Shifting Priorities: From Deficit Spending to Paying down the Debt and Lowering Taxes - Evidence from the Alberta Advantage Surveys: 1995-2000

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And They Said It Couldn’t Be Done ...

One of the rough-and-ready ways of distinguishing politicians and their electoral strategies is to contrast "vote-grabbers" from "position-takers." The former trim their policies to satisfy the average voter, whereas the latter seek to distinguish themselves from their political opponents, even if it also appears to push them away from the presumed position of the median voter. "These opposing imperatives," write Richard Johnston and his colleagues in the 1988 National Election Study—"to take stands which give voters reasons for supporting the party, on the one hand, and to move towards the center to avoid alienating voters, on the other"—create one of the "essential tensions" in campaigns (Johnston et al., 1992, 4-5). The tension is essential in the sense that it never goes away. Thus a party that comes close to taking no position will give potential voters no reason to vote for it, and they are likely to drift away; likewise a party that takes an unambiguous and intense position on a range of issues that outside the realm of acceptability and are of little concern to most voters may attract a devoted following, but their numbers will be small. Hence the need to balance the two tendencies.

The left-right spatial model that is presumed to portray the normal or bell-curve distribution of public opinion carries with it the implication that most rational politicians most of the time will be enthusiastic vote-grabbers and reluctant position-takers. This may be true, but it ignores the fact that elections are not just about how voters decide. They also reflect the ability of parties and politicians to control and shape the political alternatives to their advantage. Indeed, some politicians are of the view that this is what political life is all about. Competitive advantage sometimes goes to those politicians who successfully "prime" the electorate—that is, they give voters reasons to vote for them. In terms of rational choice theory, they are individuals or parties who are successful at "shaping preferences" (see Dunleavy, 1991, ch 5). Ralph Klein was able to take a clear position that also grabbed votes. In what follows, we examine how Albertans have responded to the initiatives advanced by the Klein governments.

The Downsian Model

In his Economic Theory of Democracy, Anthony Downs formalized the argument that governments typically plan and undertake policies that are most likely to maximize voter support, and citizens, in turn, form their political preferences on the basis of government actions that favour them. It follows that governments are likely to spend when they calculate the benefits to be greater than the political costs of financing expenditures, which can be done either through taxation, printing money, or borrowing (though only the options of taxing or borrowing are available to Canadian provinces). Stated more formally, a "government increases its spending until the vote gain of the marginal dollar spent equals the vote loss of the marginal dollar of financing" (Downs, 1957, 69). According to this theory, therefore: to increase its support a government must either increase its spending or decrease its taxing. Thus governments calculate what is in their own interests by estimating what is in the interest of their supporters.

The Klein government, however, appears successfully to have avoided the Downsian logic of government decision-making in both possible ways. After being elected in 1993, the government began immediately to slash public spending across a broad range of policy areas, including highly valued programs —healthcare, education and social welfare. Moreover, although the government did not implement any new taxes, at the same time it did not compensate citizens for reduced services by also reducing their tax burden. Despite its under-spending and over-financing, the Klein government continued to grow in popularity.

The obvious questions is: why? Politically speaking, it was a high-risk strategy to defy Downsian logic and demand that Albertans do more with less, so what accounts for the government’s unprecedented success?

Data

In order to analyze this unusual turn of events, our analysis relies heavily on a longtitudinal body of evidence known as the Alberta Advantage Surveys (AAS). The first two of these public opinion polls were conducted during the aftermath of the Klein government’s initial budget cuts (in 1995 and 1996, respectively). The third survey was taken in January 1999, midway through the second electoral mandate and after the government had successfully eliminated the deficit, reduced the debt, and begun to spend money again. The most recent one was conducted in November 2000, after the controversy over Bill 11, which changed some of the structures dealing with healthcare delivery, but prior to having to deal with the impact of energy deregulation and energy rebates.

Each of these surveys was administered via telephone to a random sample of slightly more than 1000 Albertans, which means that the margin of error for each data set is approximately +3%. Although these surveys are not panel studies, that is, although we did not interview the same people in all three studies each questionnaire did contain several of the same questions, which makes it possible to track aggregate public opinion over time.

The AAS are particularly useful in that they incorporate a variety of different measures. In addition to obtaining a number of background factors, these surveys measure the public’s approval ratings for the Klein government and the opposition Liberals, as well as measure orientations toward Premier Klein and opposition leader, Nancy MacBeth. Furthermore, the AAS also track perceptions toward the general principles of deficit elimination, spending cuts, taxes and user fees, and examine the public’s more specific orientations toward the speed and size of the budget cuts in several areas, including education, healthcare and social welfare. All of these variables (along with others) are of particular relevance to accounting for why the Klein government has remained popular. Moreover, the timing of these studies is fortunate in that they allow us to examine public opinion in Alberta during both the best and worst of recent economic times.

Four Plausible Explanations

We propose to consider four plausible explanations for the Klein government’s success. The first holds that support for political parties may be based primarily on sociological attachments and party ties. In other words, Albertans might remain loyal to the Tories because their primary social group affiliations, their friends and neighbours, prompt them to do so, or because their long-term loyalties of one kind or another bind them to the Conservative party. In Alberta, for instance, one consistent finding has been that men, particularly those living in Calgary and in rural areas, are more likely to be Conservative supporters than women or Edmontonians (Archer and Gibbins, 1997, 470). That does not, however, tell us much about other sources of support for the Klein government or the reasons for it. In addition, there is now mounting evidence to suggest that party identification has weakened in recent years, particularly among younger voters.

A second explanation begins with the premise that citizens today are less reliant than in the past on either social group or party cues (Kanji, 1999; Kanji and Archer, 1998). Downs’ theory, for example, holds that voters are "rational utility maximizers" (Downs, 1957, ch. 3), meaning that they organize their political preferences according to their calculated evaluations of which party is the most likely to provide the greatest personal gain. Samuel Popkin (1991) adds that voters can and do distinguish clearly among different policy initiatives and that they base their overall political judgements on the likely effects of government actions. If Downs and Popkin are right, then another reason why Albertans might continue to support the Klein government may be because they value the principles of deficit elimination, spending cuts, and user fees more than they oppose the short-term consequences of large and rapid budget cuts. By this account, Albertans continue to support the Tories because they distinguish between the government’s broader long-term policy initiatives, of which they approve, and their hard-hitting approach, about which they may have reservations. The argument here, in essence, is that government success is less a result of past social and partisan allegiance than of government "priming." It may be, in other words, that the government has been successful in persuading the electorate that deficit elimination was a major issue, that dealing with it would promote prosperity, and that they were the party best able to do what they promised.

It is important not to lose sight of the fact that in most democratic societies the governing party competes with other opposition parties for the right to rule. Therefore, a third prospective explanation for the success of the Klein government may be related to a weak or neutralized opposition. As noted, about halfway through their first term, the Tories began to govern without any significant threat from the left. Indeed, as we shall see, many Albertans hold that Premier Klein continues to remain popular because he has no real competition. It is possible, then, that Albertans continue to support the Klein government because they see no plausible alternative.

Lastly, a fourth possible explanation may be that the success of the Klein government rests squarely on the popularity of the leader of the party rather than on the policies the government enacts (Wattenberg, 1991). In Canada, conventional wisdom holds that leaders are considered crucial to a party’s success (see Clarke, et al., 1996). At a time when trust in politicians is at a premium, the Alberta premier is often distinguished from the rest as being somehow different. Thus support for the "Ralph Party" might be attributed directly to the preference Albertans feel for Ralph Klein over all other opposition leaders, whoever they may be. Conversely, of course, Klein’s popularity may simply be the result of the understandable desire of journalists to dramatize electoral contests (Newman, 1995; CH, 13 December, 1996).

Given the existing research on political support, we expect that each of these four explanations is partly responsible for explaining why Albertans continue to support the Klein government. But is any one explanation more compelling than the others? And if so, which particular arguments are the least relevant?

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