The investigators for this Accomplishment Based Renewal are concerned with the conditions under which democracies are able to be sustained over time. The importance of this research derives, in part, from the significance of this topic and the fact that voting, public opinion and political participation are fundamental to the promise and performance of democratic forms of government. The setting of this empirical work is Canada, a country that is one of the world's oldest functioning democracies, but one that continues to encounter support-eroding problems that most other mature democracies already have resolved. The research focuses on the electoral process as the key feature of democratic forms of government. In this research, the investigators have generated a series of hypotheses regarding the role that elections play in the support process. To test these hypotheses, they conduct a three-stage panel survey of a national sample of the Canadian electorate before, after, and approximately one year after a national election that is being held in November, 1988. Of special importance, because of the panel design, is the ability to measure individual change - - whether, and to what extent, changes in support delineated in the first two waves of the study persist over a longer period of time. This research is particularly promising because rarely does a specific election provide as theoretically attractive a setting for studying matters such as the manner in which elite representations of election issues affect support levels, how people make politically relevant economic judgments, and whether changes in the operative choice set defined by major political parties influence the extent to which people think in retrospective or prospective terms.
