Context and Francophone Support for the Sovereignty of Quebec: An Ecological Analysis

Abstract

New techniques of ecological inference are utilized to estimate with confidence intervals francophone support in each federal electoral district in Quebec for the pro-sovereignty side in the 1993 and 1997 Canadian general elections and the 1992 and 1995 referenda. Analyzing the link between demographic and political contextual variables and support for the sovereignty of Quebec suggests that demographic factors, such as the proportion of farmers and government workers, influence francophone voting behaviour more often than political factors such as incumbency. Unlike in many other countries with ethnically based movements, francophone support for sovereignty actually rises as the francophone portion of the population rises. This finding indicates that the contact hypothesis probably applies to the Quebec sovereignty movement.