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ABSTRACT
Recent scholarship has shown that the strength of national identity can be affected by election outcomes, and these changes hinge, in part, on partisan identities. Research on partisan identities highlights the behavioural effects of negative partisan attitudes in contrast to the more established positive dimension of partisanship. This study considers the impact of the 2015 Canadian federal election outcome upon national identities. Using data from the 2015 Canadian Election Study, findings show the change of government affected identification with Canada, depending on the presence and type of partisan identities held by electors and upon the level of campaign attention.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Cameron Anderson is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Western Ontario. His research explores public opinion and political behaviour in Canada and multilevel states.
Michael McGregor is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at Ryerson University. He studies political behaviour and municipal elections in Canada.
Notes
1 Certainly exceptions exist, such as in instances where new countries are formed, or when countries may join a supranational bloc, such as the European Union. We are focused here, however, upon changes in the strength of national identity absent these larger, external shocks.
2 We conceive of territorial identity as referencing one’s political identity to a defined scope of political organization and authority. In this paper, we will use the term national identity to convey a territorial political identity with the nation state of Canada.
3 Indeed, Bullock, Gerber, Hill, and Huber (Citation2015) show that partisan differences in factual beliefs are a function of partisan bias rather than actually differing beliefs.
4 The above discussion can be augmented with some consideration of partisan issue ownership of national identity. There is a relatively well-developed literature on issue ownership showing that political parties can be perceived to own the more popular policy position and/or be more competent on particular issues (Budge & Farlie, Citation1983; Petrocik, Citation1996) and that these effects are stronger when the issues are considered salient amongst voters (Belanger & Meguid, Citation2008). There has been little extension of this literature to the topic of national identity. However, Sheets, Domke, and Greenwald (Citation2011) find, in the American case, that religion and national identity have grown in importance as a basis of evaluating Presidential candidates and that the Republican Party has come to ‘own’ issues related to patriotism in American politics. In the case of Canada, Nadeau, Blais, Gidengil, and Nevitte (Citation2001) found that the Liberal Party owned the national unity issue in the wake of the 1995 sovereignty referendum in Quebec. Beyond this, there has been little work exploring whether political parties own the issue of national identity. This would seem to be a topic for further research.
5 The web component of the CES was a non-probability sample. Among other things, this is likely to mean that levels of partisanship and political attentiveness are likely to be overestimated in the sample. Though we can think of no reason why this may bias our results, or affect the observed relationship between any variables of interest, we are nevertheless hesitant to comment in detail about the magnitude of observed effects. Instead, we focus largely upon direction.
6 The 2015 CES includes both online and phone versions, but the national identification question was only asked repeatedly to web respondents.
7 In 2011, CES respondents were asked the same question as in 2015, except in only one wave of the questionnaire. Prior to 2011, CES respondents were presented with a different question on territorial identity. Instead of being asked about national identification in particular, they were asked how strongly they identify with country in comparison to their level of identification with several other territorial units (town/neighbourhood, region, province, North America, or the world as a whole). A relative measure of this nature does not provide information on how strongly an individual identifies with the country in absolute terms. It is conceivable, for instance, that an individual might identify more strongly with Canada than with any of the other territories listed, but still have a very low level of identification with the country. The 2015 CES includes an absolute measure of national identification, making this the ideal dataset to employ to study the relationship between partisanship and changes in national identification.
8 The wording for all CES survey questions employed here can be found in Appendix I.
9 Both positive party identification and negative party identification are measured prior to the election. The authors recognize that partisan identities may change as the result of an election. While positive party identification is also measured post-election, however, negative party identification is not. We cannot, therefore, limit our analysis to individuals with consistent partisan identities (though we have replicated all analysis below, excluding respondents who have inconsistent positive partisanship, and the substantive conclusions remain unchanged).
10 Among the sample, 39.2% paid a lot of attention to the campaign, while 49.8% and 11.0% paid some attention and not much attention, respectively.
11 There has been some debate in the literature about the appropriateness of using lagged dependent variables (see Wilkins, Citation2018 for a summary). Scholarship has largely concluded, however, that such a variable is indeed an appropriate tool for capturing dynamic effects in political process, such as is the case here (Keele & Kelly, Citation2006).
12 We limit all analysis to respondent for whom we have data on all variables (partisanship, strength of national identification, sociodemographic characteristics and attention). These values may therefore differ from the population more generally. Though we can think of no obvious reason why this might bias our results, readers should nevertheless be mindful of this restriction.
13 There are a small number of cases (3) in our sample where respondents are coded as holding negative party identification and positive party identification towards the same party. It is assumed here that such respondents misunderstood some portion of the questionnaire and they are dropped from our analysis.
14 We are hesitant to make strong statements about the direction of causality in the relationship between partisanship and pre-election national identification. We suspect that some degree of endogeneity exists, whereby these two types of identities mutually reinforce one another. This concern is not germane, however, to the analysis of post-election identity, whereby pre-election identity has been controlled for (). Changes in national identity cannot affect partisan identification, so the causality must begin with partisanship.