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The dramatic breakthrough of two new political parties in the watershed federal election of October 25, 1993, still reverberates through Canadian politics to this day. In that election, the Bloc Québécois received 49 per cent of the vote in Quebec and captured enough seats to form the official opposition, while the Reform party got 38 per cent of the vote in the Western provinces and won only two seats less than the Bloc. The emergence in 1993 of what some have labelled Canada's "fourth party system" (Bickerton et al., 1999; Carty et al., 2000) has considerably modified the configuration of partisan competition to which Canadian voters were accustomed. Despite the defeat of the sovereignty option in the 1995 Quebec referendum, the Bloc has managed to keep an important number of seats in the House of Commons for most of the past decade. The Reform party has since evolved into the Canadian Alliance before merging with the Progressive Conservative party, with the new merged party now having reasonable hopes of eventually forming a national government.
Considering the major impact the rise of two new parties in 1993 has had on national politics, it is surprising that relatively few empirical efforts have been devoted to the study of its specific causes. Some accounts of the 1993 results refer to Maurice Pinard's (1971) well-known explanation of the emergence of the Social Credit party in Quebec in the June 1962 federal election. Indeed, the 1993 election shares important similarities with the 1962 contest that provided the original testing ground for Pinard's theory. Both elections saw the sudden rise of third parties and were held during periods of economic hardship which, Pinard argued, is usually an important condition for the electoral success of third-party movements. For these reasons, the link with Pinard's theory appears obvious and is usually assumed without being empirically verified. Did one-party dominance and strains really play a role in the rise of Reform in the West and of the Bloc in Quebec in the 1993 Canadian federal election? Our study proposes a new empirical test of Pinard's argument applied to the 1993 case, using individual-level survey data from the Canadian Election Study.
The Pinard Argument
Pinard's (1971) study looked at the electoral breakthrough of Social Credit...