Bettering Canadian Democracy

The goals of the Political Communities Survey Project (PCSP) were to design a new survey that would help to provide an alternative and richer vantage point than was commonly reported in the literature. One that helped to deepen our theoretical understanding by incorporating potential contextual complexities such as a broader mix of political objects and sub-objects, as well as a way to identify a diversity of perspectives. One that more adequately incorporated and helped to more rigorously test the growing realm of competing explanatory possibilities that are now discussed in the relevant literature. And one that made it possible to explore with more empirical analysis, the possible links across the spectrum of political support from the most specific political objects (such as various political authorities and institutions) to the most diffuse (such as democracy as a way of govern and its various principles, or the political community more generally).

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The road to developing and implementing such a survey instrument was by no means easy. It required reviewing a copious amount of literature on political support and reviewing the bulk of the survey work that had been conducted to date to establish a more complete inventory of the sorts of concepts and indicators we have worked with in the past and the types of data that we had collected and analyzed. The PCSP team began the very meticulous task of filling in the missing blanks between what the literature led us to want to survey and what the available survey material would not yet allow us to explore. As well, we began to expand considerably on the realm of plausible indicators that were theoretically relevant but not yet developed or available for analysis, because in-depth and more dedicated surveys within particular democratic contexts did not exist. Thus, we began to design, test and re-test a variety of never-before implemented survey questions that would help us fill the various gaps that existed between what we wanted to analyze more deeply in the Canadian context and what has already been done worldwide.

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Our first two pilot studies involved testing our new survey instrument as part of the Quebec component of the Comparative Provincial Election Project (CPEP), which was a survey project that was administered online (Wesley et al. 2015). Mebs Kanji was asked to be the lead PI on both the 2012 and 2014 post provincial election CPEP surveys conducted in Quebec and he had acquired the funding to make it possible. So, this provided us with at least two viable opportunities to test the validity and reliability of our newly developed measures by piggybacking our survey questions onto a larger and, at that time, more established survey project, before taking our survey instrument countrywide. Throughout this process, we also analyzed and documented our preliminary results (as much as possible) as they emerged and presented our results in a variety of different outlets for valuable feedback (Kanji and Tannahill 2013; 2014; Kanji, Tannahill, and Hopkins 2015; Tannahill and Kanji 2016; Kanji and Tannahill 2017, these were also presented at a series of conferences between 2012 and 2023) and suggestions which we considered and incorporated as we progressed.

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These repeating cycles of survey design and redesign, testing and retesting, took multiple iterations and years to get to the point where we were more certain that the various new measures that we had designed were in fact valid and reliable, and that they were worthwhile to implement more broadly in terms of how they were interpreted by respondents, the variation that they captured, and the results that they provided. Furthermore, we had to secure the financial partners along the way to make such a large-scale survey project doable. Our final survey instrument had over 800 different variables and took approximately one hour to complete each sitting, of which there were two – Wave 1 and Wave 2. Eventually, the funding came through, thanks to partners such as Elections BC, the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada, and we were finally ready to go.

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Each of our Political Communities Surveys (Waves 1 and 2) were administered across Canada in all provinces in 2017. Each survey was translated and delivered online to a random selection of Canadians, in either French or English depending on the preferred language of the respondent, and was administered by Abacus Data, a prominent market and political research firm located in Ottawa, Canada. The respondents who were invited to do our surveys, either as part of the CPEP or as part of the 2017 Political Communities Survey Project (PCSP), were all Canadian citizens, of voting age, and residents of their home province for at least six months. We did this to ensure that the people we were talking to were all adults, and were fairly well rooted in their current contexts. Moreover, all of the respondents who answered our surveys (2012, n=1,288, Quebec only; 2014, n=1,544, Quebec only; 2017, n=5,651, Canada-wide) were recruited to participate through a representative panel of over 500,000 Canadians coordinated by Abacus with their sampling provider partners.

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Based on what we learned from analyses of each of these three rounds of data, we are moving now into the next phase of the PCSP. In this next phase, we will be going into the field again. The new and revised instruments that will be employed in the field will cover a broader portion of the population with different backgrounds and an expanded set of questions that probe even deeper based on what has been learned so far. Through a new collaboration with scholars from three other countries, the United States, Britain, and Poland, the next phase will also cast a wider net to include political systems outside of just Canada’s. More specifically, this new project includes both quantitative surveys, as have been conducted so far under the PCSP, as well as in-depth interviews carried out in civil society organizations in four major metropolitan areas in Canada, the US, the UK, and Poland, as well as comparable general population surveys for each of their countries (employing a similar general PCSP questionnaire in all four countries.).

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First, the new wave of this PCSP survey that will be carried out in Canada in 2023, with shorter versions in other countries, will address limitations that we have identified so far in terms of the substantive scope of our earlier questionnaires, by including more variables that dig in more depth into performance as the most significant driver of political support. These will include questions that tap orientations toward more aspects of democracy (both in terms of what democracy provides in practice as well as what the public think their democracies should offer), assessments of more objects within the political system (including a broader range of authorities, both political and non-political), more aspects of citizens’ lived experiences (including direct experiences with a variety of government benefits and services), and a broader scope of policy effects and perceptions of the system’s outputs. It will also dig deeper into the potential consequences of political support that we have, so far, been unable to discuss in depth and which are rarely explored in the context of political support. These consequences include, for instance, the degree and variation in compliance with polity rules, participation in a variety of political activities (both traditional and non-traditional), demands for political change (such as system, institutional and societal reform), as well as social cohesion. The new wave of surveys will also tap citizens’ perceptions of the system’s capacity to adapt to varying situations. This last component, adaptive capacity, promises to be especially fruitful and, based on our findings to date about the major concerns surrounding performance, extremely necessary.

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While we believe that by using interviews and surveys, we can draw conclusions about what needs to be done, if we do not also assess the capacity of the system to address these needs, any solutions we propose may never see the light of day. In fact, before solutions can even be proposed, capacity and the limitations on this capacity should be better understood. We need only look at the health care system in many countries over the course of the pandemic to find perfect examples of how solutions without capacity can be entirely ineffective. Thus, through the next phases of the PCS project, we will also be conducting interviews with political elites (including elected representatives at all levels of government) to determine where they believe, based on their privileged vantage points in positions of leadership, our system has the capacity to respond to societal needs and where it is lacking. By expanding the scope of the PCS project in this way, we will be able to start filling the gap in understanding the disconnect between citizens and the political elite that govern them. Again, our plan is to carry out this data collection across all four countries involved in our new international collaboration.

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Finally, in addition to political elites, we will also be expanding the reach of this research and our understanding of on-the-ground societal demands and the direct impact of the political system’s outputs. To do this, once again in collaboration with our international partners, we will conduct interviews with the leaders of civil society organizations to determine their views on the benefits produced by our political system, how well they meet the demands of the most vulnerable, and how well the system has adapted to demands in times of real crisis (i.e. the pandemic). The first phase in getting a more broad-based understanding of the challenges faced by vulnerable Canadians (and their potentially different demands on the political system) will be to conduct interviews with civil society organizations that serve these populations. The findings from these interviews will not only help to better understand the capacity of governments to deliver for these groups, but also the capacity of the organizations themselves (as an extension of society’s social safety net) to meet the needs and demands of such vulnerable groups.

 

The next phase after that, which is also funded and will likely commence in 2024, will be to tap the perceptions of this segment of citizens directly in all countries through both face-to-face interviews and online surveys. Data collection in this phase will also include surveys of a large sample of patrons of various civil society organizations, the more “vulnerable” members of our societies in each of the four democratic countries on either side of the Atlantic who are otherwise generally excluded from broad-based public opinion surveys or other forms of general population studies.

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Text excerpted from "Democracy's Challenges", dissertation by Kerry Lynne Tannahill