations in party positions and campaign behaviour” (169–70). In taking up this challenge, future scholars would do well to build in a more robust social media analysis—one that goes beyond studying what parties tell voters, in order to examine how online conversations among citizens differ from region to region. Future studies would also benefit from a greater focus on political marketing. Beyond campaign strategy, it is worth asking how party branding attempts and narrow-casting efforts play out on a regional basis. And Provincial Battles, National Prize begs for a pan-Canadian encore involving all 10 provinces, not just the largest and most Liberal-friendly. Theory is best built with a small number of cases, and this book demonstrates that in spades. It is best tested with many more.
