1 Long, J. A. and Quo, F. Q., “Alberta: One Party Dominance,” in Robin, M. (ed.), Canadian Provincial Politics: The Party Systems of the Ten Provinces (Scarborough: Prentice-Hall, 1972), 1–26Google Scholar.

2 Riker, W. H., The Theory of Political Coalitions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 33Google Scholar.

3 Macpherson, C. B., Democracy in Alberta: Social Credit and the Party System (2nd ed.; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962)Google Scholar.

4 Ibid., 238–39.

5 When Alberta was created as a province in 1905, provision had to be made to organize the first provincial election. The federal Laurier administration accordingly appointed a Liberal lieutenant-governor who in turn called on the Liberal leader to form the first government and to arrange for the first election to be held several months later. Not surprisingly, the Liberals won all but two seats.

6 “Alberta: One Party Dominance.”

7 Ibid., 24.

8 Palmer, Howard and Palmer, Tamara, “The 1971 Election and the Fall of Social Credit in Alberta,” Prairie Forum 1 (1976), 123–34Google Scholar.

9 “Electoral Cleavages in Alberta During the Social Credit Reign 1935–1971” (unpublished, University of Calgary, December, 1972)Google Scholar.

10 Ibid., 13.

11 See Davis, O. A., Hinich, M. J. and Ordeshook, P. C., “An Expository Development of a Mathematical Model of the Electoral Process,” American Political Science Review 64 (1970), 426–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; W. H. Riker, The Theory of Political Coalitions; Riker, W. H. and Ordeshook, P. C., “A Theory of the Calculus of Voting,” American Political Science Review 62 (1968), 25–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for examples of the methodology proposed.

12 The model is developed more rigorously in Levesque, T. J. and Norrie, K. H., “A Spatial Model of Sustained Overwhelming Majorities” (University of Alberta, March 1977)Google Scholar. (Mimeographed.)

13 The last part of the equation is an interaction term. In the discussion that follows a₁₂ is set equal to zero, which is tantamount to assuming that the perceived losses on each of the issues are evaluated independently.

14 Thus the popular interpretation that vocal student opposition in the United States to the war was largely a result of the removal of the student draft deferment.

15 Such would be the case, for example, if a party campaigned on a platform of increasing education spending but then when in office actually cut it.

16 The procedure can be illustrated more formally in the following manner. The voter is indifferent between parties 1 and 2 when

where E is the expectations operator and the subscripts refer to the parties. For a voter with the most preferred positions (, ) this can be written following equation 2 of the text as follows:

By taking expectations of both sides, realizing that E(X)² = σx² + μ²x and that and are constant, and solving for in terms of the following equation is obtained.

with the a's defined above, where is the variance of the probability distribution the voters attach to the announced position of party two on issue X, where is the announced position of party 2 on issue X, and likewise for issue Y. The expression is the formula for a straight line in the XY space. A voter holding any combination of and that happens to fall on this line will be unable to choose parties. All voters with a most preferred X - Y combination above the line will favour one party while those below it the other. The size of the vote for any arbitrary party depends systematically on some well-defined and interesting political parameters.

17 See Elton, D. K., “Electoral Perceptions of Federalism: A Descriptive Analysis of the Alberta Electorate,” in Elton, D. K. (ed.), One Prairie Province? Conference Proceedings and Selected Papers (Lethbridge: The Lethbridge Herald, 1970), 133–52Google Scholar.

18 See Norrie, K. H., “Some Comments on Prairie Economic Alienation,” Canadian Public Policy 2 (1976), 211–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “The National Policy and the Prairie Region to 1930,” in Akenson, D. (ed.), Canadian Papers in Rural History, Vol. 1 (Langdale Press, 1978), 13–32Google Scholar, for discussions of this.

19 A good example of the latter function is the current moves by the Lougheed government to reduce the American tariff on petrochemical imports. Rather than make his case on this purely federal matter through Alberta's elected members of Parliament, he has taken up the issue himself and actually visited US political leaders in an attempt to enlist their support in exchange for promises of future deliveries of gas. The more obvious federal representatives have been completely ignored here.

20 See Pratt, Larry and Richards, John, “Oil and Social Class in Alberta: The Bourgeoisie Take Power,” Canadian Forum (October-November 1978), 12–13Google Scholar, for an alternative view.

21 Long and Quo, “Alberta: One Party Dominance,” 13–16.

22 Ibid., 14–15.

23 Ibid., 13–14.

24 It must be acknowledged here that the saliency factor is not entirely an exogenous variable. A party that feels itself to have the advantage on one or another of the issue spaces will logically attempt to convince the voters of its overriding importance. The attempts by Lougheed to stress the crisis nature of federal-provincial relations during the 1975 election is a good example of this, as is the indication that he would like to fashion the next campaign along similar lines.

25 A further implication of the present work is that Macpherson's assertion of a homogeneous independent commodity producer class was not even necessary to his analysis of one-party dominance. The similarity of interests as regards federal-provincial relations is sufficient under certain conditions to generate large majorities. The greater dispersion of interests over time has merely increased the chances of a more competitive election whenever this issue does not dominate. Accordingly, critics such as those referenced in footnote 20 are not necessarily undermining the Macpherson thesis when they argue that he underestimated the heterogeneity of interests on internal issues.