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The Rise of Third Parties in the 1993 Canadian Federal Election: Pinard Revisited
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 March 2005
Abstract
Abstract. This study proposes a new test of Maurice Pinard's theory on the rise of third parties applied to the case of the 1993 Canadian federal election. We assess the effect at the individual level of Pinard's factors (one-party dominance and grievances) on support for the Reform party and the Bloc Québécois using data from the Canadian Election Study. Logistic regression analyses of vote choice indicate that the extent to which the second major party was perceived to be electorally weak at the constituency level was a significant factor in leading some Western voters to support Reform. In Quebec, however, perceptions of predominance did not matter to a vote for the Bloc because the latter is a “radical” third party attracting support mostly on the basis of communal values and interests. The results further show that political grievances, but not economic ones, were a significant predictor of support for both third parties in that election.
Résumé. Cette étude propose un nouveau test empirique de la théorie de Maurice Pinard concernant la percée électorale des tiers partis. L'impact des facteurs de Pinard (prédominance d'un parti et présence de griefs) sur l'appui au Parti réformiste et au Bloc québécois à l'élection fédérale canadienne de 1993 est vérifié au niveau micro-sociologique à l'aide des données de l'Étude sur l'élection canadienne. Les analyses de régression logistique du vote indiquent que la perception que certains électeurs de l'Ouest avaient de la faible compétitivité du second parti traditionnel dans leur circonscription les a encouragés à appuyer le Parti réformiste. Au Québec, les perceptions de prédominance n'ont cependant pas eu d'effet significatif sur le vote en faveur du Bloc en raison du fait que ce dernier est un tiers parti “ radical ” dont l'appui repose principalement sur des valeurs et des intérêts de groupe. Les résultats indiquent enfin que, contrairement aux griefs de nature économique, les griefs politiques régionaux ont significativement contribué au succès électoral des deux partis.
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- Research Article
- Information
- Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 37 , Issue 3 , September 2004 , pp. 581 - 594
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- © 2004 Cambridge University Press
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.
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.
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 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).
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
References

Table 1: Impact of Structural Factors on Third-Party Rise (Logistic Regression Estimates)
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