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 DOI: 10.1177/13540688030095006

2003 9: 619Party PoliticsR. Kenneth Carty, D. Munroe Eagles and Anthony Sayers

Candidates and Local Campaigns: Are there Just Four Canadian Types?  

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CANDIDATES AND LOCAL CAMPAIGNS

Are There Just Four Canadian Types?

R. Kenneth Carty, D. Munroe Eagles and Anthony Sayers

A B S T R A C T

A recent political anthropology argues that the character of Canadianparties’ constituency election campaigns is largely determined by thenature of their local associations’ nomination politics, as shaped by theelectoral appeal of the constituencies in which it takes place. Threecharacteristics of the nomination process define a model that suggeststhere are only four basic types of candidate in Canadian elections, eachproducing a distinctive campaign organization and style in terms of bothconstituency activity and the integration of the local campaign with thatof its national party. In this article, we use the data from a nationalsurvey of local associations of the national parties to explore theapplicability of the proposed typology and test hypothesized partyorganizational and campaign relationships that flow from this theory oflocal campaign politics.

KEY WORDS � Canada � candidates � constituencies � elections � local campaigns

Introduction

Conventional accounts of modern election campaigns portray them asnationalized, centralized and leader-dominated affairs (e.g. Farrell and Webb,2000; Mughan, 2000), a characterization widely applied to Canadian elec-toral contests (Bell and Fletcher, 1991). This interpretation is increasinglybeing challenged by evidence that points to the relevance and importanceof national parties’ local campaigns (Carty and Eagles, 1999; Denver andHands, 1997; Pattie et al., 1994; Whiteley and Seyd, 1992, 1994). A recentstudy of the candidate and campaign process at the grass roots in Canadaextends this rethinking of the place of local organization and activity inthe electoral process (Sayers, 1999). It draws on a close observation of 25individual campaigns in 7 federal electoral districts by the candidates of the

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(then) 3 major Canadian parties during the 1988 Canadian federal election.This political anthropology provides the basis for a theoretical model thatintegrates the essence of the nomination process with the characteristicelements of resulting local campaign organizations. Simply put, theargument suggests that:

[I]n choosing a nominee, nomination meetings are also harbingers of thetype of election campaign a party will run in a riding. The type ofcandidate that is successful and the support that he or she receivesprofoundly affects local campaigns.

(Sayers, 1999: 51)

Despite the enormous political, geographic, and socio-economic variationacross the constituency map, the hypothesis is that Canadian elections arefought by just four kinds of candidates.

The model underlying the propositions implicit in this theoretical positionrests upon a comprehensive typology that integrates three critical elementsof a constituency’s electoral politics: the local nomination process anddynamic, candidate types, and campaign organization and style. While thecase studies nicely illustrate the utility of the typology, and its capacity toexplain local campaign organization and practice, they are limited innumber and drawn from a single province (British Columbia), where thestructure and dynamic of party competition differ from those in otherregions. This article presents a first test of the applicability of the modelutilizing a national dataset containing details of the nomination and electioncampaign processes and experience of the constituency associations of theProgressive Conservative, Liberal and New Democratic (NDP) parties duringthe same election in which the case studies were conducted. The data comefrom an extensive survey of local party associations undertaken for theCanadian Royal Commission on Electoral Reform and Party Financing(Carty, 1991) and, while not explicitly designed to test this model, they doallow us to assess its general validity.1

We begin by specifying the model and differentiating its basic features.The integrated nomination-candidate-campaign theory identifies three keycriteria – local party competitiveness, party structure and the nature of thenomination contest (if any) – that together produce four distinct types ofcandidate. Each of these candidate types is, in turn, associated with distinc-tive patterns of campaign team organization and practice, resource avail-ability and integration into the wider party campaign. After classifying the416 candidates in our dataset in terms of the three nomination contextcriteria, we turn to testing the theoretical expectations of the model. Earlysections of the article provide simple bivariate descriptive tests of individualelements of the typology. The final empirical section uses a multivariatefactor analysis to test whether the specific relationships that constitute theelements of the model then combine to define the four hypothesizedcampaign types.

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Nominating Local Candidates

Any attempt to provide a comprehensive and integrated model of the deter-minants of local election campaigns is inherently ambitious. The Sayersmodel frames local electoral contests in terms of the socio-demographic,economic, and geographic characteristics of the individual constituency.However, the typological approach to local campaign organization andactivity begins with three dimensions of the first stage in the electoral cycle– the actual nomination of party candidates. In particular, it identifies thecompetitive position of the party in the local electoral district, the struc-tural openness of the party to potential nominees and the actual presenceor absence of a contested nomination as critical. These three featuresprovide the basis for a fourfold typology of local candidates in general elec-tions (Sayers, 1999: 11).

In Canadian parties the nomination of party candidates has long been theprerogative of the local constituency associations, which traditionallyrequire that candidates be (re-)nominated by a vote of the local member-ship before each election (Carty and Erickson, 1991). One expects that thecompetitive position of the party locally will be an important determinantof the quality of the candidate that the nomination process attracts. Whenan incumbent MP is not re-offering, those local parties that are in a strongcompetitive position should attract stronger candidates who bring withthem particular campaign advantages (e.g. prior experience, high namerecognition, access to financial resources). In districts where a party is weak,it may have difficulty finding a candidate and may even need to depend onthe wider party parachuting someone in to ensure that they have a standard-bearer in the riding.2 To operationalize this basic condition we use the differ-ence between the party’s share of the local vote and that going to the winneras a measure of its competitiveness in the constituency. Weak (i.e. undesir-able) constituencies are defined as those in which the candidate finishes atleast 10 percentage points behind the winner.3 The strongest, and so mostdesirable, constituencies are those in which the party has an incumbentmember of parliament.

Variations in local competitiveness help to account for the attractivenessof the riding to potential candidates, but the model incorporates twoadditional dimensions of the process to explain differences in the kinds ofcandidates selected and the subsequent campaigns they are able to mount.Differences in the basic structure and organization of the parties, primarilyin terms of their relative openness to mobilizing new members, shapes theextent to which outsider or insurgent challenges for the associations’ nomi-nations are possible, and so likely. In mass-membership style parties, theprocess is typically more bureaucratic, inhibiting outside challengers. Thus,the NDP, with its mass structure, has an institutionalized nominationprocess that is largely limited in scope to active, established party members.That produces a relatively closed nomination process. By contrast, the

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Liberals and the Progressive Conservatives, with their looser cadre-styleorganizational structure, have local associations in which the candidatesearch is generally accommodating, informal and wide-ranging. Priormembership in these parties is much less significant as a criterion for partici-pants – as selectors or candidates – than it is for the NDP. The result is acomparatively open nomination process, one that is relatively permeable tooutsiders who may have no particular history of membership or activity inthe party: in the 1993 general election almost 20 percent of the candidateshad not been active in their party before becoming a candidate, and anotherquarter of them admitted to once having been involved in some other party(Carty et al., 2000: 167–8).

The third defining element of the nomination process typology is theactual experience (or not) of a contested nomination. Contested nomi-nations are a signal of a healthy local intra-party democracy. In the opencadre-style parties, a contested nomination normally involves a rapid andlarge mobilization of new local party members as rival candidates strive tomaximize their support at the association’s nominating meeting by sellingmemberships to personal supporters. In closed, mass-style parties, supportmobilization comes principally from within the ranks of party members sothat a contested nomination is largely an exercise in internal party democ-racy. The argument suggests that the experience (or not) of these differentkinds of nomination contests is critical to shaping the type of candidatechosen, and to the organization and resources he or she will bring to theelection contest.

There are potentially a large number of permutations and combinationsof these variables. In fact the typology drawn from the case studies suggeststhat despite the myriad possibilities and complexities there are actually justfour ideal-typical types of candidate. The theoretically important point isthat these candidate types then determine the kind of campaign team thatis constructed and the type and amount of resources at its disposal. Thesefactors all combine to affect the level and nature of central party involve-ment in the local constituency campaign.

To summarize the essence of the nomination-candidate-campaign styletypology: in desirable constituencies, cadre-style parties’ contested nomi-nations lead to the nomination of local notables who mount highly person-alized parochial campaigns that are weakly integrated with that of the widerparty. Those same parties’ unappealing districts typically produce uncon-tested nominations, giving rise to stopgap candidates who then must runtoken campaigns that parallel those of their national party. Contested nomi-nations in mass-style parties produce party insiders who conduct subsidiarycampaigns that are well integrated into the party’s national campaign.Finally, incumbents (in all parties) and non-contested cadre party nomi-nations in very competitive districts have high-profile candidates whoseelection campaigns constitute significant components of their nationalparties’ overall election campaigns. While not all incumbents may be

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literally high-profile national political figures, ‘most have some publicprofile’ (Sayers, 1999: 53). In the analysis of high-profile candidates thatfollows, we distinguish between those who are incumbents and those non-incumbent cadre party candidates in locally competitive constituencies (whodo not face competition for the nomination) in order to explore whetherincumbency itself produces a distinctive type.

Our indicators for the three defining nomination context variables aresimple: we recognize that Liberal and Conservative cadre-style organiz-ations have open local association nomination processes, while nominationcontests in the mass-style NDP associations are comparatively closed.Nominations are labelled as contested if more than one candidate is on theballot at the local nomination meeting, and the constituency is identified asdesirable if the party is locally competitive – that is within 10 percentagepoints of the winner. Applying these criteria to our national set of candi-dates in the 1988 general election, we discover that there was a reasonablenumber of all types of candidate (see Table 1). There are relatively largenumbers of local notables (N = 104) and stopgap candidates (N = 118), butgiven that party insiders are, by definition, found in only one (NDP) of thethree parties, the numbers are smaller (N = 53). High-profile candidatesmake up the largest group but, as suggested above, we have split them intotwo groups: incumbents (N = 109) and non-incumbents (N = 32).

In the initial development of the model based on ethnographic casestudies the variables are described in general and heuristic terms. Our moreformal operationalization allows for a systematic test of the model acrossthe full national dataset. Having classified all the candidates of the threemajor parties in these theoretical terms, it remains to briefly outline theattributes of the campaign organizations, resources and practices that themodel postulates are logically and empirically linked to these archetypal

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Table 1. Operationalizing Sayers’s typology for statistical testing

Defining Nomination Campaign NumberCandidate type criterion contest style of cases

High-profile Incumbent Uncontested Component 109

High-profile Not incumbent/ Uncontested Component 32non-incumbent <10% behind

winner

Local notable Not incumbent/ Contested Parochial 104cadre-style party

Party insider Not incumbent/ Contested Subsidiary 53mass-style party

Stopgap Not incumbent/ Uncontested Parallel 118>10% behindwinner

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candidates. With the broad characterizations of the campaigns identified, wecan then turn to the available data and explore whether the expected patternsare observable in our survey data of local associations and campaigns.

Candidate Types and Campaign Teams

At the heart of the nomination-candidate-campaign model of constituency-based electoral politics in Canada is the proposition that the experience oflocal party associations in the candidate nomination period carries with itthe determinants of the conduct of the subsequent constituency-levelcampaign itself:

Central to the [campaign] team is the candidate and the volunteers whofill its important organizational positions. Because nominations arecrucial in deciding the composition of this group, they have profoundimplications for the way in which campaigns are organized.

(Sayers, 1999: 66)

In particular, the model suggests that there are consistent and internallycoherent differences across the candidate types along four dimensions of thecampaign team: (1) the composition of the team, especially in terms of theinner circle of supporters on the team, the number of workers and theirresources; (2) the relationships among the inner circle of the campaign team;(3) how the inner circle, including the candidate, perceives the task ofrunning a campaign and its main strategic focus; and finally, (4) the degreeto which the key personnel and resources of the campaign are integratedinto the wider party (Sayers, 1999: 71).

As strong and politically attractive individuals, who are nominated withoutfacing a contest in their parties, high-profile candidates go on to mountprofessional campaigns directed by acquaintances or trusted party strate-gists. Incumbents have the added advantage of being able to rely on theirconstituency staff and presence to assist with the organization of thecampaign team and effort. These campaigns tend to attract ample funds andvolunteers. Decision-making in the local campaign involves the candidate’sown inner team, but as a result of the interest of the national party in high-profile races, national strategists are also involved. These campaigns focusvariously on the qualities of local candidates as well as local, provincial andnational issues, and, as such, serve as important components of their party’snational campaigns (Sayers, 1999: 83–7).

In sharp contrast, the campaign teams of local notable candidates aredeeply influenced by their need to recruit large numbers of new partymembers in order to win the nomination in their constituency. Since localnotable candidates orchestrate their own nomination, they are not beholdento their party. As a result, they enjoy a great deal of freedom in the compo-sition of their campaign teams that are often quite separate and independentof the local party association’s executive. Relationships among those in the

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inner circle of local notables’ campaigns are personal and highly candidate-centred, and the campaigns emphasize the importance of candidate qualitiesover party policy in motivating volunteers’ involvement. Often resource-rich, these are parochial campaigns whose local and candidate orientationleaves them relatively independent of the national party effort (Sayers, 1999:71–5).

Party insiders are candidates who have prevailed in a contested nomi-nation where the challenge(s) came from a fellow party member(s). Oncethe nominee has been selected, however, the local party association pullsitself together in support of her/him. The campaign teams put into placearound this type of candidate draw heavily from long-time members of theconstituency association. Resources for the campaign are raised locally, butfunds may also be channelled into such races from national party bodiesoperating through their provincial offices. Accordingly, the flow of financialresources within these campaigns is more complex than that of the otherarchetypal campaigns and involves an atypical extra-local presence. Ineffect, party insider candidates run campaigns that are subsidiaries of theirparty’s national campaign (Sayers, 1999: 76–9).

Finally, stopgap candidates who win uncontested nominations in undesir-able constituencies must build their campaign teams from whateversupporters they can attract locally. In some cases, family and friends are themain providers of activists for these long-shot efforts, and those individualstypically have little political experience. Financial resources are meagre, andvolunteers are in short supply. Stopgap campaigns do not attract nationalattention, or national party help, so by default the locus of decision-makingis local. Ironically, the lack of resources available for creating a distinctivelocal campaign throws the focus of attention back onto national campaignissues and strategies. Stopgap candidates almost inevitably run shadowcampaigns that parallel those of the national party (Sayers, 1999: 79–83).

This is a portrait of striking differences among four basic types of localcampaigns. Our question is: do such hypothesized differences in campaignteams exist systematically across the country? Table 2 presents the results ofsome simple descriptive tests for these patterns of differentiation in campaignteams along several of the key dimensions of the theoretical account. Acentral relationship is that between the candidate and the local party associ-ation, with the important difference being the extent to which candidates, asindividuals, influence and control the campaign itself. The table suggests thatcampaign teams do appear to vary according to candidate type. The first rowof the table points to the average increase in local association membershipduring the election year for each candidate type. By far the largest mean rateof membership growth was found in the associations with local notablecandidates, reflecting the necessary efforts those individuals must make torecruit new members in order to capture the local association’s nomination.Relatively high rates of growth also exist in the associations with high-profilecandidates. That pattern reflects the mobilization advantages of favoured

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and strong candidates in races that have broader significance for a party’snational campaign, especially where incumbents are fighting to retain theirseats. As expected, membership growth is modest in associations with partyinsider and stopgap candidates.

We expect that a ‘core group’ of influential local association activists willplay a dominant part in selecting high-profile and stopgap candidates, andthis turns out to be the case. In prominent and strategic races, local partieshave a strong interest in ensuring they have a competitive candidate, somore than two in five of high-profile nominations were managed by theirlocal association’s core group – in many instances a group closely tied to anincumbent. Just the opposite situation applies in the case of stopgap candi-dates. In those cases, the party’s lack of competitiveness means that somelocal (and sometimes even national) party activists have to be proactive infinding someone willing to carry the standard: over half of the stopgapswere found this way. By contrast, the core groups of local associationspicked only about a third of the entrepreneurial local notable candidates.Given the oligarchic cast of mass party structures, we might have expectedcore groups in NDP local associations to have played a decisive role inselecting their party insider type of candidates. Surprisingly, only just overa quarter of party insider candidates were found this way. In practice, super-vision and control of the nomination process is ensured in a different way.

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Table 2. Candidate types and campaign team characteristics (percentages and means)

High-profile

High- non- Local Partyprofile incumbent notable insider Stopgap

Mean change in membership, 311 411 650 70 69***1988 (#)

Core group decides candidate (%) 43 43 36 28 55**Candidate selects campaign 75 72 84 33 45***

manager (%)Candidate most important factor 71 70 51 32 41***

in attracting volunteers (%)Agreeing that party loyalty most 19 20 33 39 32

important in attracting volunteers (%)

Mean index score of candidate 2.00 1.88 2.01 1.67 1.91*centrality for campaigning(0–3; low = 0)*

Campaign team controls 56 59 65 46 47campaign (%)

Index measures are defined in the Appendix. Significance (ANOVA and chi-square). ***p <0.000; **p < 0.01; *p < 0.05.

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With a more bureaucratized structure, NDP local associations are far morelikely to routinize their nomination process by constituting a regular candi-date search committee. Thus, over half (56.6 percent) of all party insidercandidates came through just such a committee process. That mechanismwas used to find a few of the other candidates although it was resorted tofor just over a quarter of the stopgaps.

Once the nomination is completed, critical issues concerning the compo-sition and control of the campaign team arise. The third row of Table 2confirms the prediction that high-profile and local notables are more likelythan party insiders or stopgaps to select their own campaign manager ratherthan leaving the appointment to the local party machinery. Similarly, thepersonal campaign teams of the high-profile and local notable candidatesare more likely (than the local party association) to control the planningand conduct of the campaign than is the case for the other two candidatetypes. The evidence confirms that candidate-specific factors are likely to bemore important for attracting campaign workers to high-profile and localnotable campaigns, and least important in attracting volunteers to partyinsider (where activists are likely to be long-time party members) or stopgapcandidate teams. Conversely, party loyalty accounts for more in attractingvolunteers to the latter two types of candidate (though these differences failto reach an acceptable level of statistical significance). More generally, thecomparative importance of the candidate versus the party in mobilizingCanadian campaign personnel is striking for all but the party insiders. It isgreatest for the high-profile incumbents and prominent local notables, butit is also still the most important factor for the hapless stopgap candidacies.

To provide a summary measure of the importance and centrality of thecandidate to the local campaign we constructed an index of ‘candidatecentrality’ to measure the importance of the persona and efforts of indi-vidual candidates in attracting both financial and human resources to thecampaign team (see Appendix). This index confirms the theoretical expec-tation that high-profile and local notable candidacies produce the mostcandidate-centred campaigns. By contrast, the candidate-centred score islowest for the party-dominated campaigns of party insiders. There is littleregular difference across the campaigns in terms of whether they arecontrolled by the candidate’s team or the local association, although theproportion run by organizations independent of the local party establish-ment is probably higher than in other parliamentary democracies.

Candidate Types, Campaign Autonomy and Resources

The evidence to this point in our measures of the campaign team – the factorsgoverning its composition and the relative balance between candidate andparty in local campaign organization and management – suggests that thefour candidate type typology does capture some of the basic variation across

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local election campaigns in Canada. To extend our exploration of the widerutility of the typology, we can look at the level of party assistance, or inter-ference, coming from outside the local constituency and at the level ofresources these campaigns command.

Table 3 presents data on a number of measures on the existence andnature of extra-local involvement in the resourcing and direction of individual local campaigns. The model predicts a higher level of extra-constituency involvement in high-profile, party insider and stopgap candi-dacies, albeit for different reasons. High-profile candidates are significantenough for the larger party to command the attention of party strategistsat the regional or national levels, though the stature of the candidatesprovides them with enough space to pursue a distinctive local agenda if theychoose to do so. As a result, their component campaigns will almostinevitably reflect a complex set of both concerns. Stopgap candidates mustrely on extra-local resources for their parallel campaigns in conditionswhere local resources are simply too sparse to support a meaningfulcampaign. Finally, party insiders mounting subsidiary campaigns in morebureaucratic party organizations find campaign organizers from a varietyof levels channelling resources according to need or strategic opportunity.These candidates typically find their ‘local campaigns are integrated withand subservient to the nonlocal campaign, having little influence over itsdirection’ (Sayers, 1999: 95). It is in the case of the parochial campaigns oflocal notables that we expect to see the highest levels of local campaignautonomy with many of those candidates ‘going it alone’.

The patterns revealed in the data of Table 3 do not support these expec-tations in any clear or unequivocal fashion because none of the observeddifferences across the candidate types is statistically significant (at the 0.05level or better). We must therefore be especially cautious about making toomuch of these findings. However, as a first test of the model, it is worth

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Table 3. Candidate types and local party autonomy (percentages and means)

High-profile

High- non- Local Partyprofile incumbent notable insider Stopgap

Received outside campaign 43 41 47 59 50help (%)

Outside strategists or managers 31 36 46 23 38involved in campaign (%)

Mean score on an index of local 1.34 1.14 1.21 1.35 1.15association financial autonomy(0–2; low = 0)*

Index measures are defined in the Appendix. Significance (ANOVA and chi-square). ***p <0.000; **p < 0.01; *p < 0.05.

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noting some of the more obvious findings and patterns. While party insidersand stopgap campaigns are more likely to report receiving outside campaignhelp, the former were the least likely to report having an ‘outsider’ managethe campaign or be involved in determining campaign strategy. Perhapssurprisingly, local notable candidates were more likely to have receivedoutside help, or to have recruited outsiders as campaign managers or strate-gists, than were high-profile candidates. We suggest that this is to beexplained by the more ephemeral ties to the party or local association thatsuch candidates often have. Less constrained by the constituency’s formalboundaries, and forced to build personal organizations rather than relyingon existing party machines, they are simply more prepared to recruitpersonal help from wherever they can find it. There is little evidence hereof any sharply distinctive pattern in the relative financial autonomy of localassociations by candidate type although associations that are captured bylocal notables, or must rely on stopgaps at election time, would appear to beotherwise amongst the least financially autonomous of all local constituencyparty associations.

In explaining some of the ambiguity in interpreting the case studies onthis dimension, Sayers (1999: 94–5) notes the difficulties in drawing hard-and-fast distinctions between campaigns. Because individuals may misjudgea party’s local chances, the line between stopgap and local notable candi-dates can be difficult to identify in the context of an ongoing campaign(recall we used a post hoc arbitrary 10 percent threshold measure ofcompetitiveness). While this may account for some of the softness in differ-entiating between these two types of candidates’ campaigns, other anoma-lies remain. The questions used to tap this dimension refer to the simplepresence or absence of external involvement in the local campaign and maysimply obscure the subtleties of real world experience that are matters ofdegree. Further research needs to refine the instruments on which suchmeasures are based.

A central theoretical expectation of this model of archetypal candidatesis that they are likely to differ greatly in terms of the strength of their localassociation and, more importantly for electoral purposes, in terms of theamount and nature of campaign resources at their disposal. At the extremes,we expect stopgap candidates to be resource-poor, and high-profile candi-dates to be resource-rich, served by strong and reasonably affluent localparties (especially so in the case of incumbents). Party insiders should haveaccess to a reasonable pool of volunteers from existing party organizations.Local notable candidates, who have had to mobilize support to capture thenomination and are responsible for managing their own electoral campaigns,are generally expected to have well-staffed and financed campaigns (Sayers,1999: 106). However, the boundary between less-successful local notablesand stopgaps can be a fine one. Affluent local notable candidates maybankroll their own campaigns, and popular local heroes among them maywell attract large numbers of volunteers, but if the candidates do not bring

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some identifiable assets to their campaigns they can quickly find themselvesrelatively resource-deprived.

Evidence supporting most of these expected patterns is found in Table 4.High-profile candidates’ campaigns, especially those of incumbents, aremore likely to attract volunteers, and to report a sufficient number of volun-teers to mount the kind of campaign they wished, than are the campaignsof any other type of candidate (though this ratio measure failed to reach the0.05 level of statistical significance across all types). They are also by farthe most likely to report surpluses at the end of the campaign – over two-thirds of them did so.4 For their part, stopgap candidates are far less likelyto attract volunteers than other candidate types confirming the pattern inthe case studies where ‘all the stopgap candidates in [the] study, even thosewith some financial backing, ran into the same major obstacle. They couldnot find enough volunteers to canvass the riding’ (Sayers, 1999: 82). Thishelps explain an apparently anomalous result in the table, namely thereasonably large proportion of all candidate types that reported ending thecampaign with a financial surplus, including a third of the stopgaps. Forthe personalist and candidate-centred campaigns of stopgap candidates, theshortage of activists, rather than money, appears to be the most criticalfactor limiting contact between candidate and electorate. This confirms theobservation that: ‘A lack of workers is the most reliable indicator of acampaign that has a limited electoral future’ (Sayers, 1999: 81).

A Multivariate Test of the Four Types

Our analysis has uncovered a variety of suggestive evidence of the utility ofthe four-type typology of Canadian nominations and election campaigns.However, the significant theoretical import of the model is its integration ofthe various features of a party’s local nominee, and his/her organization and

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Table 4. Candidate types and campaign resources (percentages and means)

High-profile

High- non- Local Partyprofile incumbent notable insider Stopgap

Mean no. of volunteers 315 248 159 172 86***available, 1998

Mean ratio of volunteers 1.67 0.97 0.82 0.79 0.72available/volunteers needed

% reporting campaign 68 47 44 31 34***surplus, 1988

Index measures are defined in the Appendix. Significance (ANOVA and chi-square). ***p <0.000; **p < 0.01; *p < 0.05.

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campaign team. What remains to be determined is thus whether, or to whatextent, the various pieces of the model accumulate to resemble the fourgeneral types of nominations and campaigns. Answering this questionrequires that we examine relationships across a number of indicators simul-taneously to determine whether the patterns identified with respect to eachcomponent combine to define the four hypothesized types of nominations,candidates and campaigns. From the indicators we have available, we selecteight measures to represent relevant aspects of the party organization andcampaigning practice. Variations in the financial resources available, andthe stability or volatility of a local association’s membership base, tap theunderlying organizational resources that a local campaign can command.These obviously condition the attractiveness of the local nomination. Theimportance of candidates to fund-raising, and of party appeals for volun-teers, both tap aspects of the relative importance of personal or candidate-centred as opposed to more generic party appeals to the mobilization effortsof local associations. The typology distinguishes among campaigns in termsof their relative autonomy or integration into the wider party campaign. Soto capture this important dimension we include the candidate as opposedto the party’s role in appointing a campaign manager. Similarly, lodgingcontrol of the campaign in a local party campaign team represents animportant constraint on the formal party organization’s ability to directmatters. The presence of outside help in the local campaign indicatesbroader interest in the local outcome, and thus signals a modicum of inte-gration of the local race in the broader partisan effort. If the nomination-candidate-campaign model holds, a confirmatory factor analysis involvingthese eight measures ought to uncover underlying factors that are recog-nizable in terms of the features of the constituency campaigns run by thefour types of Canadian candidate.

A principal components factor analysis of these measures extracts fourunderlying dimensions that collectively explain 61.7 percent of the variance.The factor loadings reported in Table 5 reveal that to a remarkable degree,given the limitations of the measures, each of the factors identified in thisanalysis resembles one of the campaign types of the model. The first factoridentified appears to tap an underlying factor reflecting the campaigns oflocal notables. These well-financed and highly successful campaigns takeplace in cadre parties with memberships that grow rapidly during acampaign and fall away between them (note the high positive loadings onfinancial strength and membership change). The candidate, rather than theparty, is the central determinant of the campaign team (note the positiveand high loading on the candidate appointment of campaign managers,and the negative and high loading on party appointment). Their parochialcampaigns do not involve outsiders (note the weak negative loading onoutside help).

The second factor we recognize as belonging to the party insiders, sinceit features high loadings on the party appointment of a campaign manager

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and strong loadings on the presence of help from outside the constituency.These features are attributes of the party insider type of campaign in whichthe party has a marked presence and plays a comparatively strong role inthe conduct of the campaign. The remaining two factors are less clearlydemarcated in terms of the typology. However, the importance of partyloyalty in attracting volunteers, coupled with the importance of the candi-date for fund-raising, might be seen to reflect the combination of partyinvolvement in attracting strong candidates, i.e. characteristic of high-profile campaigns. These candidacies are likely to arise in vigorous con-stituency associations with relatively stable memberships.

The fourth factor extracted bears some resemblance to the characteristicswe associate with stopgap candidates. In areas where parties are locallyweak and poor, volunteers are motivated by their partisanship and candi-dates are largely left on their own to run parallel campaigns without outsidehelp. Association membership is likely to be low in election and non-electionyears alike. In these campaigns, the diehard party members (or candidate’sfriends) who constitute the modest support team are left to manage thecampaign as best they can.

In sum, this preliminary analysis provides considerable support for theargument that Canadian campaigns represent distinct combinations of partyorganization and campaign teams. The ideal types identified from Sayers’scase studies do emerge from the quantitative evidence, despite the fact thatthey often represent differences in degree along various continua. Particu-larly sharply defined are the parochial campaigns of local notables, and thesubsidiary campaigns of party insider candidates. The campaigns of thehigh-profile and stopgap candidates are less sharply differentiated, butempirical traces of each can be seen in the third and fourth factors. Clearly,

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Table 5. Confirmatory factor analysis of campaign types*

1 2 3 4

Candidate type Local Party High-notable insider profile Stopgap

OrganizationFinancial strength 0.503 0.018 0.168 –0.510Membership change, 1987–88 0.523 0.108 0.005 –0.261Candidate’s impt. for fund-raising 0.187 0.390 0.674 –0.164Party loyalty attracts volunteers 0.032 –0.152 0.698 0.479

Campaign teamCandidate appoints campaign manager 0.706 0.006 –0.055 0.377Party appoints campaign manager –0.509 0.568 0.088 0.162Campaign team controls campaign 0.414 0.469 –0.313 0.513Outside help for campaign? –0.057 0.751 –0.077 –0.214

* Factor loadings taken from principal components analysis explaining 61.7 percent of totalvariance.

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local nominations and election campaigns are complex and multifacetedprocesses in Canada, but important basic features of their differentiationand operation are captured in the four categories of the typology.

Conclusions

Evidence from a growing number of political systems that local campaign-ing matters has spurred a growth in scholarly attention to this previouslyneglected area. The nomination-candidate-campaign model represents aprovocative and ambitious contribution to the literature on local campaign-ing in two respects. First, it argues that the interplay between the competi-tive character of a local constituency and party structure is genetically linkedto the nomination process responsible for the selection of a candidate.Second, the analysis points to the prevalence of four basic patterns in thestyle and content of local nomination and the subsequent electioncampaigns these candidates conduct. Considering how complex each ofthese processes can be when taken on their own, the model’s ability toreduce the potentially infinite tapestry of local nomination and electioncampaigns to four types constitutes a significant theoretical advance. Itprovides us with a framework for systematically studying the local dimen-sions of national election campaigns.

Our evaluation of this typology and theory of local campaign types hasturned up considerable empirical support for it. Indeed, our attempt todivide one of the types into two (distinguishing incumbents among high-profile candidates) appears to have added little analytic power. The analysisappears to confirm the contention that the competitive positions, thecontestedness of the nomination process and the type of party organizationare critically important in shaping the outcomes of this first critical and localstage in the electoral process. There may well be just four basic types oflocal candidates and campaigns in Canadian elections. Much of the hypoth-esized differences in the related character of the campaign teams, the levelof extra-local involvement and the nature and level of resources available,also stood up well in the empirical analysis. Though differences between thecandidate types were not uniformly large across all measures, given theinevitable variation found when one shifts from the flexibility of a quali-tative ethnographic research design to the more systematic and rigid arenaof statistical testing, we suggest that this fourfold typology provides apowerful framework for future work.

It would appear that the genetic material governing the conduct of localelections in Canada is to be found in the characteristics of the nominationprocess. That being the case, the considerable local autonomy long possessedby local party associations over the nomination process may be one of themost important keys to understanding electoral politics in Canada.

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Notes

We gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments from participants at the CanadianPolitical Science Association’s ‘Workshop on Local Campaigning in ComparativePerspective’, and from this journal’s anonymous reviewers.

1 The survey of all the local party associations of three major (and two minor)parties was conducted in 1990 under the auspices of the Royal Commission onElectoral Reform and Party Financing. For a full account of the survey and dataset,as well as an analysis of many of its principal findings, see Carty (1991). Thereturn rate of 54 percent produced a representative set of 416 constituency associ-ations in the Liberal, Progressive Conservative and New Democratic parties thatprovide the evidence for the analysis in this article.

2 In 1988, the election in question here, all three national parties were able to mounta candidate in each constituency. In the general election of 2000 only one was ableto do so.

3 During the election in question this was a three-party system but with consider-able inter-constituency variation in competitiveness. Candidates won with marginsthat ranged from 0.01 percent to 65.8 percent of the vote.

4 Given the statutory limits on local campaign spending, the high proportion ofincumbents with a surplus likely reflects their enhanced fund-raising capacity.

References

Bell, David V. J. and Frederick J. Fletcher (eds) (1991) Reaching the Voter:Constituency Campaigning in Canada. Research Studies of the Royal Commissionon Electoral Reform and Party Financing, vol. 20. Toronto: Dundurn Press.

Carty, R. Kenneth (1991) Canadian Political Parties in the Constituencies. ResearchStudies of the Royal Commission on Electoral Reform and Party Financing, vol.23. Toronto: Dundurn Press.

Carty, R. Kenneth, William Cross and Lisa Young (2000) Rebuilding Canadian PartyPolitics. Vancouver: UBC Press.

Carty, R. Kenneth and Munroe Eagles (1999) ‘Do Local Campaigns Matter?Campaign Spending, the Local Canvass and Party Support in Canada’, ElectoralStudies 18: 69–87.

Carty, R. Kenneth and Lynda Erickson (1991) ‘Candidate Nomination in Canada’sNational Political Parties’, in H. Bakvis (ed.) Canadian Political Parties: Leaders,Candidates and Organization. Toronto: Dundurn Press.

Denver, David and Gordon Hands (1997) Modern Constituency Electioneering:Local Campaigning in the 1992 General Election. London: Frank Cass.

Farrell, David and Paul Webb (2000) ‘Political Parties as Campaign Organizations’,in Russell J. Dalton and Martin P. Wattenberg (eds) Parties Without Partisans:Political Change in Industrial Democracies, pp. 102–28. New York: OxfordUniversity Press.

Mughan, Anthony (2000) Media and the Presidentialization of ParliamentaryElections. New York: Palgrave.

Pattie, Charles, Paul Whiteley, Ron Johnston and Patrick Seyd (1994) ‘Measuring

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Local Campaign Effects: Labour Party Constituency Campaigning at the 1987General Election’, Political Studies XLII: 469–79.

Sayers, Anthony M. (1999) Parties, Candidates, and Constituency Campaigns inCanadian Elections. Vancouver: UBC Press.

Whiteley, Paul F. and Patrick Seyd (1992) ‘The Labour Vote and Local Activism: TheImpact of Local Constituency Campaigns’, Parliamentary Affairs 45: 582–95.

Whiteley, Paul F. and Patrick Seyd (1994) ‘Local Party Campaigning and ElectoralMobilization in Britain’, Journal of Politics 56: 242–52.

Appendix

Candidate Importance for Campaigning – Additive index measuring the importanceof candidates for campaign fund-raising and attracting volunteers. It has a rangeof 0–3 and was constructed using three dummy variables, the first measuringthe importance of ‘the local candidate to the success of election fundraising’ (1 = ‘very important’ or ‘important’; 0 = ‘somewhat important’ or ‘not import-ant’). The second measure tapped perceptions of whether ‘candidate effort wasimportant for fundraising’ (specifically: ‘How would you describe the attentionor effort the local candidate must personally put into election fundraising activi-ties?’ (1 = ‘vital’ or ‘important’; 0 = ‘intermittent’ or ‘no’ importance). The thirdmeasure asked how significantly a change in the candidate would have affectedthe volunteers working on the campaign (0 = ‘volunteers the very same’ or‘largely the same’; 1 = would change volunteers ‘somewhat’ or ‘completely’).Mean = 1.87; SD = 0.88.

Financial Autonomy – Additive index measuring the degree of non-election yearfinancial autonomy. It has a range of 0–2 and was constructed using twodummy variables, representing ‘flows of money during non-election yearsto/from the national party’ (1 = no flows) and sharing of local membership listswith national parties (1 = local associations guard their lists). Mean = 0.76; SD = 0.68.

Financial Strength – A two-item additive index measuring the general financialposition of local party organizations. It was constructed using measures of theparty’s total income in 1990 and their total assets in that year, each measuredby four categories (1 = poorest; 4 = richest). The resulting index ranges from2–8. Mean = 4.62; SD = 1.94.

The data are all taken from the 1990 Constituency Association Survey done underthe auspices of the Royal Commission on Electoral Reform and Party Financing.For details of the study, see Carty (1991).

R. KENNETH CARTY is Professor of Political Science at the University of BritishColumbia. His most recent book (with W. Cross and L. Young) is RebuildingCanadian Party Politics.ADDRESS: Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia,Vancouver, BC Canada V6T 1Z1. [email: rkcarty@unixg.ubc.ca]

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D. MUNROE EAGLES is Associate Professor of Political Science and AssociateDean of Arts and Science at the University of Buffalo (SUNY). He is the author ofnumerous articles on the political geography of Canada and twice edited TheAlmanac of Canadian Politics.ADDRESS: Department of Political Science, University at Buffalo (SUNY), Buffalo,NY, USA 14260–4600. [email: eagles@buffalo.edu]

ANTHONY SAYERS is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University ofCalgary. He is the author of Parties, Candidates, and Constituency Campaigns inCanadian Elections.ADDRESS: Department of Political Science, University of Calgary, Calgary, ABCanada T2N 1N4. [email: asayers@ucalgary.ca]

Paper submitted 28 October 2002; accepted for publication 5 February 2003.

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