Big Tents, Shifting Stakes: A Changing Landscape of Canada’s Brokerage Politics

• In Event: Political Party Strategies and Ideologies / Electoral Boundaries

Abstract

Does the brokerage model still capture the dynamics of party competition in Canada in an era of intense polarization? A defining feature of Canadian politics has long been the distinctive character of brokerage party politics in which parties’ ostensible ideological commitments are softened if not sacrificed to secure a particular configuration of votes necessary under the first-past-the-post electoral system. In effect, so-called big tent parties employ a political strategy characterized by malleability verging on ideological agnosticism as they endeavor to build broad coalitions of interest groups from across the Canadian electorate. At the federal level this has historically produced a contest between the Liberal Party and various manifestations of the Conservative Party for the presumably vote-rich and plastic center of the Canadian ideological landscape.

The metaphorical stakes of Canada’s big tent parties, however, are not fixed. The configuration of ideas and interests to which parties attach themselves has shifted over time with implications for voter alignment. This paper offers a novel empirical analysis of these changes over the last decade by leveraging data from Vote Compass, a voting advice application operated during the four Canadian federal elections held between 2011 and 2021. Between 1.6 and 2 million respondents were surveyed on a wide range of policy issues using Vote Compass during each election. Detailed policy positions of the parties contesting each election were also collected in order to calibrate the instrument. We use these data to model the contours of each party in terms of the space it occupies in a multidimensional construct of the Canadian ideological landscape. We then apply this model across time to observe how said contours change, exploring not only how the shape of big tent parties transforms over time but also which segments of the electorate are included in and excluded from each tent as the stakes shift. The uniquely sample size made available by the Vote Compass data permits us to examine in granular detail both the ideological and demographic constituencies that are enfranchised or disenfranchised in this process.

The results of this analysis offer valuable insights into how the Canadian model of brokerage politics operates in an era of increased political polarization in which parties are increasingly affixing themselves to overt ideological commitments.

Authors

• Clifton van der Linden, McMaster University

• Ori Freiman, Digital Society Lab, McMaster University

• John R. McAndrews, McMaster University

• Alexander Shestopaloff, Queen Mary University of London