Abstract
Canada sits uneasily within the literature on both political parties and parliamentary systems. In violation of Duverger’s Law, Canada has long combined a single-member plurality electoral system with a vibrant multi-party system and a dominant party of the centre, the Liberal Party. And despite its two historically largest parties being sprawling ‘brokerage’ parties, the Canadian House of Commons has higher levels of party unity in parliamentary voting than its close counterpart in the UK. The Canadian House is also more dominated by parties in terms of committee independence and the autonomy of the Speaker.
Jean-François Godbout’s Lost on Division: Party Unity in the Canadian Parliament is an exceptional new work that ties the two above phenomena together, with a novel and groundbreaking argument. Godbout argues that Canada’s tight parliamentary discipline is a primary cause of the multi-party system. Rather than arguing that Canada’s diversity of parties arose primarily from shifting social forces and other exogenous developments outside Parliament, he submits an institutionalist explanation that parliamentary parties’ early tight control of members prompted dissenters to form their own parties, rather than to work within existing ones. This has shaped the subsequent development of both Parliament and the party system. This is a convincing explanation of why Canada has both tighter party discipline and more significant minor parties than similar countries, like the UK.
Lost on Division: Party Unity in the Canadian Parliament has several goals and purposes. It makes a major empirical contribution simply by presenting Godbout’s comprehensive data of all voting in the two chambers of the Canadian Parliament. This alone is a significant achievement. Godbout demonstrates (pp. 6–7) that while party unity in the House of Commons after Confederation in 1867 was about 80% for Liberals and 85% for Conservatives, it rose steadily over the following decades to hit close to 100% by the 1940s, where it has remained ever since. For government motions alone, the near-100% rate was achieved as early as 1900. While there has been some minor receding on private members’ legislation in recent years, party cohesion in the Canadian House of Commons remains consistently very high. Patterns in the appointed Senate are different, with a much more graduated increase and variations over time (p. 220) (major changes in 2016 instituting an independent appointment process means that a majority of Canadian Senators now have no party affiliation and the entire concept of party voting in the Senate is on the decline; an evolving development Godbout can only briefly address).
Godbout’s central analytical question is, what explains this hardening of Canadian House of Commons voting at the beginning of the 20th century and its perpetuation ever since? He considers explanations such as expansion of the franchise or professionalization of MPs, but finds them inadequate. Instead, using his voting database and other quantitative and qualitative data, he argues that changes in the parliamentary agenda and rules are the primary explanation for the hardening of party lines in Canada – as well as the proliferation of new parties.
Godbout does not dismiss social and electoral forces. In particular, 19th- and early 20th-century Canadian voters and parties began to sort along regional, linguistic, and religious lines, so that French-speaking and Catholic voters strongly leaned Liberal, while the Conservatives were associated with Anglo-Saxon Protestantism. This led to more unified voting in Parliament, as parliamentary caucuses became less diverse and more cohesive. However, Godbout argues this developed into an increasing norm of high party discipline in the House in all matters. Meanwhile, the share of parliamentary time devoted to government legislation grew at the expense of private members’ business, and the civil service adopted merit policies that reduced patronage opportunities. All these reduced options and autonomy for MPs by the time of the First World War, while expectations for unified party voting grew. This especially posed difficulties for the rising region of Western Canada, which brought its own grievances and issues separate from language and religion.
All this, Godbout argues, led to dissent being registered through the creation of entirely new parties, rather than through the existing ones so that ‘...the emergence of several distinct regional parties in the House of Commons can be linked to parliamentary rules and party discipline’ (p. 9). In the 1921 election, the Progressive Party won the second most seats, relegating the governing Conservatives to third place and begetting Canada’s multi-party system. While the Progressives soon faded, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) formed a decade later and has been in Parliament ever since, renaming itself the New Democrats in 1961 (while garnering support in Ontario, the origins of both parties were primarily in Western Canada). The Social Credit party, with both Western and Quebec wings, was also a parliamentary force in the mid-twentieth century. This proliferation of regional parties can be projected to more modern times, with the Bloc Québécois and Western-based Reform Party storming the House of Commons in 1993 as the second and third place parties, and remaining (with Reform merging to form a new Conservative Party in 2004).
This review can only capture a small part of the many dimensions of the book. Lost in Division’s originality is sometimes a downside; the author has so much data and the scope is so sweeping that the book is packed and sometimes a dense, though always engaging, read. Godbout leavens this with his mixed-methods, drawing from MP memoirs and other sources to bring the quantitative data to life.
Lost on Division is a provocative and welcome addition to Canadian scholarship and has considerable value to non-Canadian readers interested in the study of parliamentary party cohesion and/or the development of party systems. Godbout’s approach particularly invites comparisons with other Westminster systems, like Australia, to understand how each has evolved differently according to its context. More broadly, scholars should engage Godbout’s argument that institutional rules and norms shape party systems as much or more than social forces.