Canada's quasi-party system: the causes and consequences of Liberal hegemony.(Book Review)

Andre Blais, Elisabeth Gidengil, Richard Nadeau and Neil Nevitte, Anatomy of a Liberal Victory: Making Sense of the Vote in the 2000 Canadian Election. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002. 241 pages.

WILL THE LIBERAL PARTY EVER BE DEFEATED AGAIN IN A FEDERAL ELECtion? Since the mid-1990s, the opposition parties and critics of the Chretien regime have been casting about for a magic bullet that might help to dislodge the Liberals from power. Nothing has worked; not the various attempts to "unite the right," not the reinvention of the Reform Party as the Canadian Alliance, not the search for a charismatic leader whose karate-kicking, wetsuit-wearing media stunts were intended to draw attention to just how old the incumbent prime minister really is. Through it all, through the attacks on his personal integrity ("Shawinigate," or the Grand-Mere Affair) and that of his government (the HRDC imbroglio), Jean Chretien has consistently frustrated his detractors. Chretien's election win on November 27, 2000--his third successive majority government, placing him alongside Sir John A. Macdonald, Sir Wilfrid Laurier and Mackenzie King as the only party leaders to have accomplished this feat--underscored just how dominant the Liberal Party has become in federal politics. Even if, miraculously, the right in Canada were somehow to be united under a single party banner, this would provide no guarantee that the outcome of the next federal election would be any different from the previous three, since the Liberals begin each campaign with a substantial advantage over the opposition.

This is one of the central themes of the latest publication issuing from the Canadian Election Study. The authors of Anatomy of a Liberal Victory make the point that "Liberal dominance is the steady state of the Canadian party system. Since 1945, the Liberals have won a plurality of the vote in 14 out of 18 federal elections." They won handily in 2000 despite widespread dissatisfaction with their handling of the key issue of health care, despite the prevailing perception that Jean Chretien was an arrogant leader and despite a noticeable drop in support for the party after the English-language leaders' debate on November 9. How are we to explain the Liberal victory, and what are its implications for the current health and future prospects of Canadian democracy?

First the explanation. Blais et al. construct a muhistage model of vote choice in Canada, incorporating eight different …