The Limits of Participation: Members and Leaders in Canada's Reform Party (review)

Only infrequently are political scientists afforded the opportunity to study political institutions first-hand from their conception and birth through their growth and development to their demise. Faron Ellis's study of the Reform party does just that. Focusing on the attitudes and characteristics of the party's members and their oftentimes stormy relationship with the party leadership, the book provides an empirically rich account of key elements of the party's history and a useful reality check on 'the limits of participation' – the gap between the rhetoric of populist parties and the realpolitik of Canadian politics.

Many readers will find the story slow to get underway, with Reform only appearing in chapter 2. In setting the stage, the opening chapter does offer a fine account of great swaths of Canadian party history, largely from a Western perspective, but its purpose is unclear. Specialists will find limited value added – little here is original – whereas the general reader doesn't need such detailed background, particularly since little of it is linked to the subsequent analysis of Reform.

Much of the book reports results from several surveys of Reform party members' demographic characteristics and political attitudes. All but the most committed numbers junkie will be overwhelmed with detail. A case in point is chapter 5, the longest chapter in the book: 'Opinion Structure of Delegates Attending Reform's 1992 Assembly.' Table after table presents statistical data on the members, some in the form of simple cross-tabulations, others through more sophisticated statistical techniques such as factor analysis. To be sure, much of value and interest emerges. In some instances the data confirm stereotypical views of Reformers' attitudinal makeup: when delegates to the party's 1992 assembly were asked to rate various groups' influence on federal government policy, they placed 'Quebecers' and 'Central Canada' at the top of the influence hierarchy; trade unions, 'feminists,' and environmentalists came only marginally behind the banks and well up the list; Westerners and 'the average voter' were at or near the bottom, well below homosexuals. Yet other data challenge conventional wisdom: the same delegates were, by a two-to-one margin, pro choice. Aside from statistical overkill, the chapter suffers from a lack of connection to the book's central theme of leadership-membership tensions in a populist organization.

For the book's real strength lies in its analysis – largely non-statistical – of the tensions between the grassroots members, who wanted the party run according to their populist principles (which is to say by the membership), and leader Preston Manning and his close advisors, who sought to impose discipline and direction in an effort to shift the party towards the political mainstream and thereby to power. Through a combination of astute tactics, control of the party's levers of power, and sheer bloody-mindedness, Manning and those around him (early Reform stalwart Stephen Harper appears frequently in these pages) generally succeeded in finessing, overriding, and otherwise evading the membership's preferences on key policy and strategic issues. A central theme, amply demonstrated throughout the book, is what Ellis terms 'the power imbalance between leaders and members of even the most participatory political parties.' In the end when Reform was, in Ellis's curious term conjuring images of obsolete warships, 'decomissioned,' Manning paid the price, decisively losing the leadership of the Canadian Alliance to Stockwell Day.

It seems clear that the author was at the very least an engaged fellow traveller if not a significant player in the Reform party, but this is never made explicit. That this is in significant ways an insider account is not the issue – they often produce insights unavailable to outsiders – but the reader deserves to know just what Ellis's role was in the party and where he came down on certain key internal divisions. That said, the book betrays no evident biases; the treatment of leaders and members seem equally evenhanded.

Those with limited enthusiasm for detailed statistics on...