Stephen Clarkson's The Big Red Machine offers an insightful chronicle of the Liberal Party of Canada's electoral behaviour over a period of thirty years. By bringing together revised versions of his previously published accounts of the Liberal Party's successes and failures in the nine general elections held between 1974 and 2004, Clarkson provides a unique opportunity for serious reflection on Liberal Party dominance of twentieth-century Canadian politics. Beyond that, however, his accessible and compelling presentation of the story of Liberal electoral politics offers a nostalgic review of the events and personalities that shaped the political journey from Pierre Elliott Trudeau to Paul Martin. In accomplishing this, Clarkson has produced a book that will be of as much interest to non-academic followers of Canadian politics as it is to serious students of partisan politics.

Those who are interested in understanding the determinants of political success will appreciate the careful way in which each chapter explores the factors that influence electoral outcomes, including the strategic dimensions of party and campaign organization, leadership and the leader's campaign, advertising and media coverage, policy, and financing. While Clarkson cautions that we cannot “derive simple lessons from history and apply them to future campaigns” (265), the process of reviewing nine election campaigns in one volume sheds considerable light on the complex role these factors played in, for example, the Liberal's 1974 victory and Chrétien's three consecutive majorities, as well as the Trudeau government's defeat in 1979 and the Turner debacle of 1984. Quantitative voting behaviour studies play only a minor role in Clarkson's analysis of electoral outcomes. Instead, he relies on a careful review of events—often made more compelling by the sense of insider knowledge his writing exudes—to allow for a rich interpretation of electoral success and failure.

Students of party politics will appreciate Clarkson's effort to use his book's introduction and conclusion to confront what has become the dominant approach to studying Canadian party politics and party system change—that is, the “party systems approach” popularized by Ken Carty, Bill Cross, Lisa Young and a number of other leading researchers. Many readers will recall that Clarkson's analysis of the Liberal Party's 2000 campaign challenged Carty, Cross and Young's interpretation of Canada's “fourth party system.” In particular, he disputed their claim that regionalization of party support during the 1990s coincided with the fragmentation of party politics into a series of distinct regional party subsystems that undermined the pan-Canadian character of party politics prior to the critical election of 1993.

Clarkson is correct to stress the ways in which evidence from his studies of the Liberal Party conflict with the Carty group's characterization of the fourth party system. But such deviation is to be expected. The identified characteristics of any party system are never anything more than the norms that tend to be reflected in the operation of parties and partisan politics. There will always be aspects of the party system that seem out of step, more in tune with a previous (or future) party system. As such, if Clarkson had abandoned his dogged insistence that the Carty group has incorrectly characterized the most recent transformation in the character of the Canadian party system, and instead opted to work toward a respecification of the character and norms of this system, he could have made a more significant contribution.

As a political economist, Clarkson is keenly aware of the value of historical conjunctural analysis of the sort associated with the party systems approach. This is evident when, in the concluding chapter, he discusses how micro-level critical elections (such as the 1993 election) take place in a macro-level context that is occasionally transformed—such as when the postwar political and economic paradigm was superseded by a neoliberal political economy. Unfortunately, he fails to make full use of this political economic analysis in rethinking his own perspective on the party systems approach. He contends that the ground moves with political economic events like the neoliberal turn, but this analysis is merely “added on,” rather than integrated into his perspective on party system change.

The Big Red Machine is an example of scholarship emerging from years of careful and sustained observation. It provides a fascinating review of thirty years of Liberal history. It offers very thoughtful analysis of the potential role of leadership, organization, policy, communication and finances in electoral success and failure. It also provides considerable food for thought to those interested in the study of party systems. With this, Stephen Clarkson has made another important contribution to the study of Canadian politics.