Social stratification, voting behaviour, and the images of Canadian federal political parties*

Abstract

We wish to acknowledge the Canadian Consortium for Social Research a s the source of the 1965 and 1968 federal election surveys on which our analyses are based. The CCSR bears no responsibility, of course, for the analyses and interpretations reported herein.

Moving beyond the urban/rural cleavage: Measuring values and policy preferences across residential zones in Canada

“…Though there is debate about the consistency of citizens' ideologies, it is generally agreed that left-right ideology is an important organizing framework for the ways in which Canadians think about politics, and a robust literature has developed that aims to define left and right attitudes in public opinion. The earliest studies on the subject were fascinated by how the general public understood the terms left and right (Conover & Feldman, 1981;Laponce, 1970Laponce, , 1972Ogmundson, 1979), if the public could apply these terms correctly to political parties (Converse, 1964;Elkins, 1974;Lambert & Hunter, 1979), and how perceptions of left and right affect voting patterns (Kay, 1977;Weisberg & Rusk, 1970;Zipp, 1978). Noting the confusion of the public when it came to these terms, researchers began to explore the inability of citizens to understand the concepts of left and right and, subsequently, place themselves correctly on the then-standard 7-point scale (1 = very left, 7 = very right).…”

Class voting and class consciousness in Canada

“…Using Gallup Poll data, and considering the Liberals and the CCF/NDP as leftist parties, Alford found the mean class voting score for Canada to be +8 for the 1952-62 period (Alford, 1963: ioz), well below the index values for Britain, Australia, and the United States. Subsequent applications of the Alford Index have identified various parties, or combinations of parties, as the appropriate left-wing alternatives, but have still found the amount of class voting to be low (Schwartz, 1974;Clarke et al, 1979;Lambert and Hunter, 1979). The index reaches its highest point when Social Credit is considered to be a left-wing party (Ogmundson, i975a;Myles, 1979;Myles and Forcese, 1981); however, the reasoning used to classify that party as left-wing is controversial (Ogmundson,i975b) and may be difficult to justify on the grounds of its recent ideology or policies (Stein, 1973).…”

Social class, lefthight political orientations, and subjective class voting in provincial and federal elections

“…I See also Clarke, Jenson, LeDuc and Pammett (1979: 107-19); Lambert and Hunter (1979); Myles (1979); Schreiber (1980); Erickson (1981); Myles and Forcese (1981); Hunter (1982); Zipp and Smith (1982); Gerber (1986). z The 1984 CNES also asked respondents to rate the three major federal parties, but not their respective provincial parties, on the traditional 'for the working class' vs. 'for the middle class' scale.…”

“…Fourth, our approach was multivariate. We were interested in the combined and relative effects of the traditional set of 'objective' social class measures (income, occupation and education) on respondents' voting behaviour.3 Fifth, we coded each of the social class measures into as many levels as frequencies permitted, instead of treating them as dichotomies as Ogmundson (i975a; i975b) and Lambert and Hunter (1979) did. This permitted us to inspect the pattern of effects associated with each predictor for any apparent departures from linearity.…”