Class voting in the 1984 Canadian general election
Date
1993
Authors
Dadgou, Mehrdad
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Abstract
This study is a replication of some of the more important aspects of Ogmundson's 1972 study. While Ogmundson's study was based on a survey of the 1965 federal election, the present study used the results of a survey on the 1984 federal election. Ogmundson's study was basically a critique of an earlier study on Canadian voting behaviour by Alford (1963). In his study of voting behaviour in four Anglo-Saxon societies Alford (1963) formed an index of class voting to measure the association between social class and voting. In doing so he cross-tabulated the class position of the major parties with the class position of voters. In the case of Canada Alford lumped the Liberals and the NDP together as the working class parties and set them against the Progressive Conservative Party as the middle class party. Alford's findings led him to conclude that Canada was a case of "pure nonclass politics". He interpreted his findings as evidence that individual Canadians are not interested in class.
Ogmundson criticized Alford on two accounts. Firstly, he pointed to the error of classifying the Liberals as a working class rather than a middle class party. Secondly, he pointed out that the low level of class voting in Canada is due to the desire of the elites (e.g., the parties) rather than the voters. Ogmundson's criticisms of Alford formed the central themes of this study. Accordingly, six hypotheses which directly addressed these two points were selected for examination. All these hypotheses, except for one, were previously tested by Ogmundson and others. The findings, in general, repeated those of Ogmundson's results.
The first hypothesis concerned the class position of the major political parties in Canada. It was established from both the respondents' point of view and the experts' point of view the Liberals and the Conservatives are the middle class parties and that the NDP is the only working class party in Canada. The second and the third hypotheses concerned the rate of class vote. It was shown that the rate of class vote increased for almost all measures of respondents' social class status when the new measures of party class position was used. The fourth hypothesis concerned the political distinctiveness of the working class and the middle class in Canada (i.e., the proportion of support which a class gives to a given party). It was shown that when the measure of political distinctiveness is based on the voter perception and motivation the proportion of the middle class votes for the middle class parties is considerably higher than the proportion of the working class votes for the working class parties.
The fifth hypothesis, which was tested for the first time, was not confirmed by the data. The evidence suggests, contrary to what was expected, that those respondents who were less "aware" of social class tended to vote more in harmony with their social class status and the class position of the parties than those who were more "aware". The sixth hypothesis showed that class issues (defined in a broad manner) are more salient to Canadians than regional, ethnic, and religious issues.