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The article presents an overview of political developments in Canada for 2008. It includes an analysis of the political motives of leading public figures, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and commentary on trends in public opinion regarding the events described. Various electoral results, institutional changes, and notable issues in national politics are discussed. These include the challenges faced by the government in handling the global financial crisis which began in 2008. The efforts of Harper to advance the agenda of his Conservative Party are discussed.

In this paper we are concerned with the fundamental question of internal party democracy. Must political parties that depend upon a substantial membership inevitably end as oligarchies? Has the emergence of the cartel party, the “public utility” of modern democracies, spelled an end to active citizen‐partisans? To approach this issue we explore the cartel theorists’ suggestion that stratarchical organizational forms might provide parties with a way out of an apparent democratic dead end. The paper considers the logic of such parties and then examines how Canadian parties have been organized around stratarchical principles. The second substantial part of the paper turns to an assessment, in terms of the standards adopted by the Canadian Democratic Audit, of how, and to what extent, these parties might be considered democratic institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political parties in Canada oscillate between periods of inter-election quiescence and active electoral year mobilization. This article moves beyond vote share accounts of party system change by using the financial accounts of local associations and central party organizations to track these patterns in the New Brunswick party system. The analysis covers several electoral cycles encompassing government turnover and the rise of a flash party. Ecological models rooted in electoral district-level data (including measures of party activity based on their annual financial records, census data describing the electoral districts and conventional aggregate electoral data) are developed to provide a more nuanced account of a party and party system change than those based on simple election results. The findings demonstrate that even in a period of remarkable electoral flux, party activity and success appears to be rooted in diverse constituency social and political contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the record of western democracies to measure the impact of differing electoral formulae on the rate of voter turnout. The record of 509 national elections in 20 countries provides the basis for a regression analysis that clearly identities higher turnout rates in PR systems that cannot be explained by a wide variety of control variables or traditional arguments about PR. The data also reveal a marked increase in electoral turnout over the last century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the importance of plurality rule in elections. It is stated that the goal of the plurality rule is to establish one-party majority governments. It is mentioned that plurality, majority, and proportional electoral formulae interpret vote shares into seat shares in different ways, and plurality rule results in majorities 70 percent of the time. It is suggested that plurality systems should be used if elections are expected to result in legislative one-party majorities. However, it is stated that the system has limited effectiveness.