1 Palmer, Howard and Palmer, Tamara, “The 1971 Election and the Fall of Social Credit in Alberta,” Prairie Forum 1 (1976), 123–24.Google Scholar

2 Ibid.

3 Richards, John and Pratt, Larry, Prairie Capitalism: Power and Influence in the New West (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1979), 148–49.Google Scholar

4 See, for example, Stevenson, Garth, “Class and Politics in Alberta,” in Pratt, L., ed., Essays in Honour of Grant Notley (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1986), 213Google Scholar; Palmer, Howard and Palmer, Tamara, Alberta: A New History (Edmonton: Hurtig, 1990), 325Google Scholar; and Flanagan, Thomas and Lee, Martha, “From Social Credit to Social Conservatism: The Evolution of an Ideology,” Prairie Forum 16 (1991), 220Google Scholar. Other writers espousing the general interpretation considered here include Gibbins, Roger, Prairie Politics and Society: Regionalism in Decline (Toronto: Butterworths, 1980), 137–39Google Scholar; and Engelmann, Frederick C., “Grant Notley and Democracy in Alberta,” in L. Pratt, ed., Essays in Honour of Grant Notley, 173, 175–76.Google Scholar

5 Edmonton Journal, August 31, 1971, 5.Google Scholar

6 Barr, John J., The Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of Social Credit in Alberta (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974), 247.Google Scholar

7 The party received 54 per cent of the vote in the province as a whole in 1935, and 43 per cent of the total vote in 1940 (Government of Alberta, A Report on Alberta Elections: 1905–1984 [Edmonton: Office of the Chief Electoral Officer, 1983], 49–59).Google Scholar

8 The figures cited for the election of 1935 are taken from Bell, Edward, “Class Voting in the First Alberta Social Credit Election,” this Journal 23 (1990), 523Google Scholar; and for 1940 from Bell, Edward, Social Classes and Social Credit in Alberta (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, forthcoming)Google Scholar, chap. 8.

9 One indication of the lower class positions of rural dwellers is that they tend to make less money than people in cities. In 1931, the average annual family income of those engaged in agriculture in Alberta was $523, whereas the average family income in Calgary was $1,686 and in Edmonton $1,576. In 1971 the average family income for farmers was $6,223; the average family income in Calgary was $10,943 and in Edmonton $10,699 (Census of Canada 1931, Vol. 5: Population [Ottawa: King's Printer], 699; 1971 Census of Canada, Incomes of Families, Family Heads and Non-Family Persons, Catalogue 93–724, Vol. 2, Part 2, Bulletin 2.2–12 [Ottawa: Statistics Canada], 81–2, 87–1 ).Google Scholar

10 Government of Alberta, A Report on Alberta Elections, 61–105Google Scholar. Urban constituencies include Calgary, Edmonton, Lethbridge and Medicine Hat for all eight elections, Red Deer for elections from 1955 to 1971, and Grande Prairie for the 1967 and 1971 elections.

11 Richards, and Pratt, , Prairie Capitalism, 166–67.Google Scholar

12 Peter Lougheed assumed the leadership of the Conservatives in 1965; Manning retired in 1968 and was succeeded by Harry Strom.

13 Government of Alberta, A Report on Alberta Elections, 93–96.Google Scholar

14 Of those surveyed, 53 per cent claimed to have voted Social Credit, yet in the election the party received 45 per cent of the vote. Conservative support among respondents was 25 per cent, whereas they received 26 per cent of the vote. Liberal support was over-reported by four percentage points; New Democratic party support was under-reported by eight points. The adjusted figures were arrived at by multiplying the original frequencies in each cell by the percentage by which the support for the party in the entire sample was under- or over-reported.

15 The terms “old middle class” and “new middle class” are seldom defined by those using them. Generally, and in the present article, the “old middle class” refers to the self-employed who are not members of the bourgeoisie proper: independent professionals, farmers, artisans and so forth. The “new middle class” refers to non-manual, salaried employees, such as professionals, clerical workers, bureaucrats and others who are not self-employed. The “proprietor-managerial”; category in Table 1 thus includes members of both the old and new middle classes (and possibly a very small number of bourgeois respondents) and so is not an ideal indicator of new middle-class party preferences. For a discussion of these class definitions see Hamilton, Richard, Restraining Myths: Critical Studies of U.S. Social Structure and Politics (Toronto: John Wiley and Sons, 1975), 10–11.Google Scholar

16 Barr, , The Dynasty, 124.Google Scholar

17 Foster, Peter, The Blue-Eyed Sheiks: The Canadian Oil Establishment (Toronto: Collins, 1979), 38.Google Scholar

18 Palmer, and Palmer, , “The 1971 Election,” 125.Google Scholar

19 Government of Alberta, A Report on Alberta Elections, 13–17.Google Scholar

20 Ibid.

21 Males only are examined in order to avoid the methodological problem of classifying spouses as members of different social classes. In previous decades, women who worked outside the home and had working-class husbands were often employed in low-paying clerical jobs. A breakdown of the workforce containing both males and females would classify the husband as working-class and the wife as middle-class, yet the couple's orientations and lifestyle would be more working-class than middle-class. Ideally, data that classify households by the person, male or female, with the highest status job or highest income should be used, but such data are unavailable for 1971.

22 Table 3 does not include a category for the upper class or bourgeoisie, which would have represented approximately 1 per cent of the population. This category was not included as it was unclear as to how the census classified such people; in all likelihood, they are included in the non-manual occupations, making the proportion in this category in Table 3 slightly inflated.

23 Macpherson, C. B., Democracy in Alberta: Social Credit and the Party System (2nd ed.; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962).Google Scholar

24 See ibid., 10–21, 205.

25 In addition to the references cited in footnote 8 and the data contained in Table 1, see Anderson, Owen, “The Alberta Social Credit Party: An Empirical Analysis of Membership, Characteristics, Participation and Opinions” (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Alberta, 1972), 46Google Scholar. Anderson cites an unpublished province-wide public opinion poll commissioned by the Alberta Social Credit League in 1956 which estimated the levels of support for Social Credit in various occupational categories, including the following: farmer, 51 per cent; semi-skilled industrial, 52 per cent; skilled labour, 50 per cent; business owner and professional, 42 per cent; and other white collar 45 percent.

26 Figures taken from Table 3.

27 This article focusses on the “mass” or popular support for Social Credit. The party membership was demographically different from its mass base, and comes closer to what the conventional accounts describe as typical of Social Credit supporters. See Anderson, , The Alberta Social Credit PartyGoogle Scholar, chap. 5, for a breakdown of the party membership.

28 Government of Alberta, A Report on Alberta Elections, 17.Google Scholar

29 Using the four occupational categories shown in Table 4, the unadjusted survey results show 63 per cent support for the Conservatives, yet the party actually took only 46 per cent of the popular vote; Social Credit took 41 per cent of the popular vote, yet the survey indicates 27 per cent support. The survey versus actual results for the New Democratic and Liberal parties respectively are as follows: 9 per cent survey, 11 percent actual; 1 per cent survey, 1 per cent actual.

30 Palmer, and Palmer, (“The 1971 Election,” 126)Google Scholar acknowledge that the Conservatives received substantial rural support in 1971. They attribute this to three things: the Conservatives and Social Credit had similar rural policies, leaving rural voters with no compelling reason to vote for the latter; rural Albertans had been used to voting Conservative in federal elections since that party's sweep in 1958 under John Diefenbaker; and “what is perhaps most important” was “the penetration of urban-life [sic] styles and values into rural life, largely through the mass media”; (ibid.). This explanation is problematic, however, as it would predict the decline of Social Credit earlier than it actually occurred. Considering first what is presented as the most important component of the explanation, it seems unlikely that urban values did not penetrate rural areas from 1935 to 1967, yet did so between 1967 and 1971. This element of the explanation also assumes that rural dwellers finally developed the same dislike for the Social Credit party as urbanites always had. But as shown above, Social Credit had enjoyed considerable urban support throughout its tenure. As for the Diefenbaker sweep of 1958, the authors do not explain why rural Albertans would wait three elections before voting Conservative provincially. Also, if both parties had the same rural policies, policy factors did not favour either party.

31 Government of Alberta, A Report on Alberta Elections, 101–05.Google Scholar

32 See Barr, , The DynastyGoogle Scholar, chaps. 10–13; Hustak, Allan, Peter Lougheed (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1979)Google Scholar, chaps. 4–8; and Wood, David G., The Lougheed Legacy (Toronto: Key Porter, 1985)Google Scholar, chaps. 4–5.

33 Edmonton Journal, August 7, 1971, 7.Google Scholar

34 Scown writes that “ideological differences appeared to be minimal between the Social Credit and Conservative parties. The Conservatives were offering basically the same policies but with updated packaging and advertising” (“A History and Analysis of the 1971 Alberta General Election” [unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Calgary, 1973], 41Google Scholar). For similar assessments see Palmer, and Palmer, , “The 1971 Election,” 128–29Google Scholar (they also make the point that the “1971 campaign was not, of course, geared to the questions of urbanization, secularization, or interprovincial mobility discussed in this paper”;); Hustak, , Peter Lougheed, 138Google Scholar; and Finkel, Alvin, The Social Credit Phenomenon in Alberta (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 189–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Richards and Pratt point out that Lougheed maintained that a Conservative government would take a more activist role in diversifying the provincial economy than the Social Credit government had (Prairie Capitalism, 169–70Google Scholar).

35 Manning, Preston, The New Canada (Toronto: Macmillan, 1992), 47–48.Google Scholar

36 Palmer, and Palmer, , “The 1971 Election,”; 125.Google Scholar

37 Richards, and Pratt, , Prairie Capitalism, 165.Google Scholar

38 See Barr, , The Dynasty, 199–200.Google Scholar

39 Edmonton Journal, August 28, 1971, 71.Google Scholar

40 Manning, Ernest, Realignment: A Challenge to Thoughtful Canadians (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1967).Google Scholar

41 Manning, , The New Canada, 89.Google Scholar

42 Barr, , The Dynasty, 239, 243.Google Scholar

43 Edmonton Journal, August 26, 1971, 1.Google Scholar