Revisiting Sectoral Voting in Canada: Evidence from the Canada Election Studies

• In Event: Welfare State Politics in Canada

Abstract

According to the budget-maximizing bureaucrat model, public sector employees should rationally seek to increase government budgets to increase their own power. In contrast to most advanced democracies, class and sectoral voting has largely been neglected in Canada. The ideological and voting preferences of the public sector has been unexamined since the 1980s, when a small left-wing voting cleavage was uncovered by (Blais et al. 1990; 1991). Using the Canadian Election Study (1968–2019), we revisit and expand on this work by testing whether public sector employees in Canada are more likely to: 1) vote for leftist parties; 2) turnout to vote; 3) hold leftist political attitudes. We find that the public sector holds more economically leftist attitudes than the general public and that a sectoral cleavage has emerged, with public sector employees increasingly supporting the leftist New Democratic Party (NDP). We also find that social class moderates these two relationships, as professionals and managers in the public sector are significantly more likely vote for the NDP and hold more leftist economic attitudes than their counterparts in both the private sector, and the routine non-manual and working class in the public sector.

Authors

• Simon Kiss, Wilfrid Laurier University

• Matthew Polacko, University of Toronto