Governing the “Government Party”: Liberal Party of Canada Leadership Conventions of 1948, 1958 and 1968 (original) (raw)
During the twentieth century, as Canadian voters began to associate the brand of their major political parties with the characteristics of their leaders, the Liberal Party of Canada’s leadership races evolved into events of national importance. This study examines this transformation through the 1948, 1958 and 1968 leadership conventions. It incorporates perspectives from inside the Liberal Party as well as the Canadian media’s portrayals of the conventions. This thesis explores the alternating pattern of anglophone and francophone Party leaders, the complications associated with the predictability of the outcome, the evolution of convention tactics to recruit delegate support, Party (dis)unity throughout the contests, and the political science theories that deconstruct the conventions and predict outcomes. It also details how, over time, the political ambitions of senior-ranking members trumped the interests the Liberal Party.
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PARTIES, ELECTIONS, and the FUTURE of CANADIAN POLITICS
This volume was conceived during Royce Koop's postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Political Science at Memorial University of Newfoundland in 2010-11. The two of us had a number of conversations over the course of that year about parties and elections (both inside and outside of Canada), and early on we noted that there had not yet been a consolidated effort to unpack the tumultuous last two decades of electoral politics in Canada. Given our training at the University of British Columbia, where we had been doctoral ...
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