Parliamentarizing war: explaining legislative votes on Canadian military deployments

Abstract

The parliamentarization of military deployments is a burgeoning area of study but has tended to neglect the peculiar cases of legislatures deprived of any war powers. This article contributes to this literature by examining the curious case of Canada. Since Canadian governments are not required to secure parliamentary support to deploy the military, it analyzes why they occasionally have and increasingly do. We propose and test four hypotheses to explain why and when governments willingly choose to involve parliament in war decisions absent constitutional or legal obligation to do so: executive ideology, mission risk, minority parliament, and blame shifting. Our findings suggest that ideology and mission risk have the strongest explanatory and predictive power for when the executive will invite the legislature to vote on a military deployment in Canada. While the desire to avoid blame may contribute to the decision to hold a vote, this is not as influential or statistically relevant. The association between holding a vote and being in a minority parliament, for its part, is negligible and statistically insignificant.