The Political Ecology of Campaign Contributions in Canada: A Constituency-Level Analysis

This article explores the constituency dimension of campaign financing in the 1984 and 1988 federal elections in Canada. The analysis uncovers considerable variability in the capacity of constituency parties to attract campaign donations. These variations appear to be related to the past local and regional strengths of parties, to the expected closeness of the current contest, and to whether incumbents are running for re-election. Multivariate analyses suggest that these political variables have a broadly consistent impact on fund-raising after other features of the socio-economic diversity of constituencies have been controlled.