Search

The recent growth in public support for the Reform Party has the potential to transform the Canadian political landscape. This paper argues that the conditions for Reform's success are broader factors also observed in other advanced industrial democracies in the 1980s and 1990s, namely the crisis of welfare-state expenditures and the attendant resurgence of conservatism. But while the fiscal crisis established the conditions that made Reform possible, it has been the populist elements of its project that have prodded the strongest attraction for voters. Analysis of 1994 province-wide survey data from Alberta indicates that the belief that certain "special interests" have too much influence on government policy best differentiates those individuals who switched their allegiance to the Reform Party from those who maintained their previous party loyalties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]