The dramatic breakthrough of two new political parties in the
watershed federal election of October 25, 1993, still reverberates through
Canadian politics to this day. In that election, the Bloc
Québécois received 49 per cent of the vote in Quebec and
captured enough seats to form the official opposition, while the Reform
party got 38 per cent of the vote in the Western provinces and won only
two seats less than the Bloc. The emergence in 1993 of what some have
labelled Canada's “fourth party system” (Bickerton et al., 1999; Carty et
al., 2000) has considerably modified the configuration of partisan
competition to which Canadian voters were accustomed. Despite the defeat
of the sovereignty option in the 1995 Quebec referendum, the Bloc has
managed to keep an important number of seats in the House of Commons for
most of the past decade. The Reform party has since evolved into the
Canadian Alliance before merging with the Progressive Conservative party,
with the new merged party now having reasonable hopes of eventually
forming a national government.
Considering the major impact the rise of two new parties in 1993 has
had on national politics, it is surprising that relatively few empirical
efforts have been devoted to the study of its specific causes. Some
accounts of the 1993 results refer to Maurice Pinard's (1971) well-known explanation of the emergence of the
Social Credit party in Quebec in the June 1962 federal election. Indeed,
the 1993 election shares important similarities with the 1962 contest that
provided the original testing ground for Pinard's theory. Both
elections saw the sudden rise of third parties and were held during
periods of economic hardship which, Pinard argued, is usually an important
condition for the electoral success of third-party movements. For these
reasons, the link with Pinard's theory appears obvious and is usually
assumed without being empirically verified. Did one-party dominance and
strains really play a role in the rise of Reform in the West and of the
Bloc in Quebec in the 1993 Canadian federal election? Our study proposes a
new empirical test of Pinard's argument applied to the 1993 case,
using individual-level survey data from the Canadian Election Study.
The Pinard Argument
Pinard's (1971) study looked at the
electoral breakthrough of Social Credit in Quebec in the 1962 federal
election. Having obtained only 0.6 per cent of the provincial vote and no
seats in the preceding election, Social Credit suddenly managed to get 26
per cent of the vote and to capture a third of the Quebec seats in the
Canadian House of Commons. To account for the rise of Social Credit,
Pinard proposed a theoretical model based on Smelser's (1963) value-added scheme elaborated to explain any
episode of collective behaviour. Of the six structural determinants of
collective behaviour identified by Smelser, Pinard maintained that two
were necessary and decisive for the rise of a third party.1
For the purpose of this article, we adopt
Pinard's (1973: 455) definition of a third
party “as any non-traditional party which has not yet been in power.
It thus remains in the eyes of the voters as an untried
alternative.”
First is the presence of “strain” at the moment of the
election, often—but not always—in the form of a deterioration
of the economy. A third party can hope to make significant electoral
inroads by mobilizing voters' discontent towards the incumbent party.
This discontent is particularly high when it is fueled by specific
grievances held against the government. Pinard's analysis focused on
the economic hardship that affected Quebec's rural population in the
early 1960s as the principal strain conducive to the rise of Social Credit
in that province. Economic grievances arise when large segments of the
population are affected by a deteriorating economy, caused for example by
a recession, a depression, or a deep restructuring of the economy.
Pinard's emphasis is on economic change. The strain lies in a change
for the worse in people's economic situation prior to the election,
as opposed to a long-term strain like chronic poverty which rather tends
to inhibit support for third parties. Smelser's concept of
“strain,” however, is abstract and can embrace many forms.
Although a steep economic decline was possibly a crucial factor in the
1962 election in Quebec, other types of grievances could also be expected
to contribute to the rise of third parties in other elections, such as
ethnic, linguistic, class or regional grievances.2
“… [P]olitical movements are a response
to gaps created between a group's expectations and its actual
conditions. Whether this gap results from the types of changes just
described [economic changes for the worse], or from other
sources, does not matter too much” (Pinard,
1971: 119).
But for a third party to electorally benefit from the presence of such
strain, the main opposition party must not be viewed by the voters as a
viable alternative to the incumbent party. If the main opposition party is
indeed “strong,” it will most likely attract the discontented
voters' support and the third party will not benefit from strain;
such a situation often leads instead to a government turnover. The second
condition identified by Pinard is thus a conducive situation of one-party
dominance. In other words, strain creates readiness among the dissatisfied
voters to vote against the incumbent party, but it is the level of
competitiveness of the party system which structures the courses of action
available to these voters. If they perceive the main opposition party to
be weak; that is, electorally dominated by the incumbent party, then they
will turn en masse to a third party in order to express their grievances.
Pinard contended that this is exactly what happened in the case of Social
Credit in 1962, since the federal Conservatives were historically
“weak” in Quebec. He observed a negative relationship at the
constituency level between the electoral strength of the Conservatives in
the 1957 and 1958 federal elections on the one hand, and the success of
Social Credit in the 1962 election on the other.
A number of scholars criticized this model when it was first suggested
by Pinard three decades ago. As it happens, the questions and doubts
raised by these people all dealt with the “one-party
dominance” part of the argument. The first scholar to question the
relevance of one-party dominance as a factor in explaining the rise of
third parties was Vincent Lemieux (1965).3
While his book was published in 1971, Pinard
first presented his argument in a 1964
paper.
According to him, the main problem with Pinard's
argument concerning the Social Credit success in 1962 is that the
Conservatives, identified by Pinard as the weak “opposition”
party in Quebec, had won 50 out of the 75 Quebec ridings in the preceding
1958 election; the Liberals were the actual opposition party in 1962, not
the Conservatives.
4 The fact that the
Conservatives were the incumbents in 1962 led Pinard (1971: 26) to formulate a “two-step”
variation of his basic model: Quebec voters turned first to the weak
traditional opposition party in 1958, then switched to a third party in
1962 when it was clear that the Conservatives failed at correcting the bad
economic situation.
Lemieux suggested instead that the
configuration of the party system at the time of the election was a more
important condition than the past strength of the parties. For Graham
White (
1973), “one-party dominance”
was a relativistic concept which had many dimensions, rendering difficult
the effort to operationalize it in a unique and universal way. What is
more, the concept doesn't help to explain many cases of third-party
successes, especially “class parties” that arise at times of
intense dissatisfaction within particular social classes towards the party
system. André Blais (
1973) also
emphasized the abstract nature of the concept of one-party dominance and
the operationalization problems it created. Testing five different
aggregate indicators of predominance, Blais found that only two supported
the theory. He concluded that structural conduciveness was not a
determining factor in explaining the rise of third parties.
More recent work, however, has tended to rehabilitate the relevance of
one-party dominance as a condition for the rise of third parties.
Examining third-party support in English constituencies, Monroe Eagles and
Stephen Erfle (1993) concluded that one-party
dominance was a significant factor accounting for the breakthrough of the
SDP/Liberal Alliance in the 1983 British general election. Nelson
Michaud (1999) tested Pinard's model with
the purpose of explaining the sudden success of the Reform party in the
1993 Canadian federal election. Looking at Reform support in the four
Western provinces, and using constituency-level ecological data, he found
that support for Reform in 1993 was significantly higher in ridings that
were previously dominated by the incumbent Conservatives in the 1984 and
1988 elections. Similarly applying Pinard's framework to the study of
the New Democratic party's breakthrough in Atlantic Canada in the
1997 federal election, Stephen White (2000)
finally showed that the collapse of the Conservatives in some of the
region's ridings in 1993 significantly helped to explain the
NDP's electoral success in 1997.
Pinard nonetheless replied to his early critiques by reformulating his
one-party dominance condition into “a more general condition of
structural conduciveness, that of the political nonrepresentation of
social groups through the party system” (1973: 442). He proposed to distinguish between two
types of third parties: protest ones like Social Credit, and radical (or
ideological) ones like the Farmers and Labour movements and like the Parti
Québécois. Following this distinction, one-party dominance
would be a conducive factor for the rise of protest parties only, whereas
it would be an irrelevant factor for the rise of radical parties. As
Pinard explained, popular support for a protest movement “is more
likely to be based on generalized beliefs of discontent than on a shared,
articulated ideology” (1973: 443). By
contrast, in a radical party, class or communal consciousness and values
are imbedded in a strong ideology that acts as the main factor of mass
mobilization. Minor parties of the radical type can thus arise in party
systems characterized by strong competition, as long as there is a large
pool of voters whose ideological positions are not represented through the
existing parties.
The implication for the study of the 1993 case is that we should
expect one-party dominance to have been an important factor in the Reform
party's rise but not in the emergence of the Bloc
Québécois. Founded in 1990 with the purpose of promoting the
sovereignty of Quebec, the Bloc fits Pinard's definition of a radical
party. It provided a new vehicle for sovereignist voters whose main
interest had yet to be represented through the existing federal party
system. On the other hand, Reform shared important similarities with
previous protest movements from Western Canada in that its rhetoric
strongly relied on regional, economic and institutional discontent (Flanagan, 1995; Laycock,
2002).
Although the relevance of strain or grievances as a necessary
condition for the rise of third parties has not been the subject of
intense debate in the literature, few empirical studies have attempted to
verify the actual impact of grievances on third-party voting. Descriptive
accounts of the 1993 Canadian federal election often attribute the success
of the Reform party in that election to economic discontent. Voters'
frustrations supposedly were fueled by the worst recession of the postwar
period, the restructuring of the Canadian economy following the adoption
in 1989 of the Free Trade Agreement with the United States, as well as by
some unpopular economic decisions made by the Mulroney government such as
the imposition of the Goods and Services Tax (Gagnon
and Tanguay, 1996: 127; Clarke and Kornberg,
1996: 470). Similarly, it is often argued that in addition to the
strong support of sovereignist voters, the Bloc Québécois
also attracted support from voters who were dissatisfied with their
economic condition prior to the 1993 election (Noël, 1994: 24; Blais et al.,
1995; Gagnon and Tanguay, 1996: 128). One
notable exception to this line of argument, however, comes from
Michaud's (1999) study which casts some
doubts on the relevance of economic strain since his analysis failed to
uncover a significant relationship between Reform's
constituency-level support and local unemployment rates at the time of the
1993 election.
There are good reasons to believe that non-economic grievances were
also related to the rise of the Reform party and the Bloc in 1993. The
birth of these two new parties can be attributed to long-standing
alienation these regions felt towards the federal government. In Quebec,
regional discontent is rooted in historical ethno-linguistic grievances
that were intensified when the Meech Lake constitutional accord failed to
be ratified in June of 1990 (Pinard et al.,
1997: 76-81). This accord aimed at the recognition of Quebec's
status as a “distinct society” within the Canadian federation,
and its failure directly led to the creation of the Bloc
Québécois. The rest of the country is not impervious to
regional grievances either. A sense of political inequality can also be
found in the Western provinces, which have long felt their interests to be
underrepresented in national politics (Gagnon and
Tanguay, 1996: 127; Clarke and Kornberg,
1996: 472). Regional alienation was indeed one of the main
motivations that sparked the creation of the Reform party in 1987, with
its famous initial slogan “The West Wants In.” One of the
concerns that galvanized the sense of alienation in the West at the time
was the Mulroney government's decision to award a defence maintenance
contract to Canadair of Montreal over what was widely seen as a cheaper
and technically superior bid by Bristol Aerospace of Winnipeg. In
addition, the failure of the Meech Lake Accord, which was perceived by
other Canadians as giving “too much” to Quebec, and that of
the 1992 Charlottetown Accord, which would have given the peripheral
regions more political input into Canada's central institutions, may
have contributed to the intensification of frustrations in the West on the
eve of the 1993 federal election (Johnston et al.,
1996).
As pointed out earlier, Pinard's theory of structural
conduciveness has generated few empirical tests. In particular, one-party
dominance and strain have never been tested together in a single analysis
at the micro level. Pinard (1971: 109-11) and
Michaud (1999) tested the two factors together
with ecological data, but this prevented them from testing the potential
impact of non-economic grievances on third-party support. Our study fills
these gaps by empirically assessing the effect of Pinard's
factors—one-party dominance and grievances (economic and
regional)—on the rise of the Reform party and the Bloc
Québécois in 1993, using individual-level survey data.
Data and Methodology
We use data from the 1993 Canadian Election Study. Estimations of vote
choice for the Bloc Québécois and the Reform party are
performed using logistic regression analysis. We perform separate logistic
regressions for each party; Bloc voting is estimated for Quebec
respondents only, while Reform voting is estimated for respondents from
the Western provinces only (Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British
Columbia).5
The dependent variables are
dummies taking the value of 1 if the respondent reported (in the
post-election wave) a vote for the Bloc (or Reform) and the value of 0 if
the respondent reported a vote for another party.
The micro level of analysis arguably represents the ideal context in
which Pinard's theory should be tested, for at least two reasons.
First, because grievances—whatever their source—are felt by
individuals, they should be measured using voters' actual opinions
and attitudes. Second, as Irvine (1972: 314) has
suggested, tests of the one-party dominance hypothesis should ideally use
“survey data on perceptions of the local party system” (see
also White, 1973: 407). Pinard (1973: 440) concurred by stating that “in the end
it is the people's perception of this condition that counts.”
The 1993 Canadian Election Study survey allows us to construct
individual-level measures of both voters' grievances and their
perceptions of the electoral strength and weakness of the parties.
Two relevant points should be made with regards to the
operationalization of Pinard's concept of one-party dominance at the
individual level. The first point is that one-party dominance is a
local factor: the appropriate focus must be the structure of
competition in the constituency (Eagles and Erfle,
1993: 96). In other words, the basis of measured perceptions of
predominance should be “the voters' own riding” (Pinard, 1973: 440). This is because in an electoral
system based on single-member plurality districts like the one in Canada,
the local competition matters more, in the end, than the national one
(Lanoue and Bowler, 1998; Sayers, 1999). The second point is that Pinard, in
fact, insists more on the perceived electoral weakness of the second
traditional party than on the dominance of the other established party in
the riding. For Pinard (1973: 440), a one-party
dominant system is one in which the traditional alternative “cannot
be considered a serious challenger” to the dominant party. The
hypothesis to be tested, therefore, is that of a positive relationship at
the constituency level between the weakness of the second established
party and the strength of the third party (Pinard,
1971: 23).
As a consequence, our indicator of electoral conduciveness is the
perceived weakness of the second traditional party in the
respondent's constituency.6
Other
possible indicators of one-party dominance were also tested, like the
individual scores of the Conservatives and the Liberals, as well as the
gap between the Conservative and the Liberal scores (similar to Eagles and Erfle, 1993), and they produced about the
same results as those presented in this article. We also tested measures
of one-party dominance using perceptions about the parties' chances
of winning at the national level. Results indicate that national
measures of predominance are less strongly correlated to third-party
voting than local measures, which lends support to the view that one-party
dominance is mostly a local factor.
Respondents were asked to
estimate each party's chances of winning in their riding using a
scale from 0 to 100, where 0 meant no chance at all and 100 meant certain
victory. The variable is the lowest of the two standardized scores given
to the Conservative party and the Liberal party.
7 Respondents were required to provide a score for all parties
to be included in the analysis. The scores were standardized (readjusted)
by dividing each party's score by the total scores given to all the
parties, so as to add up to 100 (see Bilodeau,
2000).
That score was then rescaled (divided by 100) and
was reversed in order to obtain a positive regression coefficient, so that
the minimum score of .50 means the second party is perceived as tied with
the other traditional party for the first place in the riding and the
maximum score of 1 means it has no chance at all to win in the riding.
8 For example, say a respondent gave a
(readjusted) score of 50 to the Conservatives and of 35 to the Liberals,
we take the lowest of the two (35), divide it by 100 (.35) and reverse it
(× −1 + 1) to obtain a final value of .65.
This means
that the lower the value of this variable, the tighter the perceived
competition between the Conservative and the Liberal candidates in the
riding, and that the higher the value, the weaker the second established
party is perceived to be in the respondent's district.
Measuring voter grievances is a more straightforward task. What the
Pinard theory calls for is for voters to be angry with the government. We
test for two possible types of grievances: economic and regional (or
political). Economic discontent is measured on the basis of the
respondents' financial situation. Respondents saying their personal
financial situation got worse in the year prior to the election and who
blame the policies of the federal government for this situation can be
expected to hold economic grievances against the government (see also
Lewis-Beck, 1988: 36-39). Regional alienation is
tapped through perceptions of unfairness or inequality within the Canadian
federal system. Respondents who believe that the federal government gives
less attention to their province than to others can be expected to be
especially frustrated with the federal institutions of governance. These
voters feel that the political interests of their region are not heard by
the government, and they perceive that their province is deprived of a
significant voice within the federal system. These are important political
grievances that can be expected to facilitate the rise of regional third
parties (see also Pinard et al., 1997: 330;
Kornberg and Clarke, 1992: 174-75).9
The two variables are dummies coded 1 for
respondents expressing such grievances and 0 otherwise.
Our vote choice model contains several independent variables that are
included as controls. These are socio-demographic characteristics of the
voters, such as age, gender, education, income, religion, language and
ethnicity.10
All control variables are
standardized to run from 0 to 1, either as a dummy variable or as a scale
in the case of age, education and income (complete coding details
available from the author).
The model also includes party
identification dummy variables for respondents identifying very strongly
or fairly strongly to one of the competing parties. The inclusion of party
identification variables allows us to control for (or partial out) the
projection effect of partisanship on perceptions of the parties'
chances of winning the election and on feelings of regional alienation.
Finally, a variable measuring support for sovereignty is included for
Quebec to test the hypothesis that the Bloc is a “radical”
third party that attracts support mostly on the basis of social or
communal values.
11 The variable is a
five-point scale running from 0 (very opposed to sovereignty) to 1 (very
favourable to it).
Results
Table 1 presents the impact of one-party
dominance and strains on support for the Reform party and the Bloc
Québécois in the 1993 election.12
A total of 1,249 post-election interviews were conducted in
the four Western provinces for the 1993 CES, and a total of 864
post-election interviews were conducted in Quebec. The smaller Ns
in the regressions are due to missing data on some of the models'
variables.
For each party, the first column displays the logistic
regression estimates of the impact a variable has on the likelihood of
supporting the party. While the sign and significance of the logistic
coefficients are readily interpretable, the actual values of the logistic
coefficients are not since they change the dependent variable by a
log-likelihood ratio. For this reason, we also calculate and report in the
second column (effect) the change in mean predicted probabilities
13 The probabilities of voting Reform (or Bloc)
are derived from the formula: P = 1/(1 +
e−xb) where x is a matrix of
independent variables including the constant, and b is a vector
of coefficients that are to be estimated.
of supporting the party
due to each significant independent variable, controlling for the other
variables in the model. The change in probabilities is computed by varying
each significant variable, one by one, from its minimum to its maximum
value
14 The maximum value is 1 for all
independent variables; the minimum value is 0, except in the case of
perceived weakness where it is .50.
while holding all other
independent variables constant. The figure indicates the difference in the
probability of voting for the party that is due to that specific variable,
everything else being equal. Unlike the logistic coefficient, it provides
a precise measure of the strength of the relationship between the
independent variables and the incidence of voting Reform (or Bloc).
Table 1: Impact of Structural Factors on Third-Party Rise (Logistic
Regression Estimates)
The effects of control variables indicate that francophone respondents
were significantly drawn to the Bloc Québécois, whereas
males significantly supported the Reform party in Western Canada. However,
respondents of non-European ethnic groups had a significant likelihood of
voting for a party other than Reform. Not surprisingly, partisans from
other federal parties were significantly less likely to vote for either
Reform or the Bloc. The only exception to this pattern has to do with
Conservative partisans in the West: although they did not significantly
support the Reform party, neither were they tempted to vote for a party
other than Reform. Note also that in Quebec, the effect of identification
with the Conservative party is significant but less pronounced than that
of the other party identification variables. The results pertaining to
party identification confirm the Conservative party's fragility when
it entered the 1993 contest, due in part to the collapse of the electoral
coalition that helped bring Mulroney's Conservatives into office in
the 1980s (see also Nadeau et al., 1995; Carty et al., 2000: 37-43).
What about the impact of structural factors? As Pinard would
hypothesize, we can observe a statistically significant positive
relationship between the perceived weakness of the second traditional
party in the respondent's constituency on the one hand, and support
for the Reform party in Western Canada on the other. If perceptions move
from a tie between the two traditional parties (a value of .50) to an
extreme weakness of the second party (no chance at all to win, or a value
of 1) the probabilities of voting Reform increase by 18 points. This
result suggests that one-party dominance was a significant factor in the
electoral success of the Reform party in the West in the 1993 federal
election.15
Note that the addition of
ideology (measured through respondents' opinion on wanting higher
taxes to maintain social programs) to the Reform support model presented
in Table 1 does not affect in any way the
statistically significant effect of perceived weakness on Reform's
vote (results available from the author).
It also seems that
regional grievances had a substantial impact on Reform support. Western
voters who said their province received less attention from the federal
government were significantly more likely than others to vote for that
party. A feeling of regional alienation causes a five-point increase in
the probability of supporting Reform.
16 The
distribution of Pinard's structural factors differed across regions.
Notably, one-party dominance and regional alienation were more prevalent
factors in the West (means of .81 and .55, respectively) than in Ontario
(means of .74 and .38, respectively, with mean differences between the two
regions being statistically significant at p < .01), a
situation that may explain in part the greater success Reform had in the
Western provinces.
One-party dominance does not seem, however, to account for the rise of
the Bloc Québécois. This is mainly due to the inclusion of
sovereignty support as a predictor of the vote.17
If sovereignty support is removed from the Bloc voting model,
perceived weakness comes up significant at p < .01 with a
logistic regression coefficient of 2.02.
A move from being very
opposed to Quebec sovereignty to being very favourable to it causes a
major increase of 49 points in the probability of voting for the Bloc.
This indicates that, in the end, the extent to which the second
traditional party was weak (or not) did not really matter to Quebec voters
since many of them voted for the Bloc because it was a sovereignist party.
This finding is consistent with Pinard's revised theory according to
which one-party dominance is not a necessary condition for the emergence
of radical third parties. Regional alienation, on the other hand,
significantly contributed to the Bloc's success in 1993. Believing
that Quebec receives less attention from the federal government than the
other provinces increases one's likelihood of supporting the Bloc by
about nine points in that election. This direct effect of regional
grievances adds up to the indirect one that variable has on Bloc voting
through sovereignty support. Indeed, Quebec voters who felt regionally
alienated were also more likely to be sovereignists.
Finally, it appears that economic grievances had no significant impact
at all on third-party support. Perceptions of political inequality within
the federal system were more salient to vote choice in the 1993 Canadian
election than discontent with one's current financial situation and
the government's economic policies. This finding has two
implications. First, it indicates that, contrary to usual accounts of the
1993 Canadian election, economic strain did not play an important role in
the breakthrough of Reform and the Bloc. This conclusion is much in line
with Michaud's own (1999). Second, and
related, it shows that a narrow application of Pinard's theory based
on his 1962 results may be misleading. Economic grievances might have been
a key factor in the rise of Social Credit in the 1962 federal election in
Quebec, but it does not necessarily mean they are crucial for every case
of third-party success. In fact, as Jean-François Godbout and
Éric Bélanger (2002) have shown,
minor parties sometimes inhibit economic voting by exacerbating
non-economic issues and regional grievances, which seems to have been the
case in the election examined here.18
We
also verified for the possible presence of an interactive effect between
one-party dominance and grievances by introducing interactive terms in the
two regressions of Table 1. The interaction
terms had no statistically significant impact on vote choice, and the
signs of their coefficients went contrary to expectations (results
available from the author).
Conclusion
The empirical findings presented in this article offer a positive
verdict regarding the usefulness of Maurice Pinard's theory in
accounting for third-party successes in the 1993 Canadian federal
election. The results indicate that the extent to which the second major
party was perceived to be electorally weak at the constituency level
brought some Western voters to support the Reform party. One-party
dominance did not seem to be as significant a factor in the rise of the
Bloc Québécois, though. The Bloc being a radical party
giving expression to communal interests left unrepresented through the
other federal parties, this situation is accounted for by Pinard's
revised theory of one-party dominance. The results also show that the
intensification of political grievances prior to the election, manifested
in the form of regional alienation, positively contributed to the success
of both third parties. In contrast to the case of Social Credit in 1962,
however, economic grievances do not appear to have mattered to the rise of
third parties in the 1993 election.
Other factors, such as cynicism towards politics and the institutions
of governance, may also help explain the success of Reform and the Bloc in
the 1990s (see Bélanger, 2004; Bélanger and Nadeau, 2005). Nonetheless, the
Pinard theory provides important clues as to some of the conditions that
gave way to the 1993 earthquake in Canadian federal party politics. Our
demonstration has also shown that it is possible to devise a test of
Pinard's argument at the micro level. In particular, our
operationalization of one-party dominance using voters' actual
perceptions of the electoral strength of traditional parties in their
constituency adds to the relevance of the competitiveness of the local
party system as a factor conducive to the emergence of minor parties.
Pinard's conceptual distinction between protest and radical third
parties also proved to be appropriate in the case at hand, and offers a
sensible explanation as to why one-party dominance was not a significant
factor in the electoral success of the Bloc Québécois.
Lastly, the effect of political grievances on third-party support revealed
in our analysis suggests that one should also test for non-economic
strains when applying Pinard's theoretical framework.
Acknowledgments
I thank Richard Nadeau, André Blais, Maurice Pinard and two
anonymous Journal reviewers for their valuable comments and
suggestions. An earlier, and much different, version of this article was
presented at the 2000 meeting of the Canadian Political Science
Association in Quebec City. This study benefited from the financial
support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
and of the Fonds pour la Formation de Chercheurs et l'Aide à
la Recherche du Québec, in the form of doctoral fellowships.
