Rebuilding Canadian Party Politics

Canadian party politics collapsed in the early 1990s. This book is about that collapse, about the end of a party system, with a unique pattern of party organization and competition, that had governed Canada’s national politics for several decades, and about the ongoing struggle to build its successor. Rebuilding Canadian Party Politics discusses the breakdown of the old party system, the emergence of the Reform Party and the Bloc Québécois, and the fate of the Conservative and New Democratic Parties. It focuses on the internal workings of parties in this new era, examining the role of professionals, new technologies, and local activists. To understand the ambiguities of our current party system, the authors attended local and national party meetings, nomination and leadership meetings, and campaign kick-off rallies. They visited local campaign offices to observe the parties’ grassroots operations and conducted interviews with senior party officials, pollsters, media and advertising specialists, and leader-tour directors. Written in a lively and accessible style, this book will interest students of party politics and Canadian political history, as well as general readers eager to make sense of the changes reshaping national politics today.

Aimed at upper-level undergraduate and graduate classes at the university level, this collection of 33 essays provides a broad range of perspectives on Canada's diverse and dynamic political climate. It is a classic political studies reader that combines the strengths of tradition and innovation; papers by distinguished political experts are combined with the perspectives of modern scholars to create a thoroughly updated text.

This book is about the collapse of Canadian party politics in the early 1990s, about the end of a party system that had governed Canada's national politics for several decades, and about the ongoing struggle to build its successor.

Canadian Parties in Transition examines the transformation of party politics in Canada and the possible shape the party system might take in the near future. With chapters written by an outstanding team of political scientists, the book presents a multi-faceted image of party dynamics, electoral behaviour, political marketing, and representative democracy. The fourth edition has been thoroughly updated and includes fifteen new chapters and several new contributors. The new material covers topics such as the return to power of the Liberal Party, voting politics in Quebec, women in Canadian political parties, political campaigning, digital party politics, and municipal party politics.

The Canadian party system is a deviant case among the Anglo-American democracies. Unruly and inscrutable, it is a system that defies logic and classification – until now. In this political science tour de force, Richard Johnston makes sense of the Canadian party system. With a keen eye for history and deft use of recently developed analytic tools, he articulates a series of propositions that underpin the system. For its combination of historical breadth and data-intensive rigour, The Canadian Party System is a rare achievement. Its findings shed light on the main puzzles of the Canadian case, while contesting the received wisdom of the comparative study of parties, elections, and electoral systems elsewhere.

Arising from a conference held at the University of Calgary in honour of Mildred Schwartz, Regionalism and Party Politics in Canada brings together current scholarship on regionalism and parties in order to make sense of the transition of the party system. Canada's party system is clearly in a state of flux: we are moving from the two-and-a -half party system that has dominated the country for most of the past century to something new. A look at the current Parliament suggests that regionalism has become the most dominant and important cleavage in Canada. Divided into four sections, the text first examines different approaches to the study of regionalism. It then moves on to the place of regionalism in Canadian society before turning towards regionalism's relationship to the Canadian party system. The volume concludes with an examination of how Canada compare with the rest of the world in terms of the regionalsim of its parties and party systems.

The Liberal Party of Canada is one of the most successful parties in the democratic world. It dominated Canadian politics for a century, practising an inclusive style of “big tent” politics that enabled it to fend off opponents on both the left and right. This book traces the record of the party, unwrapping Liberal practices and organization to reveal its distinctive “brokerage” approach to politics and franchise-style structure. A masterful analysis of how one party came to define the nation’s public life, this book also identifies the challenges that lie ahead as the Liberals reinvent themselves for the twenty-first century.