Parties, Candidates, and Constituency Campaigns in Canadian Elections

Eric P. Mintz is an associate professor of political science at Sir
Wilfred Grenfell College, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Most analyses of election campaigns in Canada focus on the parties and
leaders at the national level, with little attention being paid to the
campaigns in the constituencies. This study helps redress that imbalance
by examining the campaigns in seven British Columbia constituencies in
the 1988 Canadian election. Sayers explains the character of
constituency campaigns primarily in terms of the nature of the candidate
selection process, the geographic context (city, suburban, or country)
and related media characteristics, the competitiveness of the campaign,
and the nature of party organization (cadre or mass).

The strength of this study is its systematic theoretical approach to
the development of testable hypotheses. Future studies of
constituency-level politics will likely make use of the framework
developed in this book. Although the author has undertaken an ambitious
effort to interview those involved in 25 campaigns, the discussion of
many of those campaigns is rather limited. The author’s assumption
that control over the nomination process makes constituency associations
important and powerful seems dubious given the organizational weakness
that he documents. The book’s editing could have been improved:
several errors and some repetitiveness detract from the generally
careful, scholarly analysis.