The 'two worlds' hypothesis extended: An electoral geography of provincial and federal party support in Canada

There exists a large body of literature in electoral politics, on Canada and elsewhere, that sees voting as a reflection of social cleavages. Partisan preference is seen to spring from social, economic, and demographic divisions in society. Students of Canadian electoral politics have indeed found this to be true in the study of federal elections, leading one psephologist to conclude that Canadians are ‘profoundly rooted in tribal loyalties.’ The present dissertation focuses on revealing the extent to which these social divisions are manifested in provincial electoral politics and to assess the degree of symmetry between these two political worlds. The research offers a distinctly geographic interpretation of the ‘two worlds’ hypothesis that looks within provincial boundaries and sees electoral politics situated in places, in communities, and in neighbourhoods. The constancy assumption that cross-level symmetry is uniform across the country is questioned and the dissertation seeks, instead, to understand how group-party patterns of support vary across the electoral terrain. In short, the dissertation explores the question: Do Canadians, in their respective communities, inhabit two political worlds? Lacking adequate statistical samples, the analytic approach is predicated on rendering aggregate federal and provincial election results onto commensurable spatial units. This innovative approach requires that the vote at Canada's 26,000 federal polling sites be geographically transposed onto Canada's 683 provincial electoral districts. This is accomplished through the use of spatially referenced data within a geographic information system (GIS). Employing recent techniques of ecological inference, the congruence of cross-level group-party support is assessed and the embeddedness of these place-specific measures of electoral cleavage in local contexts is explored. Evidence in support of the ‘two worlds’ hypothesis is readily apparent and spatial patterns in the social structuring of party preferences are well accommodated by the brokerage theory of party competition in Canada.