Francophone Bilingualism, Inter-Group Contact, and Opposition to Sovereignty Among QuéBec Francophones

Abstract

Using ecological inference methods and a dataset that combines results from the 1995 Québec referendum, the federal and provincial elections of 1997 and 1998, and data from the Canadian census, this article considers the relationship between the local linguistic environment and francophone support for Québec sovereignty. Outside of Montréal, we find that the linguistic composition of the population has little direct influence on support for sovereignty but that support for sovereignty declines as the proportion of francophones who know English rises. In Montréal, we find that support for sovereignty rises as the non-francophone portion of the population declines, but knowledge of a second language does not influence support for sovereignty.The status of Québec within Canada has been at the centre of political debates in Québec throughout recent history, and language is a central element of this debate. A majority of francophone Quebecers supported sovereignty in the 1995 referendum, and pro-sovereignty parties won the 1997 federal and 1998 provincial elections. By contrast, non-francophones are overwhelmingly opposed to Québec's sovereignty. Preliminary research suggests that francophones living in areas with members of other linguistic groups (a way of defining contact) are less likely to support sovereignty than are francophones living in linguistically homogeneous areas. 1 This finding is consistent with the contact hypothesis. 2

Nationalism and ethnic heterogeneity: The importance of local context for nationalist party vote choice

“…In other words, an increased presence of the "other" in a locality does not increase the likelihood of voting for the BQ, whereas it does increase the likelihood that nationalism will be an important predictor of support for the BQ. This corroborates findings in the literature (Piroth et al, 2006;Lublin and Voss, 2002) that an increase in the share of non-francophones at the local level either has no effect (outside of Montreal) or a negative effect (in Montreal) on francophone's support for Quebec sovereignty. In terms of our second contextual variable our preliminary analysis shows that the percent of unemployment has a significant negative effect on support for the BQ, suggesting that the higher the percentage of unemployed people in a locality the smaller the likelihood that an individual will vote for the Bloc Qu eb ecois.…”

Logical Inconsistency in EI‐Based Second‐Stage Regressions

“…Burden and Kimball (1998), for example, use King‐based estimates of district‐level ticket‐splitting rates as dependent variables in second‐stage regressions which examine why individuals cast split‐ticket ballots. Other examples of EI–R and variants of this two‐stage statistical technique can be found in Kimball and Burden (1998), Voss and Lublin (1998), Cohen, Kousser, and Sides (1999), Wolbrecht and Corder (1999), Voss and Miller (2000), Gay (2001), Redding and James (2001), Burden and Kimball (2002), Kousser (2002), Lublin and Voss (2002), and Piroth, Serre, and Lublin (2002).…”