This project investigates factors affecting electoral behavior and support for political parties, the political regime and community in a mature democracy, Canada that recently has undergone a major transformation of its national party system. The is conducted at the time of Canada's next national (federal) election, which is anticipated in late May or early June 2004. The study focuses on four principal topics: (i) the explanatory power of rival models of party choice; (ii) the explanatory power of rival models of electoral participation (turnout); (iii) the measurement and dynamics of partisan attachments, and factors responsible for those dynamics; (iv) system-level orientations, i.e., evaluations of the national electoral system and the national party system, support for national political regime and community, and factors affecting such orientations. Data are collected by pre- and post-election telephone interviews with a national sample of 2000 members of the Canadian electorate. The sample includes an existing two-wave (2000 and 2002) national panel, which will be augmented to yield a representative national sample of the 2004 national electorate. Respondents will be chosen using RDD techniques, and interviews will be conducted using a CATI system. A rolling cross-sectional (RCS) design will be employed to map the dynamics of vote intentions and other important variables during the election campaign. Additional survey data will be gathered by a mail questionnaire sent to respondents in the post-election survey. The utility of the 2004 data collection for accomplishing the goals of the project will be significantly enhanced by availability of high quality national cross-sectional and panel survey data gathered in earlier Canadian National Election (CNES) and Political Support in Canada (PSC) studies. The survey instruments in the proposed 2004 study will be designed to maximize possibilities for analyzing individual- and aggregate-level dynamics in political beliefs, attitudes and behavior and, hence, understanding the impact of party-system change. Every effort will be made to distribute the data to interested users in a very timely way. To this end, marginals and graphs showing the dynamics of the 2004 RCS pre-election data will be posted the project website within one week after polling day. The individual-level survey data (including the four-wave panel data), questionnaires and technical documentation will be placed on the website within three months after the election. A follow-up data set including information from the mail questionnaire will be posted three months later. All data and accompanying documents will be deposited with the ICPSR and ISR data archives within one year after the election. Results of the study will be presented at scholarly conferences, in papers submitted to refereed journals, and in two book manuscripts. Broader Impact: Pace Bartolini and Mair (1990) and others who have argued that the party systems of such polities are effectively "immortal," the Canadian experience clearly demonstrates that rapid, large-scale change in the configuration of a national party system is possible. However, the consequences of such a change are not well understood. The Canadian case thus provides a very useful "natural experiment" for investigating how party-system change affects a range of important political attitudes and behavior including those pertinent to the maintenance of the integrity of the country in its current form. As discussed in the proposal, some observers contend that, by altering the choice set in national electoral politics, the new party system has reconfigured the set of forces affecting electoral choice, turnout and partisan attachments. In addition, the effects of the new party system may well extend to evaluations of the performance of the electoral and party systems and, possibly, to support for the national political regime and community. The proposed research will investigate these topics and thereby enhance understanding of the ways in which party-system change influences public political attitudes and behavior in contemporary mature democracies.
