Federal-Provincial Voting and Federal Integration in the Fourth Canadian Party System

This paper explores a particular form of federal-provincial integration, behavioral integration, in Canada since 1993. It argues that the nature of electoral politics and the party system in Canada since 1993 cannot be fully understood without an understanding of the nature and extent of federal-provincial party integration that occurs within it, especially with regard to differences in such integration between different federal parties and provinces. It argues more specifically that the traditional conception of “Affiliation Integration,” where federal-provincial integration takes place largely between federal and provincial parties of identical partisan affiliation, is still largely valid despite the 1993 electoral dealignment and the rise of two new parties in that election. In order to do so,reviewing the literature on the resulting four forms in Canada. In addition, this section will outline problems with the literature and how this paper addresses them. The second section will present the paper’s research design. In particular, it will outline the three measures of behavioral integration that will be utilized in the analysis section. The third section will test the paper’s hypotheses by measuring behavioral integration in a variety of forms. Finally, the paper will conclude by broadly evaluating federal-provincial integration in Canada since 1993 and by noting how a refined interpretation of such integration furthers our understanding of the Fourth Canadian Party System in general.