The geography of class and religion in Canadian elections revisited

Almost two decades ago, Richard Johnston advanced a provocatively counter-orthodox interpretation of the Canadian party system when he contended that "... far from lacking a social base, [it] is profoundly rooted in tribal loyalties." Specifically, he argued that where Catholics appeared in significant numbers, the party system tended to be socially grounded in the religious cleavage (Catholic/non-Catholic divisions in party choice), whereas class politics (union/non-union partisan divisions) prevailed in areas where Catholics constituted no more than a small minority. Johnston argued that religious cleavages took priority over material cleavages because of the tendency of voters to cast strategic ballots when their preferred party was rendered locally uncompetitive by the concentration of Liberal-voting Catholics. Our analysis extends that of Johnston by using multilevel methods to examine the impact of provincial and constituency-level densities of Catholics on the voting behaviour of individuals in the 2000 election. This approach enables us to simultaneously capture the interactive effects of class and religion across different levels of spatial aggregation. Our analyses suggest that religious affiliations continue to structure vote choice for all pan-Canadian parties except the NDP. We also find that these individual-level relationships are conditioned by the religious composition of the electoral district. We do not, however, uncover evidence to suggest that the religious and class cleavages interact over territory such that there are pockets where each cleavage dominates. As such, to the extent that tribal loyalties anchor the Canadian party system, they appear to be those of religious communities rather than those of class.