| We Canadians have a remarkably deep attachment to the idea that representative democracy represents the political will of the people, despite the imperfections of constituency-based elections, low voter turnout and unequal campaign financing. A survey conducted just after the June 1999 Ontario election provides an interesting test of the idea that elected governments represent public opinion. Just under 1,000 Ontario voters were asked detailed questions about their political views, the election campaign, and how they voted. The survey included a number of questions previously asked in ISR surveys between 1977 and 1981, so it is possible to measure changes in political ideology and how this affected the vote.
On June 25, 1999 the Progressive Conservative Party, led by Premier Mike Harris, was re-elected. With 43 percent of the popular vote in a three-party contest, the Conservatives won 65 percent, or 73, of the total of 113 legislature seats. The Conservatives benefited from the tendency of constituency-based elections to exaggerate the representation of the front runner in a three-way contest. But they were no more the beneficiaries than the 1990 New Democrats, whose 38 percent of the popular vote gave them 74 out of 130 seats in the legislature.
Following four years of intense partisan conflict, the Conservatives' 1999 re-election was certainly as significant as their initial 1995 victory over a discredited NDP government, which followed a Liberal regime voted out for the opportunism of calling an election after just three years in office. Cutting social assistance rates by 22 percent, dismantling rent control, a pro-business "reform" of labour legislation, slashing the Environment Ministry by 40 percent, forcing the amalgamation of the six Toronto municipalities against the expressed will of their inhabitants, introducing a single property taxation scheme, radically restructuring the delivery of education, and many, many other polarizing acts left no doubt about PC policies or that they were mere rhetoric. The first-term Conservative government explicitly targeted tenants, trade union members, teachers and government workers, and the City of Toronto. This is why the re-election of the Conservatives was a great achievement and is often taken as an explicit victory of neo-Conservative ideology.
The natural interpretation of the 1999 Conservative re-election, and likely of the previous 1995 election, is that it represents a dramatic rightward shift in public opinion, which is where our survey results come in. In surveys between 1977 and 1981, and again in 1999, Ontarians were asked a question, which begins:
We would like to know how much effort you think government should put into a number of activities. For each area, please tell me whether you think government should put: much more effort, more effort, about the same effort, less effort, or much less effort. Remember putting more effort into one of these areas would require a shift of money from other areas or an increase in taxes.
The respondents were asked about the seven areas of government effort shown in the Table below.
Not only is there no evidence of a shift to the right compared to 20 years ago, but Ontarians are now more likely to support government effort to help the poor, provide assistance to the unemployed, for health and medical care, and for education. Opinion in the other three areas, protecting the environment, eliminating discrimination against women and crime prevention, is unchanged. In the 1977-81 surveys, for example, 13 percent of respondents favoured "much more effort" for education and 34 percent supported "more effort" while in 1999 the corresponding figures were 22 and 48 percent, respectively. There were leftward changes of a similar magnitude in the other measures. And in 1999, despite the supposed backlash, 21 percent of Ontarians wanted "much more effort" to eliminate discrimination against women and 43 percent wanted "more effort," virtually identical to the figures from around 1980.
Perhaps it is just that these questions invite "soft" agreement with ill-defined government "effort," despite the warning sentence about shifting priorities or raising taxes. Not so, it turns out. Respondents were also asked if they agreed with a number of statements, including "There is too much of a difference between rich and poor in this country." In 1977-81, 14 percent strongly agreed, 48 percent agreed, 20 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed, and 18 were neutral or had no opinion; in 1999, 30 percent strongly agreed, 41 percent agreed and only 13 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed. It is possible that Ontarians truly perceive a widening gap between rich and poor and that their opinions have not shifted, but it is impossible to interpret the 71 percent agreement that there is too wide an income gap as right wing sentiment.
Further analysis of questions about the rights of labour, inequality and welfare asked in the 1977-81 and 1999 surveys is consistent with these findings. There is simply no evidence that a shift in public opinion caused the election of a provincial government with a political position far to the right of any government -- including many previous Ontario Conservative governments -- since the 1950s.
For the answers to the puzzle we must look in two directions. First, the alternatives provided to voters are small in number and not in their control. The processes that decide the policies of political parties are not subject to democratic pressures from the electorate. The neo-conservative Ontario governments of 1995 and 1999 represent the faction which gained control of the Ontario Conservative Party in the mid-1980s following the resignation of Premier William Davis.
But it is also true that the Ontario electorate has not acted according to the classical model of the political landscape, most closely associated with Anthony Downs. He thought of voters being distributed on a continuum from left to right -- and our evidence on public opinion above suggests the distribution is quite stable. Voters would then choose the party whose position was closest to their own. Staking a position far to the right and with four years of conflict to prove they meant business, the Conservatives should have lost support to the Liberals, and not been re-elected. But this experience did little to shake the traditional allegiances of Ontario voters. In fact, the "deviant" election was in 1990, when the NDP was able to expand far beyond its traditional base of support, not in 1995 or 1999, when the Conservatives appear to have reclaimed their historical role as the governing party of Ontario.
We confirmed this by looking at the relationship between Ontarians' votes and their "party identification," defined as the political party with their long-term allegiance. In 1995, when the Progressive Conservatives regained political power, 91 percent of Conservative identifiers voted for the Party with which they identified, as did 81 percent of Liberals and 88 percent of NDP identifiers. The Conservatives were more numerous and they also attracted the support of 59 percent of voters who were "independent" -- who make up about one-fifth of the electorate. The figures were quite similar in 1999, except that Liberal support was bolstered by the defection of one-quarter of the voters who mainly identified with the NDP.
Thus the victory of neo-conservatism in Ontario reflects no revolution in voters' ideology. Rather, forces beyond their control changed the policies but not the labels of the three contending parties; and voters treated the parties as if they offered the traditional, much more limited, menu of policy choices.
|
