This article tests hypotheses about the electoral support of Canada's first—and perhaps most significant—third party. It demonstrates that two micro-economic concepts, price elasticity of demand and efficiency of production, describe accurately the material base of Progressive party support. It thereby subsumes the study of agrarian parties and voting behaviour within a more general (public choice) framework. It also clarifies and substantiates important elements of the conventional wisdom about Progressive support, and it suggests means which might also shed new light upon the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and Social Credit.

In 1971, Peter Lougheed's Conservatives put an end to the long rule of the Social Credit party in Alberta. Many accounts maintain that large-scale social change that occurred in the province as a result of the postwar oil boom was responsible for this important change of government. Urbanization, in particular the expansion of the urban middle classes, secularization and increasing wealth are often cited as the primary causes of Social Credit's downfall. This article challenges this popular interpretation, arguing instead that short-term factors such as leadership, contemporaneous issues and campaign organization better explain the Conservative triumph. Also challenged is the larger claim that election outcomes may be determined by matters beyond anyone's control.

Media intrusion theory holds that the advent of electronic media, especially television, has accelerated or even precipitated party decline. This is evidently borne out by the declining membership of, and weakening support for, the two major Australian parties which each enthusiastically embraced new forms of political communication. However, “media intrusion” has arguably strengthened rather than weakened Canada's already frail brokerage parties. This different experience may be explained by the dissimilar legislative, federal and media environments in which Canadian and Australian political parties operate. Curiously, although the new forms of political communication have had different impacts, these have triggered changes in Australian political parties which have increased their resemblance to their Canadian counterparts.

This article investigates whether the entry of a greater number of women into the political arena could transform gender relations. The opinions of female and male New Democratic, Liberal and Parti québécois candidates in the 1989 Quebec general election were polled, in order to clarify three main questions: Do the female candidates polled have opinions favourable to feminist demands? Do female and male candidates have the same opinions with respect to these demands? Do political party and political philosophy influence the opinions of each sex on feminist demands? The results show that, generally speaking, women have higher scores on a feminist index than men. More specifically, this gap between women and men varies in accordance with the thematics of feminism, and with political party and political philosophy.

Now that the advent of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has made the fact of judicial power so obvious, it is important to develop the conceptual vocabulary for describing and assessing this power. One such concept that has been applied to the study of United States and British appeal courts is the notion of “party capability theory,” which suggests that different types of litigant will enjoy different levels of success, as both appellant and respondent. Using a data base derived from all reported decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada between 1949 and 1992, this article applies party capability theory to the performance of Canada's highest court, and compares the findings with similar studies of American and British courts.

This study examines the problem of achieving linguistic equivalence in Canada-wide surveys that rely, as they must, on two different questionnaires, one in English and one in French. It is argued that this is a crucial problem which needs to be dealt with squarely. Since language does not coincide neatly with territorial boundaries in Canada, there will always be some francophones outside Quebec and some non-francophones within Quebec who are not interviewed in their first language. A comparison of responses given in both languages by members of the same language group enables the investigator to distinguish true cultural differences from mere artifacts of measurement. That methodology is applied to one specific issue, support for electoral democracy.