Lynda Erickson and David Laycock, "Post-Materialism Versus the Welfare State?: Opinion Among English Canadian Social Democrats," Party Politics, 8 (May 2002), 301-325.

First Paragraph:
Like social democratic parties across the Western world, Canada's federal New Democratic Party (NDP) faces a major challenge responding to a political climate and public discourse increasingly hostile to many elements of conventional social democratic ideology. The political right has successfully promoted reduced public spending and lower taxes, fueled antipathy to public ownership and government regulation and placed welfare reform high on the political agenda. Given the NDP's traditional support for a strong welfare state to address social and economic inequality, and the popularity of the new right reform agenda, substantial dilemmas confront the party.

Figures and Tables:
Table 1. Support for welfare state issues
Table 2. Social policy priorities
Table 3. Opinions on economic and fiscal policy items
Table 4. Opinion on equity issues
Table 5. Patterns of internal difference &endash; bivariate correlationsa
Table 6. Multiple regression analysis of scales by respondent characteristics
Table 7. Relationships between post-materialism and other dimensions of socialist opinion

Last Paragraph:
Finally, the NDP might become a major player in the federal Canadian scene again by significantly altering its fiscal and social policy commitments. But our analysis suggests that the federal party is not prepared to undertake that sort of policy overhaul. New Democrats appear inclined to wait for the party's former supporters to recover their social democratic sensibilities, or perhaps wait for new voters to discover a strong antipathy to elites' commitments to globalizing free trade, rather than sacrificing either its materialist or its post-materialist commitments.