Demotion and dissent in the Canadian Liberal party

British Journal of Political Science

Volumn 36, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 561-574

  Kam, Christopher ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33646891739     PISSN: 00071234     EISSN: 14692112     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0007123406000299     Document Type: Article

References (53)

1. As quoted in Norman Ward, Dawson's The Government of Canada, 6th edn (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), p. 204.
2. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969), p. 265.
3. I interviewed six Liberal MPs in November 1999.
4. Another nine Liberal MPs entered parliament later in the session via by-elections, all of whom are included in this analysis. Four other MPs were dropped, two because of their appointment to the Senate, two because they took on the relatively non-partisan offices of the Speaker and Deputy Speaker of the House, respectively.
5. An MP dissents when she votes against her party's instructions. This is the definition employed by Norton in his work on backbench dissent in Britain. See Philip Norton, Dissension in the House of Commons: Intra-Party Dissent in the House of Commons' Division Lobbies, 1945-1974 (London: Macmillan, 1975);
6. and Philip Norton, Dissension in the House of Commons, 1974-1979 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).
7. Readers might be surprised that the Liberals experienced dissent so frequently. However, Wearing shows that this level of dissent, while high, is not unheard of in Canada. See Joseph Wearing, 'Guns, Gays, and Gadflies: Party Dissent in the House of Commons Under Mulroney and Chrétien' (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association, Ottawa, 1998).
8. Wolfgang C. Müller and Kaare Strøm, 'Political Parties and Hard Choices', in Wolfgang C. Müller and Kaare Strøm, eds, Policy, Office, or Votes? How Political Parties in Western Europe Make Hard Choices (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 5-9.
9. Brian J. Gaines and Geoffrey Garrett, 'The Calculus of Dissent: Party Discipline in the British Labour government, 1974-79', Political Behavior, 15 (1993), 113-35, p. 117-19.
10. Matthew S. R. Palmer, 'Toward an Economics of Comparative Political Organization: Examining Ministerial Responsibility', Journal of Law, Economics and Organization, 11 (1995), 164-88.
11. Michael Atkinson and Paul G. Thomas, 'Studying the Canadian Parliament', Legislative Studies Quarterly, 18 (1993), 423-51.
12. Herbert Doering, ed., Parliaments and Majority Rule in Western Europe (New York: St. Martin's, 1995).
13. David Epstein, David Brady, Sadafumi Kawato and Sharyn O'Halloran, 'A Comparative Approach to Legislative Organization: Careerism and Seniority in the United States and Japan', American Journal of Political Science, 41 (1997), 965-98.
14. Philip Norton, 'The Individual Member in the British House of Commons: Facing Both Ways and Marching Forward', in Lawrence D. Longley and Reuven Y. Hazan, eds, The Uneasy Relationships Between Parliamentary Members and Leaders (London: Frank Cass, 2000).
15. MPs' beliefs regarding the potential electoral benefits of dissent are more relevant than the actual success or failure of the strategy. If, for example, dissenting MPs do worse at election time than loyal MPs one cannot conclude that dissent is irrational or ineffective; it may be the case that dissenting MPs dissented precisely because party policy put them in such dire electoral circumstances.
16. John E. Schwarz and Geoffrey Lambert, 'Career Objectives, Group Feeling, and Legislative Party Cohesion: The British Conservatives, 1959-1968', Journal of Politics, 33 (1971), 399-421;
17. Gaines and Garrett, 'The Calculus of Dissent: Party Discipline in the British Labour government, 1974-79'.
18. For simplicity's sake, I assume that dissent completely frees the MP from the electoral cost of party policy. This is a strong assumption, and to the extent that it does not hold, dissent becomes a less attractive strategy.
19. A simple model based on the parliamentary careers of Canadian MPs elected at the 1972 election suggests that every rank that an MP is demoted reduces her probability of re-acquiring ministerial status by half. These results are available from the author upon request.
20. See, for example, Keith Krehbiel, 'Where's the Party?' British Journal of Political Science, 23 (1993), 235-66;
21. David M. Wood and William G. Jacoby, 'Intraparty Cleavage in the British House of Commons: Evidence from the 1974-79 Parliament', American Journal of Political Science, 28 (1984), 203-23;
22. and Jorgen S. Rasmussen and James M. McCormick, 'The Influence of Ideology on British Labour MPs in Voting on EEC Issues', Legislative Studies Quarterly, 10 (1985), 203-21.
23. See, for example, Edward W. Crowe, 'The Web of Authority: Party Loyalty and Social Control in the British House of Commons', Legislative Studies Quarterly, 11 (1986), 161-85;
24. Donald D. Searing, Westminster's World: Understanding Political Roles (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994);
25. and David Docherty, Mr. Smith Goes to Ottawa: Life in the House of Commons (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1997).
26. Alan Kornberg, Canadian Legislative Behaviour: A Study of the 25th Parliament (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1967), p. 134.
27. Kornberg, Canadian Legislative Behaviour, p. 134.
28. Crowe, 'The Web of Authority: Party Loyalty and Social Control in the British House of Commons', Legislative Studies Quarterly, 11 (1986), 161-85, p. 177.
29. Crowe, 'The Web of Authority: Party Loyalty and Social Control in the British House of Commons', p. 168.
30. Norton, Dissension in the House of Commons: Intra-Party Dissent in the House of Commons' Division Lobbies, 1945-1974;
31. Norton, Dissension in the House of Commons, 1974-1979.
32. Free votes are excluded by definition. Dissent was not restricted to Private Members' Bills. The Liberals experienced dissent on 12.8 per cent of whipped divisions (versus 16 per cent of all divisions). All told, Liberal MPs cast 1,278 dissenting votes; of these, 523 (41 per cent) were cast in whipped divisions.
33. Standing Order 45 in Annotated Standing Orders of the House of Commons (Ottawa: The Queen's Printer for Canada, 1989), p. 150.
34. 'Iftody to rebel again', Winnipeg Free Press, 15 June 1995. In fact, Liberal MPs were so sensitive to these dynamics that later in the session they tried to change the pattern of voting so that the backbenchers voted before the frontbenchers!
35. 'Liberal backbench gets a taste of revolt', The Globe & Mail, 25 September 1996, A7.
36. Canadian Candidate Study, 1993, Principal Investigator: L. Erickson. The response rate for the 1993 CCS was 53.1 per cent.
37. I used NORM 2.2 for Windows to generate five imputation datasets. NORM 2.2 for Windows is written by Joseph Schafer and is available on-line at www.stat.psu.edu/~jsl/.
38. The economic scale was based on survey items tapping respondents' attitudes towards: (1) the employment-inflation trade-off, (2) equality of rights, (3) affirmative action, (4) capital punishment, (5) income inequality, (6) law and order, (7) universal versus means-tested government services, and (8) the desirability of the welfare state. The social conservatism scale was based on items tapping: (1) abortion rights, (2) respect for traditional authority, (3) homosexual marriage, (4) acceptability of pornography, (5) childbirth out of wedlock, and (6) women's familial roles.
39. I coded parliamentary ranks as follows: cabinet ministers and shadow ministers = 6; junior ministers, opposition critics for minor portfolios, chief whips, and House leaders = 5; parliamentary secretaries and deputy opposition critics = 4; deputy whips = 3; committee chairs = 2; and backbenchers = 1. Neophyte MPs received scores of 0 because, by definition, they could not have lost status. So, for example, an MP who was a shadow minister in the 1988-93 Parliament, but who was left on the back bench in the 1993-98 Parliament would receive a score of - 5. Other coding schemes did not substantially change the results.
40. Anthony King, 'The Rise of the Career Politician in Britain - And its Consequences', British Journal of Political Science, 11 (1981), 249-85.
41. 2 ), where Reform % and PC % are the Reform and PC percentages of the combined Reform and PC vote share in the MP's constituency. Fractionalization ranged between 1 and 2, higher figures indicating a more even split of the right-wing vote.
42. In Canada, redistributions are carried out by an independent electoral commission. MPs could not, therefore, manipulate constituency boundaries to avoid intra-party selection battles. This did not prevent Liberal MPs from trying to impede the passage of the redistribution legislation through the House, and certainly the attention that the enabling legislation received from Liberal MPs suggests that they were worried about its consequences.
43. Canadian electoral law gives party leaders veto power on use of the party label. That said, a deeply ingrained tradition of local control of nominations severely limits the leader's ability to determine who will be the party's candidate in any given riding (constituency), and this makes it more likely than not that a sitting MP will side with the local rather than the national party in any sort of policy dispute. See Anthony M. Sayers, Parties, Candidates, and Constituency Campaigns in Canadian Elections (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1999), pp. 4-5. Certainly, party leaders have almost always used this power to parachute an outside candidate into an open seat rather than to unseat an incumbent MP.
44. Sayers, Parties, Candidates, and Constituency Campaigns in Canadian Elections, p. 35.
45. On average, private campaign contributions cover 95 per cent of candidates' campaign expenses so the public reimbursement (for 50 per cent of expenses) leaves most candidates with a large surplus: the more money raised and spent, the greater the reimbursement and final surplus. Candidates must dispose of these surpluses by handing them over to the national party or their constituency associations (CAs), but as the Canada Elections Act (1974) does not regulate CAs, most candidates transfer their surplus to their CA - whereupon all public accountability ends. The CAs' funds are then used in a way 'that is likely to be politically beneficial to the MP' (William T. Stanbury, 'Financing Federal Politics in Canada in an Era of Reform', in Arthur B. Gunlicks, ed., Campaign and Party Finance in North America and Western Europe (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1993), p. 102).
46. These figures are computed with all variables held at their median values.
47. Stuart Elaine MacDonald, 'Political Ambition and Attainment: A Dynamic Analysis of Parliamentary Careers' (doctoral dissertation, University of Michigan, 1987).
48. David C. Docherty, Mr. Smith Goes to Ottawa: Life in the House of Commons (Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 1997), pp. 217-19.
49. The small number of MPs from some of the provinces makes it impossible to control for the MP's province; controlling for region is the best that can be done. Other variables, such as the MP's sex, educational level, language and ideological orientation were tested, but had no effect.
50. I assigned MPs into leadership camps based on the assessment of Peter Regenstrief and the Liberal MPs with whom I spoke. Factional affiliation had no impact on how often MPs cast dissenting votes.
51. Stanbury, 'Financing Federal Politics in Canada in an Era of Reform', pp. 99.
52. The Liberal party traditionally operated an unregulated trust fund for the party leader to be used for a variety of activities. MPs with access to financial resources were also in a better position to fund Chrétien's leadership bid in the first instance. See Stanbury, 'Financing Federal Politics in Canada in an Era of Reform', p. 103.
53. 34th Parliament.