A05 - Local Party Organizations, Money, and Power
Date: Jun 2 | Time: 01:30pm to 03:00pm | Location:
Chair/Président/Présidente : Jim Farney (University of Regina)
Discussant/Commentateur/Commentatrice : Jim Farney (University of Regina)
From Sparks Street to Tecumseh Corners: Re-examining the Distribution of Decision-making Power in Canadian Political Parties: Rob Currie-Wood (Carleton University)
Abstract: The stratarchical arrangement underpinning franchise parties in Canada appears to have transformed. The considerable autonomy once afforded to local party organizations (Sayers, 1999) may have diminished as national party offices are more involved in candidate selection (Pruysers and Cross, 2016), constituency campaigning (Munroe and Munroe, 2018), and possess the economies of scale needed to raise financial resources that constituency associations do not (Young, 2017). National involvement is not necessarily undesirable (Rahat et. al, 2008), but it does potentially impact the responsiveness and inclusiveness of parties (see Carty, 2002). Although much of the research suggests change, it focuses on individual party functions instead of the power-sharing arrangement across all key dimensions of intraparty democracy. How do parties develop stratarchical power-sharing arrangements between the national party office and local party organizations? What explains variation in these arrangements?
I begin to answer these questions by advancing three types of franchise contracts: symbolic, deliberative, or contested. These typologies will be tested against interview data that capture the informal distribution of responsibilities along the dimensions of policy development, personnel selection, and constituency campaigning in Canada’s three largest parties. Participants were recruited from 21 local party organizations that vary by region, the political ecology of the electoral district, district competitiveness, size of the local organization, and presence of an incumbent. National party officials were also interviewed. The findings may demonstrate that power-sharing arrangements continue to vary by the amount of national involvement in local decisions, as well as the demeanor of interactions.
Show me the Money: The Use of Campaign Funds by Local Candidates: Holly Ann Garnett (Royal Military College of Canada)
Abstract: How are campaign funds used by local candidates? We know that funds used during election campaigns may cover a variety of expenses, from print, radio, TV or online advertising, to leadership tours, to printing, to outreach campaigns, to targeted mailings (Nassmacher, 1993). Scholars have also speculated that the use of funds may be evolving, especially as a result of the rise of new media, but little systematic research has directly studied whether this is the case.
Using candidate expense reports published by Elections Canada, my research explores how campaign funds are spent by candidates at the riding level. It responds to the questions: What percentage of funds are allocated to categories such as: advertising (by type – print, television, radio, new media), IT services, staff, hospitality, signage etc.)? Does this vary systematically by location? In other words, are there major differences between the use of funding in rural regions compared with urban regions?
Secondly, this research considers whether the use of campaign funds has changed over time. Since 2004, social media and the use of the internet has exploded. Has this had an impact on how candidates use their campaign funds? This research will contribute to our understanding of the changing nature of expenses on electoral campaigns and the role of money in politics in Canada.
Ready or not? The Strength of NDP Riding Associations and the Rise and Fall of the NDP from 2006-2019: Daniel Westlake (Queen's University)
Abstract: The NDP experienced a remarkable rise and fall over the course of the 2000s and 2010s. The party grew steadily to the point where it looked like it was on the verge of winning the 2015 election. Yet it lost that election to a resurgent Liberal party then suffered further losses in 2019. Over this period the NDP has become a more professional organization (McGrane, 2019), yet local NDP associations have consistently faced Conservative and Liberal associations that have more money and more donors. Cross (2016) demonstrates that advantages that the local Liberal campaigns had in 2015 played an important role in the Liberal’s success in that election. This paper tackles three questions regarding the NDP’s local riding association strength between 2006 and 2019. It asks whether the professionalization of the NDP on the national level was matched by growth in local riding association strength, whether the NDP’s growth between 2006 and 2011 occurred in spite of local riding association weakness or because of increases in riding association strength, and to what extent the NDP’s decline in 2015 and 2019 can be explained by its associations’ weakness relative to their Conservative and Liberal counterparts. In doing so, this paper demonstrates the extent to which local association strength can be used to explain the rise and fall of the NDP between 2006 and 2011.
Measuring Federal Campaign Centralization and Candidate Autonomy: Jacob Robbins-Kanter (Queen's University)
Abstract: To what extent does strong party discipline in Canada’s House of Commons and party caucuses extend to political candidates during a federal election campaign? In many respects, political parties impose strict message discipline and campaign centralization, but candidates also have considerable flexibility in tailoring their strategy and messaging to the riding-level environment. This paper seeks to measure and explain candidate autonomy from party headquarters during federal elections. The paper presents data from interviews with 100 former candidates and party strategists, as well as observational data from experience as an embedded researcher during the 2019 federal election.
Canada's NDP In Self and Scholarship: From Mass Party To Electoral Professional Party and Beyond: Simon Kiss (Wilfrid Laurier University), Peter Graefe (McMaster University)
Abstract: This paper presents the results of a systematic review of the political science literature and NDP constitutional documents to document the diverse ways in which the party has been understood and has understood itself. The working hypothesis of the project is that the NDP is haunted by a self-image of itself as a mass party, but that this is not reflected in practice. This paper is motivated by the observation that Canada’s NDP is a curious entity that has been variously characterized as a mass party, a labour party, a new politics party, an electoral professional party and a cadre party. The confusion about its nature partly stems from its foundations, which include a mix of trade unions, an organized political party and networks of intellectuals. Moreover, the difficulty of categorizing the party is again complicated by its federated structure which means it is composed of very different provincial sections. Despite the fact that there have been many studies of Canada’s NDP there have been surprisingly few systematic summaries of the literature to document the diverse ways in which the NDP has been understood. Moreover, there have been even fewer studies that combine an assessment of how the NDP has understood itself. While Whitehorn (1984) and Cooke (2006) are two exceptions to this, neither of these take into account the important developments since 2003 when the party’s links with the union movement and its provincial sections were weakened.