Elisabeth Gidengil, Andre Blais, Neil Nevitte and Richard Nadeau, "The Correlates and Consequences of Anti-Partyism in the 1997 Canadian Election," Party Politics, 7 (July 2001), 491-513.

First Paragraph:
For all the debate about the 'crisis of party', there has been surprisingly little study of the correlates and consequences of anti-partyism at the mass level (Webb, 1996). A portrait is emerging of the trends in anti-party sentiment (Clarke and Kornberg, 1993; Poguntke, 1996), but despite the growing recognition that disaffection with political parties can be a powerful force for political change (Bardi, 1996; Scarrow, 1996), we still do not know very much about what motivates this sentiment or what its behavioural implications are. In this paper, we use data from the 1997 Canadian Election Study to address these two questions: What sort of people are most disenchanted with political parties and why? And how does this affect their electoral behaviour?

Figures and Tables:
Figure 1: Canadians' evaluations of political parties (outside Quebec) p. 498
Table 1: Social background characteristics and anti-arty sentiment p. 499
Table 2: Attitudinal correlates of anti-party sentiment p. 500
Table 3: Anti-partyism and voting behaviour p. 502
Table 4: Party performance, political sophistication, and voting behaviour p. 503

Last Paragraph
As Canada's 'anti-party' party, Reform tapped successfully into both the specific source of this anti-partyism and generalized antipathy toward political parties. According to our estimates, if Reform voters had felt no more negatively toward political parties than those who voted for one of the traditional parties, Reform support would have dropped by fully four percentage points from 27 percent of the vote outside Quebec to 23 percent. The importance of antipathy toward political parties per se in the party's support raises two questions. First, it begs the question of whether 'anti party' voters perceive their party to be a 'real' party (Mudde, 1996; Webb 1996). When these voters are responding to questions about political parties, it seems, only the established parties are part of their frame of reference. Clearly, further research is needed, but this does support the contention that the 'challenge to party' may not be a challenge to parties as such but to a particular type of party (Katz and Mair, 1995). Second, the importance of anti-partyism in support for 'anti-party' parties underlines their 'quintessential dilemma ... how to be an effective party at the same time as being an "anti-party"' (Taggart, 1995: 39). If they end up acting more and more like established brokerage parties, will these parties still serve as a way of channeling anti-party sentiment and giving it legitimate voice inside the system? If they come to be perceived as 'real' parties no different from the rest, some of their erstwhile supporters may choose to opt out of the system altogether. Voice may yet prove to be exit postponed (Hirschman, 1970: 37), and the challenge to party could become challenge to parties as such.