Exam 14: Political parties and the party system

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The broker system posits that given the multiple cleavages in Canadian society and the function of parties to aggregate interests, political parties in Canada should be conciliators, mediators, or brokers among the cleavages already identified.The theory suggests that maximizing their appeal to all such groups is not only the best way for parties to gain power, but, in the fragmented Canadian society, is also necessary in order to keep the country together.Thus, in their search for power, parties should act as agents of national integration and attempt to reconcile as many divergent interests as possible.The broker theory can thus be seen to argue that the Liberal and Conservative parties have no central ideological interests and merely promise to satisfy the most important interests felt by the voters at any point in time.However, by concentrating on regional and ethnic cleavages, parties minimize the role of ideology in Canadian politics.Parties are opportunistic and pragmatic rather than offering the electorate a choice of principled, distinctive programs.Parties do not generate innovative policy approaches, but are content instead to respond to public opinion polls and advocacy group demands.
The concept of a system of ideological or class-based parties expects that in the pre-democratic period in a country such as Canada two parties will develop, both of which defend the capitalist system.When the vote is extended to the working class, however, a new left-wing, working-class party will emerge that either joins the competition or displaces one of the existing parties, generally forcing politics to take on an ideological and class-based character.In Canada, when the vote was extended to the working class at the turn of the century, some isolated labour, socialist, and communist political activity occurred.But the newly enfranchised working class did not manage to create a successful class-based party, as the Liberals and Conservatives did everything in their power to discourage such a development, using both seductive and coercive techniques.The Liberals and Conservatives were well established when the vote was extended to the working class, and they continued to define politics in non-class terms, either appealing to ethnic/religious and regional groups or else developing pan-Canadian appeals that diverted attention from class-based issues.
The one-party dominance thesis posits that Canada has really been dominated by one party, the Liberals, since about 1900.The Liberals are the "government party," power-oriented rather than issue-oriented, and maintain themselves in office with the help of public service expertise, public opinion polls, and the chance to choose election day.The Conservatives are seen as the "opposition party," ordinarily having to settle for the role of critics, but being elected to office only on those rare occasions when the people get thoroughly fed up with the Liberals.Finally, the NDP can be termed the "innovative party," never really having a chance to govern nationally, but being responsible for introducing new ideas from beyond the range of current ideological conformity, both at the federal and provincial levels.