A New Class Politics in Canada? From Brokerage Politics to Polarization

• In Event: Electoral Behaviour in Canada

Abstract

It has long been argued that class voting in Canadian federal politics is weak relative to other Western democracies (e.g., Gidengil, 1992; Kay and Perella, 2012; Johnston, 2015). Canada has also been recognized as a country largely immune to mainstream nativist politics (e.g., Gordon et al., 2019; Reitz, 2012). In keeping with the conference theme of analyzing pluralism, we argue that an emerging class divide around questions of immigration, national identity and “identity liberalism” threatens to upset both previous realities (Sobolewska and Ford, 2020). Indeed, stronger patterns of class voting are emerging in Canada, however they do not conform to the traditional expectations of working-class support for left-wing parties. Instead of working-class votes going predominantly to left-wing parties, as they did in many industrialized democracies in the postwar period, those voters are increasingly gravitating to the right-wing party, the Conservative Party of Canada, due to their alignment on questions of identity and nativism. Using data from three federal Vote Compass Post Election Surveys (n = ~50,000), we model class-based switching patterns in the electorate. We therefore document that Canada is undergoing the same pattern of “social inversion” documented in other Western countries, wherein a metropolitan, professional class is coming to dominate left-wing parties and leading those parties away from working-class voters (e.g., Cutts et al, 2020; Piketty, 2019). By generating this new class-based cleavage, concerns around immigration and identity liberalism may bring about the rise of the kinds of partisan polarization seen elsewhere.

Authors

• Joshua C. Gordon, Simon Fraser University

• Eric P. Kaufmann, Birkbeck College, University of London