The Canadian Party System: An Analytic History

Sep 2017 · UBC Press

Ebook

336

Pages

About this ebook

The Canadian party system is a deviant case among the Anglo-American democracies. It has too many parties, it is susceptible to staggering swings from election to election, and its provincial and federal branches often seem unrelated. Unruly and inscrutable, it is a system that defies logic and classification – until now.

In this political science tour de force, Richard Johnston makes sense of the Canadian party system. With a keen eye for history and deft use of recently developed analytic tools, he articulates a series of propositions underpinning the system. Chief among them was domination by the centrist Liberals, stemming from their grip on Quebec, which blocked both the Conservatives and the NDP. He also takes a close look at other peculiarities of the Canadian party system, including the stunning discontinuity between federal and provincial arenas.

For its combination of historical breadth and data-intensive rigour, The Canadian Party System is a rare achievement. Its findings shed light on the main puzzles of the Canadian case, while contesting the received wisdom of the comparative study of parties, elections, and electoral systems elsewhere.

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About the author

Richard Johnston is a professor of political science and Canada Research Chair in Public Opinion, Elections, and Representation at the University of British Columbia. He has also taught at the University of Toronto, the California Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and the University of Pennsylvania and held visiting fellowships at Queen’s University at Kingston, the Mannheimer Zentrum für Europäische Sozialforschung in Germany, and the Australian National University. He was principal investigator of the 1988 and 1992-93 Canadian Election Studies and research director for the National Annenberg Election Survey, 2000-8. From 2009 to 2012, he was a Marie Curie Research Fellow attached to the European University Institute. He is the author or co-author of five books, three on Canadian politics and two on US politics. He has co-edited four other books and written more than ninety articles and book chapters. In 2017, he received the Mildred A. Schwartz Lifetime Achievement Award for the study Canadian politics from the American Political Science Association.

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