Fighting for Votes documents the links between political parties, the mass media and voters in the 2011 Ontario general election. The election took place at a time when the province's economy was growing more slowly than in much of the rest of the country and its unemployment rate was significantly above the national average. The economy was performing so poorly that Ontario was considered a “have-not” province and in that year the provincial government received $2.2 billion in equalization payments. In spite of these federal transfers, the provincial government still incurred a $13 billion fiscal deficit, the fourth in a long string of such deficits and one that was larger, as a share of the economy, than for any other government in the country.
Consistent with these highly negative economic indicators for what had been one of Canada's most prosperous provinces, all three of the major parties contesting the election made similar issues, but particularly the state of the economy, their main focus. The ruling Liberals stressed job creation, education, health care and the environment. The Progressive Conservatives stressed taxation, job creation, debt and spending and referred to Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty as the “taxman” and blamed him for job losses. The New Democrats promised to remove the harmonized sales tax (HST) from gasoline and home heating costs and also talked a lot about health care.
Fighting for Votes follows a long tradition in Canada of researching and analyzing one particular election campaign and its outcome. That tradition goes back at least as far as John Meisel's work on the federal elections of 1957 and the 1960s, which in turn were based on the Nuffield College election studies. However, Fighting for Votes is a rare example of a piece of research dealing in a thorough and substantive manner with an election at the sub-national level. It was written by four political scientists at three Ontario universities and, unlike some other election studies which consist of individual chapters each written by a different author or authors, the result here is a combined and consolidated work of the four scholars involved in the research.
Fighting for Votes sketches out the economic and political setting, discusses each party's campaign strategy and media coverage of those campaigns, the role of party leaders and their performances in the televised debate, and which voters supported which party. There is an innovative chapter on the online e-campaign which discusses the use of social media, including websites, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. In contrast, the chapter on the more conventional mass media is somewhat disappointing as it deals only with one media outlet in one city, the Toronto Star. Given that newspaper's traditional support for the Liberal party, it might have been preferable to have a sample of several news outlets across the province.
A two-wave internet survey of voters was conducted by Harris/Decima, one survey collected during the campaign period and one during the post-election period. These surveys included questions dealing with sociodemographic characteristics and partisanship and ideology. There were also questions about specific issue concerns, questions asking for evaluations of party leaders and questions about concerns carried over from federal politics. Given the methodological sophistication of the authors' analysis of voter preferences, it was somewhat disconcerting to find that, of their respondents who were Catholics, a majority supported the Progressive Conservatives. The authors refer to this finding as “an important demographic shift” instead of the more likely explanation that it reflected an anomaly in their data.
The authors' most important conclusion is that each of the three major parties operated within scripted silos, focusing on issues decided months before the campaign even began and attempting to attract voters independently of one another without regard for what the other parties were saying. The authors conclude that if each party sticks to its message without engaging in a serious debate about the issues, the degree of democratic competition and the role of political parties will be reduced. This lack of real debate also may be linked directly to lower voter turnout. The mass media did not help alleviate these problems because they tended to treat the election as if it was a horse race between parties and their leaders, instead of discussing the major issues in the campaign.
Fighting for Votes is not only about one particular election whose results were overtaken three years later by yet another general election. Within the Ontario context, the 2011 election was important because it produced a minority government, because it led to a number of major political scandals and because the premier who was re-elected was soon to resign. It was also important because it led to the premier's replacement by Kathleen Wynne, Ontario's first female premier, who would go on to win a majority government in 2014. In the more general sense, Fighting for Votes not only has a lot to contribute to our knowledge of Ontario politics but it also has a lot to say about the behaviour of politicians, political parties, the media and the voters. It is a welcome addition to our knowledge of Canadian politics and electoral behaviour.
