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Campaign Dynamics in the 2000 Canadian Election: How the Leader Debates Salvaged the Conservative Party

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 April 2017

André Blais ,
Elisabeth Gidengil ,
Richard Nadeau  and
Neil Nevitte
André Blais
Affiliation:
professor in the department of political science and fellow with CIREQ (Centre interuniversitaire de recherche en économic quantitative) at the Université de Montréal. He has published twelve books and more than one hundred articles in journals such as The American Journal of Political Science, The British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and Public Choice. He was a member of the editorial board of the International Encyclopedia of Elections, and he is the principal co-investigator of the Canadian Election Study. He can be contacted at blais@pol.umontreal.ca.
Elisabeth Gidengil
Affiliation:
professor in the department of political science at McGill University. Her research interests are voting behavior and public opinion, gender, media and public behavior, and gender and representation. She has co-authored four books and written a mayriad of articles for journals such as Women & Politics, The Canadian Journal of Political Science, and Party Politics. Her current research concerns the 2000 Canadian Election. She can be reached at elisabeth.gidengil@mcgill.ca.
Richard Nadeau
Affiliation:
professor in the department of political science at the Université de Montréal. His research interests include the sources and effects of political and economic waitings, cognitive processes of public opinion, and electoral behavior in Western democracies. He has published articles in The American Political Science Review, Public Opinion Quarterly, and The Canadian Political Science Review. He can be contacted at richard.nadeau@umontreal.ca.
Neil Nevitte
Affiliation:
professor in the department of political science at the University of Toronto. He is the author of The Decline of Deference: Canadian Value Change in Comparative Perspective, 1981–1990 (1996) and the coauthor of several books, including Unsteady State: The 1997 Canadian Federal Election (2000) and A Question of Ethics: Canadians Speak Out (1998). He can be contacted at nnevitte@chass.utoronto.ca.
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Abstract

Canada's Progressive Conservative Party faced the prospects of electoral annihilation going into the 2000 election. In the 1993 election, the party suffered what must surely be the most humiliating defeat ever visited upon an incumbent party; its share of the popular vote plummeted from 43% to 16% and it was reduced to a mere two seats (1%, down from 57%). So complete was the collapse that the party—one of the two parties that had alternated in power since Confederation in 1867—lost its official status in the House of Commons.A political party must have at least 12 seats to be recognized officially as a political party. This status confers significant benefits, such as being able to obtain funding and to ask questions at the highly visible question period. Meanwhile, the new party of the Right—the Reform Party—managed to get 19% of the vote and, thanks to the concentration of its support in western Canada, this translated into 52 seats.For an analysis of that spectacular change, see Johnston et al. 1996.

Type
FEATURES
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , January 2003 , pp. 45 - 50
Copyright
2003 by the American Political Science Association

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References

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