Elections as the Product of Collective Decision: Federal Elections from 1957 to 1965 in Quebec
Is it fruitful to consider electoral results as the product of collective decisions, as suggested by Vincent Lemieux in his study of provincial elections in Quebec? In order to answer this question, the authors applied the same approach to new data, the results of federal elections in Quebec from 1957 to 1965. It is first noted that the operational concept of collective decision should be linked to a theoretical one. It is suggested that this theoretical concept would be more meaningful if a structural approach was adopted: it could be an “inconscient collectif” influencing the ridings in one way or another. In this sense the ridings are facing many choices: they may tend to choose a certain party, to vote for the party in government (or the contrary), or they may wish to re-elect the same party (or the contrary); finally, there might be a tendency to vote like the majority of the ridings (or, once again, the contrary). The comparison between expected and actual frequencies of the different sets of partisan choices argues in favour of the importance of party loyalty. The cleavage between the socio-economic characteristics of the traditionally Liberal, Social Credit, and Conservative ridings is also evident. The analysis of the other choices raises many problems, however. The same electoral result may refer to many different sets of choices and the relationships between these choices make it almost impossible to measure the influence of eac structural mechanism controlling for all the others. It becomes almost impossible to discover which structural law does in fact govern the ridings’ behaviour. On the whole, then, structural and causal studies are faced with the same basic methodological problem: when one wants to measure the sole impact of a particular causal factor or structural mechanism which interacts with many others, it is necessary to make some assumptions, like linearity and additivity, which exclude any complex interaction.