The long-standing centrality of party leaders to Canadian elections and politics, and the use of televised extra-parliamentary conventions to choose leaders, have led parties to believe that a new leader will provide them with an electoral boost at the subsequent election. This article tests this perception using the record of 136 cases of leadership change in Canadian provincial parties over the last three decades. The data allow the authors to consider the impact of divisive contests, the relevance of a party's competitive position, and the regional variance on any leadership convention electoral boost. It concludes the conventional wisdom is wrong.

This article explores candidate selection in Canadian political parties with a particular focus on the basic processes involved and the character of the candidates they produce. After a review of the popular conventional wisdom the article reports the results of the first systematic nation-wide study of nomination processes in local constituency party associations (carried out at the time of the 1988 general election). Despite democratic forms, competition for party nominations continues to be the exception rather than the norm and national party interests are only weakly articulated.

In July 1986, the Social Credit party of British Columbia held only the second leadership convention in its history. This article uses data from a survey of delegates to the convention to describe the divisions within the party, to assess disenchantment with the Bennett government and to estimate the effects of these and other factors on the final outcome of the convention. Analysis of a large number of policy and opinion items reveals a party largely united on economic policy but divided on social policy and issues of party organization and direction. However, leadership aspirants appeared unwilling to exploit these differences. The struggle for succession became one of “insiders” versus “outsiders,” between party professionals and the grass roots, between non-populists and populists, and the latter gave William Vander Zalm his victory.

Duverger's law regarding the impact of electoral systems on party competition depends upon two effects: the mechanical and the psychological. The former is well defined and well documented, whereas the latter has more often been a matter for theoretical speculation. In this article we provide an operational definition of the psychological effect of electoral systems and measure its impact across twenty democratic systems over more than a century. Our findings suggest that it does exist, that it works as Duverger predicted and that its impact is about the same magnitude as the mechanical effect.

Plurality (first-past-the-post), majority and proportional electoral formulae all translate vote shares into seat shares in different ways. The consequences of these differences are the subject of a large literature, and the virtues and vices attributed to the plurality rule are particularly numerous. That is not surprising given the discrepancies between seat and vote shares it generates. What is surprising is that the literature has not examined the plurality rule's effectiveness, that is the extent to which it achieves its intended goals. We take effectiveness to be a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for an electoral rule's acceptability. At the very least, a given rule ought to produce the consequences it is designed to create. This short Note is intended to assess the extent to which the plurality system passes this minimum test.