Elite Strategy, Social Structure and Catholic-Protestant Cleavage in the Canadian Provinces
Date
2013-08-30
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Abstract
The persistence of many electoral cleavages beyond the disappearance of their initial causes is a central mystery of political science. Siegfried (1913) examined how left-right orientations that emerged from the French Revolution survived many generations, Lipset and Rokkan (1967) puzzled over how the party systems of the 1960s reflected the social divisions of the 1920s, and Wittenberg (2006) demonstrated how Hungarian cleavages survived the disap- pearance of democracy itself. While voting is often considered a rational, individual act taking into account current issues and political campaigns, understanding the role that the legacies of the past play in influencing elections is equally critical.
This dissertation considers one such long-standing question of cleavage persistence: why do Catholics and Protestants in Canada have different voting patterns? By analyzing orig- inal data on the long-term history of Catholic-Protestant cleavages in Canadian provincial elections, two factors structure patterns of religious cleavage: elite strategies and social structure. Elite strategies, such as elite accommodation or policy positioning over religiously contentious issues such as Catholic education, affect both the likelihood of existence, and partisan direction of the cleavage. Additionally, variables related to social structure, such as whether a province has separate school systems for Catholics and Protestants, provide mechanisms for reproducing these cleavages in the long term.
In providing these answers, this dissertation contributes to the debate over Catholic- Protestant cleavage by shifting the analytical focus away from surveys of individuals to quantitative historical comparisons. Rather than searching for individual-level factors to control for the religious cleavage using election studies, this project considers election-level variables to explain the existence and partisan direction of cleavages. Such an approach represents a new style of explanation in this literature. Additionally, it more firmly sets the question in a comparative, rather than more parochial, setting. That is, the effects of elite strategies and social structures on the Catholic-Protestant cleavage in Canada can be viewed as an instance of the historical legacies of conflict regulation on electoral cleavages. The decisions that governments made decades ago over how to regulate Catholic-Protestant conflict (which ranged from changing the electoral system to reduce inter-religious tensions to segregating school children by religious affiliation) continue to influence how these groups divide at the ballot box today.
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Citation
Fairie, P. M. (2013). Elite Strategy, Social Structure and Catholic-Protestant Cleavage in the Canadian Provinces (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/25866