Gagnon Alain-G.Tanguay A. BrianPatten Steve - Canadian parties in transition: recent trends and new paths for research

The first edition of Canadian Parties in Transition was published over 25 years ago, in 1989, and it is reasonable to ask whether Canadas political parties and party system(s) could have been in transition for this entire period. The short answer is yesunequivocallyas the chapters in this fourth edition of the book will demonstrate. It might well be that the federal election of 19 October 2015 restored the partisan status quo ante, with a dominant Liberal Party, the Conservative Party (whatever epithet it uses to label itself) as the principal opposition, and the NDP trailing the other two as a potential third option. But perhaps the existing party system is not exactly the same as the old one(s), with the partisan allegiances of Quebecs voters still up for grabs, the question of possibly significant electoral reform on the agenda at the federal level for the first time in decades, and the ongoing impact of new communications and campaign technologies on power relations both within party organizations and among the parties themselves. The contributions to the fourth edition of Canadian Parties in Transition help shed light on the possible futures of this countrys political parties and party system.

The chapters are organized into four parts. The first explores the morphology of the existing party system and the principal factors that will shape its future evolution. Part II examines the nature of ideological competition in the Canadian party system and provides detailed portraits of each of the main parties along with the main third-party competitors that have periodically challenged their monopoly on representation. The chapters in Part III focus on both how interests are represented in contemporary democraciesvoting systems, social movement and civil society alternatives to the parties, and the various mechanisms of direct democracyas well as how effectively key groups and political communities in Canadian society (women and Qubcois, for instance) are represented by the existing system of partisan competition. Part IV is an entirely new and innovative feature of this fourth edition: each of the chapters here sketches out an important new path for future research in the disciplinary subfield of party politics. This section will be particularly useful for graduate students in need of new vistas for their own research projects.

All but 5 of the 20 chapters in this collection are entirely new, and the five that remain from the third edition have been substantially revised and updated to take into account the major political developments since the last edition appeared in 2007. The book ends with a statistical appendix containing the federal election results from 1925 to 2015 and a graph displaying voter turnout in federal elections from Confederation to the present. Emily Mann undertook these revisions for the fourth edition.