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While climate scientists have developed high resolution data sets on the distribution of climate risks, we still lack comparable data on the local distribution of public climate change opinions. This paper provides the first effort to estimate local climate and energy opinion variability outside the United States. Using a multi-level regression and post-stratification (MRP) approach, we estimate opinion in federal electoral districts and provinces. We demonstrate that a majority of the Canadian public consistently believes that climate change is happening. Belief in climate change’s causes varies geographically, with more people attributing it to human activity in urban as opposed to rural areas. Most prominently, we find majority support for carbon cap and trade policy in every province and district. By contrast, support for carbon taxation is more heterogeneous. Compared to the distribution of US climate opinions, Canadians believe climate change is happening at higher levels. This new opinion data set will support climate policy analysis and climate policy decision making at national, provincial and local levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Canadian political parties have been using the Internet as a campaign tool since the 1997 election. Rebuilding Canadian Party Politics by Carty, Cross and Young (2000) presents one of the first analyses of Internet-based communications during a Canadian election. It is also one of the most important assessments of Canadian party systems. The book outlines the components that characterize the fourth party system, which they argue, began after the 1993 election. Regionalization is the defining characteristic of this emerging system. The book argues that the Internet, like other communication technologies, is important in this latest party system. Consistent with the notion of regionalized campaign communications, the authors suggest that Canadian political parties use the Internet to target campaign messages to different regional and sociodemographic groups and enter into private conversations with voters. Using original data collected from the 2004 federal election, this paper reflects on these claims. The paper builds the case that the use of the Internet as a campaign tool is not consistent with their argument. Internet-based campaign communications in Canada by the major parties is neither regionalized nor targeted. Rather, this technology makes campaign communication more transparent and centralized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the existence of sub-State political cultures in Canada. In so doing it revisits research conducted by Richard Simeon and David Elkins into the existence of provincial political cultures in Canada. It reviews the evidence for provincial political cultures and examines recent data from the Canadian Election Study in an effort to determine whether attitudes towards government have changed. Second, it revisits the process by which sub-cultures are identified Using data from the federal election profiles and the CES the paper identifies nine distinct regional variant cultures within Canada. These regional cultures possess different political attitudes and behaviours that cannot be explained by the existence of provincial boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Canadian federal cabinet stands out among Westminster parliamentary democracies because of the large number of first-time ministers who are appointed to cabinet without any previous parliamentary or political experience. Several explanations have been put forward to account for this peculiarity but no attempt has been made to examine how Canadian prime ministers overcome the information deficit associated with appointing ministers with no experience. How can prime ministers be confident that they are making the right choice? This paper explores the subject by estimating the survival functions of ministerial turnover for potential, but not yet appointed, cabinet ministers were they to survive to a defined political benchmark; these survival rates are included in a logit model of Canadian ministerial appointment following four general elections (1957, 1979, 1984 and 2006) in which the prime minister was tasked with appointing a cabinet with ministerial neophytes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While a number of scholars have offered a variety of constitutional critiques and political analyses for the 2008 prorogation of parliament, to date no comprehensive theoretical exploration has been attempted. In addition to the widespread agreement that the use of prorogation to avoid a potential nonconfidence vote was problematic, some have acknowledged that efforts to undermine the role of parliament in Canada have become routine. Combined with the role nationalistic tensions played in justifying such a profound departure from the principles of responsible government, this paper accepts the view that the 2008 decision to prorogue parliament constituted a "harm." Using routine activities theory it explores the events before, during, and after prorogation based on the confluence of a motivated actor, a suitable target, and the lack of a capable guardian. While this theory frames past events in a new way, of specific value is how the theory can be used to begin to chart a course to correct what has been called a dangerous constitutional precedent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gated communities have been characterised as representing processes of ‘forting up’ and ‘civic secession’, in which their residents use gating as a strategy for withdrawing from political life and from taking collective responsibility for others. The assumption is that the residents of private gated communities should be less likely to participate in political life, and/or be more likely to support political parties on the right who advocate privatisation, reduced government expenditures and lower taxes. If the act of living in a gated community is associated with either greater support for parties and policies on the right of the political spectrum, or limited political participation, then the growth of such forms of privatised communities has potential implications for the future of urban politics and even for national political systems. However, despite surveys that have dealt with social attitudes ‘behind the gates’, insufficient attention has been paid to the politics of gated community residents. This paper fills this gap through a comparative analysis of electoral behaviour during the 2006 federal election at the level of the polling station. Electoral participation and partisanship in 27 gated communities in three Canadian metropolitan areas is compared against that of non-gated residents. Regression analysis is conducted in order to determine whether gated community residents differ from their non-gated counterparts in the way they vote and their levels of electoral turnout, after controlling for social composition. The potential implications of this research are then discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existing literature on gender effects in the electoral process offers little evidence of significant gender vote share differentials. In this paper it is shown that for the 2006 Canadian federal election, once candidate campaign spending is introduced into the model with appropriate flexibility in the vote share responsiveness across genders, significant differences are found to exist between male and female candidates. The findings suggest that, for equal levels of spending, male incumbents have a vote share advantage relative to female incumbents, though this vote share advantage is found to diminish with increased expenditures. Female non-incumbent candidates, on the other hand, have a vote share advantage over male non-incumbent candidates for higher levels of expenditure and this advantage was found to increase with increased expenditures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While an important component of incumbent support, the effect of economic conditions on vote choice (economic voting) can be undermined by the presence of multilevel institutions; voters are faced with the prospect of evaluating economic conditions and governments at different levels simultaneously. This paper tests the applicability of a model which seeks to account for how and how well voters cope with the complexity of multilevel governance. The accountability-centred model suggests that federal and provincial governments should only be evaluated for those actions and outcomes that they can reasonably be seen to have influence over. Additionally, it is asked whether high information respondents are better able to navigate some of the complexities of Canada's multilevel system. Analyses are conducted using data from the 1993 and 1997 Canadian Election Studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between social group identity and the level of political information in explaining Canadians' issue attitudes and vote choices. Traditional accounts of Canadians' partisan political leanings have placed a great deal of emphasis on social group identity in explaining attitudes. However based on data from the Canadian Election Studies from 1988-2004, it is argued that both social group identity and information influence the nature of vote choice and public opinion in Canada. In fact, the level of voter information has two contradictory effects on the political attitudes of different social groups. In some cases voters' level of information reduces the role of social group identity in explaining attitudes and vote choices; information acts to bridge the differences between different social groups (for example Catholics/non-Catholics and urban/rural Canadians). In other cases, voters' level of information acts to amplify the importance of social group identity in predicting attitudes (for example women/men and religious/nonreligious). These findings suggest that not only is social group identity a less effective predictor of attitudes than has traditionally been thought but that there are also significant underlying differences between the so-called "old" and "new" cleavages in Canada when it comes to understanding their impact on political values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses data from the 2004 Canadian Election Study to analyze the factors that motivated a vote for each party and to identify the ones that mattered most to the outcome of the 2004 federal election outside Quebec. Particular attention is given to the impact of the sponsorship scandal, the sources of support for the new Conservative party and the factors that explain the NDP's improved performance. The findings are used to address some basic questions about the 2004 election and its larger implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]