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Young adults have since long been identified as a group of the electorate least likely to vote. Recent research suggests, however, that turnout among young cohorts is declining rapidly in some countries. It does so at a much faster pace than the turnout among older age groups. In sum, today's youth turns out at lower levels than their parents or grandparents did when they were young. Consequently, the turnout gap between younger and older voters enlarges. The trend towards a widening generational divide has been particularly well documented in Canada and Great Britain. In other countries, such as Sweden and the Netherlands, the turnout difference between younger and older citizens is however stable through time. This paper contributes to the literature on youth participation by assessing the age gap in voter turnout in a longitudinal and comparative way. After observing patterns in the age gap in turnout, competing hypotheses explaining trends are put to the test. Using time-series cross-sectional analysis, the impact of both characteristics of elections and characteristics of voters on the age gap are assessed. The focus is exclusively on Western democracies for which the age gap can be estimated through election survey data. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, using the recent debate over same-sex marriage as a case study, concludes that Canadian conservatives have re-committed themselves to winning office and so overcome the 'Tory Syndrome'. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper outlines patterns of visible minority representation in the Canadian House of Commons, assessing whether visible minorities elected to Parliament substantively represent ethnic minority issues. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political parties are often portrayed as having a limited ability to influence policy-making. This paper examines the policy capacity of political parties in Canada in relation to their ability to propose distinct policies of their own choosing and design to the electorate and in relation to the concept of the electoral mandate. It demonstrates that decisions as to what to include in election policy platforms are shaped to some degree by existing institutional arrangements and the policy environment, but that the key factor influencing policy content is the strategic actions and decisions of parties themselves. In particular, parties have established the key boundaries of policy debate in Canada and have altered the focus of electoral policy debate through tactical considerations, by what they perceive as the appropriate course of events or by attempting to position themselves in such a way so as to appeal to the broader electorate, including through the use of "wedge" politics. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jean Chretien was the first Canadian leader since Laurier to win three consecutive majorities. This paper analyzes aggregate election data from before, during, and after the Chretien era to assess Chretien's personal impact on the electoral process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a vast literature on the possible causes of low and declining turnout in Western democracies. Most of these studies explicitly or implicitly argue that we should be concerned that fewer citizens go to the polls. The argument tends to be that low turnout is a problem because rich and better educated citizens are far more likely to vote than poor, less educated citizens and that this makes for unequal influence and representation. There are two related underlying assumptions here. The first is that rich and poor citizens in fact differ significantly in their policy preferences. The second is that if these non-voters were to turnout, election results would be significantly different from what they are at present. However, while the view that low turnout constitutes a democratic dilemma is widely held and oft stated (Piven and Cloward 1988; Verba et al. 1995; Lijphart 1997; Putnam 2000), few if any of these studies provide empirical evidence for the accuracy of these assumptions; even fewer examine the question outside the American context. We test these propositions using data from the 2000 Canadian Election Study. Our analysis entails two steps. First, we analyze differences in opinion between voters and non-voters across a wide spectrum of policy areas covering economics, social policy, national unity and others in order to assess the extent of divergent views between voters and abstainers. Next, we test the hypothesis that the outcome of the 2000 Canadian Federal Election would have been appreciably different if all citizens were to have voted by simulating universal turnout. The paper will make a significant contribution by providing an empirical assessment of some widely held but seldom tested propositions and also by extending the analysis of the consequences of low turnout beyond the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changes in the intensity of party competition drive changes in voter turnout, especially among young voters. The basic proposition has been established for elections in general (Franklin 2004) and for Canadian elections in particular (Johnston, Matthews and Bittner 2005). The details of the relationship, however, remain murky. Two related questions stand out. First, what mechanism links electoral competitiveness to the individual voter's turnout propensity? Strategic mobilization of supporters by parties and candidates seems a likely suspect (Rosenstone and Hansen 1993), but there is also evidence that voters take cues from competitive conditions directly (Cox and Munger 1989). Second, what rendering of electoral competitiveness in spatial and temporal terms is most relevant to variation in turnout? Previous work on Canadian elections has relied exclusively on contemporaneous measures of riding-level turnout (Endersby, Galatas and Rackaway 2002; Johnston, Matthews and Bittner 2005). What happens if we introduce measures aggregated to the province or nation and consider lags of electoral competitiveness?This paper addresses these questions through investigation of the spatial and temporal dimensions of competitiveness effects on turnout. The data for the analysis combines five waves of the Canadian Election Study (1988 to 2004) with indicators of electoral competitiveness measured at multiple geographical levels (riding, province, nation) and time points (current election, previous election). This multidimensional treatment not only speaks to the when and where of competitiveness, but also permits inferences about the mechanism(s) of the variable's impact on turnout. Current riding-level effects, for instance, imply an important role for the organizational efforts of parties, as an individual-level account of the relationship entails heroic assumptions about voter information. Lagged province-level effects, by contrast,are quite compatible with the low-information psychology of the typical voter. The analysis has payoffs both theoretical and practical. On the theoretical side, the paper promises to help sort out alternative accounts of the relationship between turnout and competitiveness, at the same time as it pushes the conceptual boundaries of competitiveness itself. On the practical side, the paper continues to illuminate the story of Canadian turnout decline, including treatment of the 2004 election. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore the role of issue ownership in individual vote choice in the 1997 & 2000 Canadian federal elections. As a correction to the original model, we find that issue ownership's effect on vote is conditional upon the salience of the issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite limited electoral and governmental reward, third parties commonly contest elections under single-member-district plurality (SMD-p) electoral rules. Even under the strong party duopoly of the United States, third parties continually contest local, state, and national elections. In this paper, we relax the assumption that third party candidates are motivated solely by the rewards of office and examine the incentives for them to contest elections under variations in electoral volatility and competition. We propose a curvilinear (U-shaped) relationship between electoral competition and third party participation. When electoral competition is either very low or very high we expect the number of third party candidates to be high, due to increased opportunity to draw attention to policy issues or affect the election outcome. We expect a positive relationship between electoral volatility and third party candidacies, since high volatility signals a de-aligned electorate. We test our claims using district-level data in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States from 1980-2000. The results of negative binomial regressions indicate that third parties are more likely to contest elections when electoral uncertainty is high. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data on Canadian elections from 1980 to 2004, this paper explores voters’ responsiveness to changes in the amount of federal transfer payments received by their home provinces and whether this responsiveness exhibits a ‘negativity bias’. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using constituency level data from Canadian provincial legislative elections, the paper tests the relationship between party competition and voter turnout. Controlling for other factors, multiparty measures of competition are related to turnout. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparative study of the impact of party leaders and their personality traits on election outcomes is diverse and non-cumulative-it has followed a number of directions, and the literature is conflicted in almost all of these areas. One of the main branches within the leaders literature focuses on the evaluation of personality traits, and scholars are unable to agree about which traits voters take note of; whether traits actually affect election outcomes; if they do which are more important; and why or how traits are evaluated in the first place. When one looks more closely at the literature, it becomes clear that what is needed is a larger comparative analysis that incorporates election studies across time and space, in order to be able to make more definitive conclusions about the role of leader evaluations. However, one of the challenges to this endeavor stems from the nature of the data available. Different traits are included in different election studies over time, and often even where trait continuity does exist, the question format changes, making comparability over time and across space very difficult. This paper examines the impact of question format, using pooled data from election studies conducted in two countries, Canada and the United States. The analysis suggests that question format does indeed have an effect on respondents' evaluations of party leaders, but more research is needed before we can make conclusions about the implications of these effects for the comparative study of the role of leaders. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author attempted exit polling during advance poll voting and the general election in January 2006 to understand how and if party and candidate mobilization occurs. The polling was generally scuttled by Elections Canada and by other problems involved in trying to conduct exit polling remotely. The paper shares the problems that occurred and a few results reached by a very small N and offers suggestions to scholars who desire to exit poll in Canada in the future. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-election day voting is an increasingly important part of the Canadian electoral process. NED voters made the difference in a dozen ridings in 2004. This paper examines the dimensions of this trend and implications for electoral politics. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the Conservative Party?s performance in the 2004 Canadian election, concentrating on voters? perceptions, the impact of campaign information, and the party's role as the only viable alternative to the governing Liberals. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a formal model to predict the circumstances under which voters (in plurality elections) will abandon their most-preferred candidate to cast a PROTEST VOTE. We then test these predictions on survey data from Canada and the UK. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The issue of healthcare has been dominant in recent Canadian elections and has remained a key issue on the policy agenda beyond elections. This paper aims to expose media framing effects on public perceptions of the actual state of healthcare. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares the processes used to reach electoral reform recommendations in several Canadian provinces and analyzes those recommendations both comparatively across provinces, and in the context of the electoral reform literature. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article elaborates a rationale from which party identification is seen as a hindrance to rational behavior. Hypotheses are tested in the context of the 1988 Canadian federal election. Different measures of a rational vote choice are considered. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immigrants in Canada do not always vote Liberal. Analysis of a large sample survey taken during the 2006 election suggests immigrants are prone to vote for whichever party seems regionally dominant to express inclusion within mainstream society. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electoral competition has long been held as a required and essential component of a smoothly functioning democracy. This common wisdom suggests that representative responsiveness is likely to decrease as the level of general election competitiveness falls off. The closer the election the more uncertain the incumbent member of the legislature is about her ability to get reelected, which motivates her to work harder to win votes (i.e. campaign harder, spend more time in the district, secure more pork projects, modify voting behavior in the legislature, etc.). In turn these activities should increase voter satisfaction and efficacy. This final linkage is what we take up here. Namely, do voters in districts that have competitive elections demonstrate higher levels of efficacy and higher levels of satisfaction with the representative and with the legislature itself? Using survey data from the most recent elections in three western democracies with single member district systems (UK, Canada, and the U.S.) we find no such connection. Rather, the winner/loser dichotomy is primal. Electoral competitiveness has no measurable effect on voters either in terms of satisfaction with their representative or with more abstract variables like efficacy. This finding has important implications for democratic theory and for redistricting. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The issue of electoral systems, and ultimately electoral reform, are important to examine because choosing an electoral system is one of the most important institutional decisions for any democracy. The significance of electoral systems lay in the fundamental aspect that they translate the votes of the electorate into the legislative body that will form the government. The Canadian electoral system of First Past the Post (FPTP), a plurality voting system that was adopted from the British model, has been criticized as being undemocratic in its distribution of votes and allocation of power. The system of FPTP was adopted in a time when the composition of Canadian society was very different; the principles and values of the current Canadian population do not correlate with the present electoral system. Women and minorities, whom make up a significant percentage of the Canadian electorate, are not adequately represented in the legislative body that is, in theory, meant to protect all members of society. Different electoral systems create different incentives and disincentives for political parties to achieve equality in political representation. It is crucial to recognize how different electoral systems distribute political power and how certain electoral systems are designed to actively and consciously enhance the representation of women and minorities. Elections are the venues in which eligible citizens are free to choose which candidate they believe should hold political office and it is reasonable to consider that there exists a better electoral system for Canadian democracy than the current system of FPTP. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I examine advance voting in the 2004 Canadian election. Advance voters differ from normal voters, and some parties do better than others in advance voting. But, advance voting success does not predict victory and likely does not change outcomes. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Same-sex marriage, legalized in Canada in 2005, was an electoral issue for the 2004 and the 2006 Canadian Elections. Multinomial analyses allow us to conclude that even if this issue has influenced vote choice, the net effect on the result of both elections is almost nil. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The campaign polls during the 2004 Canadian federal election and the media coverage of those polls are examined to determine how the predicted outcome of the election could be so wrong. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]