Canadian Exceptionalism in the Era of Right-Wing Populism? An Analysis of the Absence of an Electorally Successful Radical Right Party in Canada (2000-2021)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The resurgence of radical right parties (RRPs) has become a major characteristic of countries across the Western world. In the post-2000 period, RRPs have achieved major electoral breakthroughs throughout Europe, and the election of Donald Trump as president of the US in 2016 has suggested that such trends are no longer limited to the European continent. Thus far, Canada has remained an outlier. This trend is especially noteworthy given the emergence of the People’s Party of Canada (PPC) in 2018, a right-wing populist party that has participated in two federal elections (i.e. 2019 and 2021) but has yet to win any seats. This dissertation asks the following question: what explains the absence of an electorally successful RRP at the national level in Canada over the past two decades (specifically 2000-2021)? To investigate this question, I draw on five major theoretical frameworks that have been used to explain the resurgence of the radical right elsewhere to formulate and test a series of hypotheses in the Canadian context. The study relies on quantitative analyses of public opinion and elections data from such datasets as the Canadian Elections Study, the Environics Focus Canada Surveys, and the Consortium on Electoral Democracy’s Democracy Checkup Survey as well as the development of a novel dataset of the immigration policies of Canadian political parties as outlined in their election manifestos. I argue that the inability of a RRP to succeed in Canada can be explained by the following factors. First, the Canadian electorate has not witnessed a significant transformation of issue orientations from first- to second-dimension cleavages. Second, native-born Canadians have become more pro-immigrant in sentiment over time. Third, Canada has not witnessed a significant shift in the party preferences of economically precarious workers towards parties of the right. Fourth, mainstream political parties have remained positive in their coverage of immigration in their national campaigns and have focused on the economic benefits of immigration. And fifth, the geographical distribution of pro- and anti-immigrant attitudes across the country’s electoral ridings is such that a nativist turn among parties is unlikely to provide substantive electoral gains.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.014 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".