Abstract
The classic studies of voting behaviour have usually examined the way in which workers differ from businessmen, Protestants from Catholics, rural residents from urban ones, young persons from old persons, males from females. Numerous generalizations have been erected, which have seemed to hold for most American elections, and a number of British ones. Workers are more likely to vote for a left-wing party than are businessmen; so are Catholics, urban residents, youth, and men.2 No detailed surveys of the social bases of Canadian voting behaviour have been done, and this paper is an attempt to fill one small hole of the many that exist.
I am indebted to Miss Byrne Hope Sanders, Director of the Canadian Institute of Public Opinion, for generously allowing access to the CIPO survey analysed here.
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Notes
See S. M. Lipset, Political Man (New York, 1960), chapters 6, 7, and 8 for a summary of the evidence of these generalizations.
See J. M. Beck and D. J. Dooley, “Party Images in Canada”, Queen’s Quarterly, LXVII (Autumn 1960), pp. 431–88, for a discussion of this point. See also
Howard M. Scarrow, “Federal-Provincial Voting Patterns in Canada”, Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, XXVI, no. 2 (May 1960), pp. 289–98, for a discussion of possible misinterpretations of this pattern of provincial-national voting.
For a comparison of Canada with the United States, Britain, and Australia, which documents the conclusion that social class is far less important for voting behaviour in Canada than in any of the other Anglo-American countries, see R. Alford, Party and Society (Chicago, 1963).
See the papers by Lemieux and Irvine in John Meisel (ed.), Papers on the 1962 Election (Toronto, 1965).
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© 1968 The Macmillan Company of Canada Limited
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Alford, R.R. (1968). The Social Bases of Political Cleavage in 1962. In: Blishen, B.R., Jones, F.E., Naegele, K.D., Porter, J. (eds) Canadian Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-81601-9_29
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