The same can be said of the concept of political support. Feelings of loyalty toward and an identification with a national political regime and the political community of which it is a part, the belief that the regime is both effective and fair in its dealings with citizens, the latter's sensitivity toward, and even affection for, people and regions of the country other than their own - all of these should be correlates of political support as well as national unity. Indeed, because the two concepts are closely intertwined, in earlier chapters we have examined some of the images Canadians have of themselves, of their society and polity and their relationship to both. Those data provide the context in which we analyze the distribution, structure and correlates of the correlates of support for Canada's national political community, regime, and authorities.

POLITICAL SUPPORT: 1974-1988

In Chapter 1 we argued that in representative democracies such as Canada public support for key political objects is likely to be hierarchically ordered and to vary in stability over time. Support for the national political community should be the highest and most stable. Support for the national regime should be lower and somewhat more mutable, and that for political authorities should be even lower and more variable. This ordering of the levels and stability of support should obtain because democratic political cultures emphasize the distinction between political authorities, on the one hand, and the structure and processes of government (the regime) and the political community, on the other. Elected public officials both receive their “authority” from the public and are held accountable to them in periodic, constitutionally sanctioned elections.

Our principal sources of Canadian data are national cross-sectional and panel surveys conducted in 1983, 1984, and immediately before and after the 1988 federal election. The 1983 survey also contains a panel component composed of persons interviewed in the 1979 and 1980 national election surveys. The 1983, 1984, and 1988 surveys are the centerpieces of two research projects: “Sources, Distribution and Consequences of Political Support in Canada” and “Support for Democratic Polities: The Case of Canada” (co-principal investigators Harold D. Clarke and Allan Kornberg). The studies were funded by the National Science Foundation (grants SES 831-1077 and SES 882-1628). Fieldwork for the surveys was conducted by Canadian Facts Ltd., Toronto, Ontario under the supervision of Canadian Facts’ Senior Project Director, Mary Auvinen. Additional Canadian data were gathered in national cross-sectional surveys conducted in 1985, 1986, 1987, and 1989, with the fieldwork for these studies being conducted by Canadian Facts Ltd. as part of their monthly “Monitor” survey. Funding for these latter studies was provided by research grants from the Canadian Embassy, Washington, D. C, the Canadian Studies Center, Duke University, the International Political Economy Program, Duke University, and the Duke University Research Council and Provosts' Funds. All of these survey data and related technical information are available from the authors upon request.

We also employed Canadian data gathered in the 1974, 1979, and 1980 national election and panel surveys and two surveys carried out at the time of the Quebec sovereignty-association referendum. The principal investigators for the election studies were Harold D. Clarke, Jane Jenson, Lawrence LeDuc, and Jon Pammett, using research funds provided by the Canada Council and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. One of the referendum surveys was conducted as part of a project “The Quebec Referendum, the Media, and the Maintenance of the National Integrity of Canada” (principal investigators: Allan Kornberg and Joel Smith) funded by the National Science Foundation (grants SOC- 7915420). A second was the “Quebec Referendum Study” carried out by Clarke, Jenson, Leduc, and Pammett in conjunction with their 1974-80 national election surveys. The latter research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The 1974 election study is described in Clarke et al. (1979:397-400), and information regarding the other surveys can be obtained from the principal investigators.

The skein of political life in democracies is complex and tightly woven. In this chapter we attempt to unravel several of its most important strands. We begin by developing and testing a multivariate model of the support process in which the dependent variables are the authorities, regime and community support factors identified in Chapter 4. The significance of economic and more general government effectiveness evaluations in the support model prompts us to assess their generality by investigating the impact of economic and other variables on support for democratic regimes in a broader comparative context. One of the problems that has bedeviled previous studies of political support is a failure to demonstrate that it has consequences for important political attitudes and behavior in a democracy. Because one of the proudest claims of democracies is that they are governments of “laws not of men,” we next consider how people's willingness to voluntarily comply with authoritative edicts of government are affected by differences in support for the political authorities, regime, and community, as well as by other factors relevant to the support process. Finally, because citizen involvement is a sine qua non of democratic politics, we examine participation in conventional electorally oriented activities as well as more unconventional ones such as sit-ins and potentially violent protests, and determine the extent to which these are affected by variations in political support and related factors. These analyses demonstrate that support does indeed have significant consequences for two of the most important aspects of political life of a democracy.

THE FOUNDATIONS OF POLITICAL SUPPORT! A MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS

Analyses in presented Chapter 4 reveal that Canadians distinguish between support for the national political community and regime and support for incumbent authorities. Moreover, at the regime level, they distinguish support for parliament and the civil service, on the one hand, and support for the judiciary, on the other. We employed several predictor variables in our multivariate model of these four support factors.

Citizens’ beliefs, attitudes and opinions lie at the heart of democratic theory and practice. How people perceive and evaluate the political system and their roles therein affect support for political authorities and the institutions and processes that constitute a democratic political order. In this chapter we will examine a variety of psychological orientations relevant to political support processes in a representative democratic polity. We begin with the concept of democracy itself.

It is reasonable to assume that until the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II, the Cold War and the division of Europe, the end of colonialism, and the emergence of dozens of new states in Asia and Africa that most Canadians would have understood and agreed on what a democratic political order entailed. However, given events since that time - the creation of a number of “peoples’ republics” with command economies, the appropriation of the label “socialist” by communist and other authoritarian political regimes of both the right and left, the increasing emphasis on economic as well as political equality in Western countries and, more recently, the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union, of communist regimes in Eastern Europe, and the economic and political restructuring of those countries - this may be too easy an assumption. As a consequence, we are interested in delineating Canadians views of the meaning of democracy, and the extent to which they believe their country and two premier examples of liberal and nonliberal political systems, the United States and Soviet Union, approximate an ideal democratic polity. We will demonstrate that ordinary citizens, no less than political philosophers, differ in their conceptions of democracy and that some of those differences influence their judgments about the extent to which Canada approximates the democratic ideal.

Political parties are one of the distinguishing features of a democracy, and they play a variety of important roles in the support process by representing public needs and demands and mobilizing citizens to participate politically.

The sun shone brightly throughout most of Quebec on May 20, 1980, warming long lines of voters waiting throughout the day to cast their ballots in a historic referendum on sovereignty-association. The heavy turnout among the province's 4.3 million voters had been foreshadowed by a record level of voting in advance polls the previous Friday and Saturday. At the end of the day, 59.5 percent of those voting had said “no” to the Parti Quebecois government's proposal that it be given a mandate by the people of Quebec to enter into negotiations with the government of Canada for a new status for Quebec - political sovereignty coupled with an economic association with the rest of Canada.

Although the outcome of the referendum gave the Canadian federal union a new lease on life, the leaders of both sides of the bitterly contested five-week campaign predicted that this was not the end, that fundamental constitutional changes must occur - and quickly. In fact, during the debate on the referendum Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau already had offered the Quebec electorate a “renewed” federal system if the proposal were defeated. In return for voting no, Trudeau promised that the British North America Act, the written segment of the Canadian constitution, would be patriated from Great Britain, a formal amending procedure would be established, and a Charter of Rights and Freedoms would be added to it.

Political support and political culture are inextricably linked. In an extended essay on the multifaceted relationship between politics and culture Samuel Barnes (1986:16) argued that “at a minimum cultural patterns are the routine, largely unexamined options followed by most people most of the time.” They are derived from widely shared assumptions, meanings and values held by a group of people and provide the context and situations in which behavior occurs. As Barnes puts it, “culture comes early in the causal chain.” His views about culture raise the question of how widely shared assumptions, meanings, and values have to be in order for them to be considered “cultural patterns.” For example, how widely must people share views about the “meaning” of democracy or elections in order for them to be part of a cultural pattern? Also, how much political efficacy, trust, interest in politics or deference toward political authorities must people in a democracy exhibit for a culture to be considered “democratic”? Democratic theorists such as McClosky (1964:361-82) and Prothro and Grigg (1960:176-94) have argued that democratic values do not require a large measure of consensus in order for them to be a component of a democratic culture. Rather, a democratic culture can be sustained and affect the conduct of politics even if the values that lead to general democratic principles (e.g., majority rule and minority rights) are widely shared by only elite segments of a population. Although in a previous study (Kornberg, Mishler, and Clarke, 1982) we have questioned this assumption, it does suggest that any analysis of the complex relationships between political support and political culture should take into account conventional indicators of socioeconomic status such as education and income. As noted in Chapter 1, we will employ these as proxy variables to capture the effects of political socialization experiences on variations in political support.