Explaining the Religious Basis of the Canadian Partisan Identity: Success on the Third Try

Abstract

The various subtables of Table i, or some variant of them, must be familiar to every teacher and to every student of Canadian voting behaviour. While most of our history books, and certainly all of our current concerns, focus on cultural differences in Canada, all our voting and party identification data suggest that the primary line of political division is between Roman Catholics and non-Catholics. The leftmost tables in the two rows of Table i indicate that religious differences are approximately three times as strong as ethnic ones, regardless of the index chosen. The percentage difference in Liberal identifiers is 20 across religious categories, but only 6 across the ethnic ones; the phi coefficient is.21 as compared to.06, while Yule's Q is.42 as opposed to.13. Nor is this simply an artifact. The same finding shows up for vote as for party identification, for a linguistic dichotomy as for an ethnicity dichotomy, and for undichotomized as for dichotomized variables. Similarly, the religious dichotomy need not be imposed, but emerges quite freely when similar data are analysed with the aid program. Indeed, one need not depend on using dichotomies at all, though the analysis becomes more complex. In each case, however, the basic generalization holds.