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7 Comp. Pol. Stud. 3 (1974-1975)

handle is hein.journals/compls7 and id is 1 raw text is: MEASURING ELECTORAL CLEAVAGES IN A MULTIPARTY SYSTEM The Canadian Case J. A. LAPONCE R. S. UHLER University of British Columbia T he techniques most commonly used for the pre- or postdiction of an elector's choice of party-whether simple contingency or complex regression analysis-have one serious limitation in common: they assume that the dependent variable offers a choice between a single pair of distinct alternatives. When applied to the study of two-party systems such as those of the United States or Austria, the limitation is of little consequence since-by restricting the population of interest to the voters indicating a party preference-one does in effect restrict the voter's choice to a simple alternative; when applied to the study of multiparty systems, however, these same techniques are less useful because the choice offered to the voter can only be reduced to such an alternative by seriously restricting and thus prejudging the possibilities available to him (an excellent discussion of this problem is in Rae and Taylor, 1970). In a three-party system, for example, the well-informed and rational voter who decides to support party A does so not as an alternative to not-A, but as an alternative to both B and C. To overcome the limitations of the classical techniques, we propose, taking Canada and its four-party system as an example, to measure party cleavages by means of an extension of the logit model suggested by Theil (1969; a logit is defined as the logarithm of a probability ratio), then to translate these cleavages into measures of AUTHORS' NOTE: We are gratefid to Donald Blake and David Elkins for their comments on an earlier version of this paper. Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 7 No. 1, April 1974 Q 1974 Sage Publications, Inc. [31

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