¹ “Party Loyalty and Electoral Volatility: A Study of the Canadian Party System,” this journal, viii, no. 2 (June 1974), 268–88

² Ibid., 269

³ Ibid., 273

⁴ Ibid., 276

⁵ Since no explicit definition is given, the reader must assume the authors are using the definition attributed to them here. However, a reading of the footnotes and their use of the concept easily leads to such a conclusion.

⁶ The Voter Decides (Evanston, Ill. 1954), 88–90

⁷ Ibid., 107

⁸ Goldberg, Arthur S., “Social Determinism and Rationality as Bases of Party Identification,” American Political Science Review, LXIII, no. 1 (March 1969), 21Google Scholar

⁹ Working Papers on Canadian Politics (enlarged ed., Montreal 1973), 67. Since this statement has no reference to any data, it must be taken at face value.

¹⁰ “In every election since 1952 over 80 per cent of the strong party identifiers and a strong majority of the weak identifiers voted with their party”; quoted in Page, Benjamin I. and Wolfinger, Raymond E., “Party Identification,” in Wolfinger, Raymond E., Readings in American Political Behavior (Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 1970), 291.Google Scholar Table I in that article reports the relationship of party identification to presidential vote for five elections.

¹¹ Political Change in Britain (New York 1969), 40

¹² Ibid., tables 2.6 and 2.7, 41–2

¹³ Sniderman et al., examine in a different fashion the question of vote and party identification travelling together. They chose to look at the respondents who had changed their identification at any point in time. This difference in measurement of change makes it impossible to compare cross-nationally the three sets of data. It seems that the comparison is easier if analysis of Butler and Stokes is followed, albeit with recall rather than panel data.

¹⁴ 286–7

¹⁵ See, Converse, P. et al., “Continuity and Change in American Politics: Parties and Issues in the 1968 Election,” American Political Science Review, LXIII, no. 4 (December 1969), 1085Google Scholar

¹⁶ 276–7

¹⁷ The American results do not seem to be directly due to the time chosen or the state of American politics at that time. In 1964, in many ways an atypical election year, the number of respondents reporting a change of party identification in their lifetime was 22 per cent. See Pomper, Gerald M., Elections in America (New York 1971), 85Google Scholar

¹⁸ One factor which could have brought this observed high level of instability in Canada would be traumatic conditions similar to those described in The American Voter which produced the American electoral realignments after the American Civil War and during the Depression of the 1930s. Were this the case, party identification in Canada might share the characteristics of the concept found in the United States, and Table v-a might look much as Table v-b would have looked had the American sample been drawn in 1872 or in 1940. An examination of time of change is quite instructive in this regard. Of those party identifiers who have changed their party identification, 62 per cent did so in the five years prior to the time of the survey. However, from 1960 to 1965 there were no social or economic traumas in Canada comparable to the American Civil War or the Great Depression. The Canadian political and economic scene in the sixties was relatively stable, suffering from no severe disruptions. Therefore, some other explanation of the substantial number of individual changes must be found.

¹⁹ Campbell, et al., The American Voter (New York 1960), 148Google Scholar

²⁰ Pomper, Elections in America, 85

²¹ Campbell et al., The American Voter, 147. The reader probably notes that the level of intergenerational agreement in the American studies reported here is somewhat higher than that cited in Sniderman et al. Sniderman et al. report that “approximately 6 in every 10 Americans report agreement with the party preference of their fathers, compared with approximately 5 in every 10 Canadians,” 284. The source of their American values cited is The Handbook of Social Psychology (vol. 5, ed. G. Lindzey and E. Aronson, 2nd ed., 274–7) which reports a number of studies that have examined parent-offspring agreement on party loyalty. The level of agreement in these studies varies quite substantially. However, only one of those studies is directly comparable to the Canadian case which is used here. The others deal with samples of children or with special adult samples which could be expected to differ substantially from a national voter sample. The most comparable data come from The Voter Decides (1948). The Handbook reports that 61 per cent of that sample had exactly matched parents and offspring. That group includes a match of “independent” offspring and parents who were not consistently loyal to a single party. However, the question evoking an “independent” response for the parents does not seem to represent what is normally thought of as an “independent” position. The alternative offered in the question is “or did they shift around from one party to another.” Shifting allegiance is not usually what is thought of as independence, and it differs substantially from the alternative in the respondents' party identification question which is, “Do you think of yourself as… an independent…?” Therefore, I returned to the original report in The Voter Decides and recalculated the values only for those respondents whose fathers supported one of the major parties. This raises the value to 69 per cent. Sniderman et al. were perhaps implicitly doing the same when they report “5 in every 10” Canadians because that value is close to the percentage of respondents whose fathers expressed a preference. Including those with no preference – the equivalent of the dd, rr, ii set in The Voter Decides – the level of agreement is reduced to 46 per cent, which is a full 15 percentage points less than the 61 per cent reported for the three pairs in The Voter Decides. All values reported in the text are based on reports of respondents whose father or both parents had been remembered to have a party loyalty.

²² See Pammett, Jon H., “The Development of Political Orientations in Canadian School Children,” this journal, IV, no. 1 (March 1971), 132–40.Google Scholar Pammett compares his findings to Greenstein's study of American children and reports substantially different patterns of acquisition of party loyalty.

²³ Interestingly enough, it was precisely the supportive evidence from earlier American socialization studies, Hyman's in particular, which was used in The American Voter as validation for the assumptions about patterns of transmission between generations, 146–7.