Lisa Young and William Cross, "The Rise of Plebiscitary Democracy in Canadian Political Parties," Party Politics, 8 (November, 2002), 673-699.

First Paragraph:
Many advanced industrialized countries, including Canada, have experienced a decline in conventional political participation, coupled with a rise in support for direct democracy in recent years (Abramson and Inglehart, 1995; Butler and Raney, 1994; Dalton, 1996; Nevitte, 1996; Norris, 1999). These trends create clear dilemmas for political parties, as they make it diffi- cult to recruit activists and mobilize voters, as well as challenge the privileged place political parties have enjoyed in structuring government. There is evidence, however, that in some of these countries political parties are responding to this challenge by reforming their internal practices in such a way as to accommodate societal demands for more direct involvement in decision-making (Scarrow, 1999; Seyd, 1999). Seyd (1999: 401) argues that there is evidence of a "more general trend toward a new, plebiscitarian type of party in which vertical, internal communications between members from the leadership and headquarters to the member at home replace horizontal communications within areas, regions and constituencies."

Figures and Tables:
Figure 1. Influence Differentials
Table 1. Factor analysis. Intra-party democracy: factor analysis (principal components, varimax rotation, missing values replaced by mean)
Table 2. Best way to elect a party leader
Table 3. Mean factor scores, factor 1 (support for undifferentiated membership)
Table 4. Mean factor scores, factor 4 (deference to party elites on policy development)
Table 5. Mean factor scores, factor 2 (dissatisfaction with extent of grassroots influence)
Table 6. Percent of respondents indicating that the following is 'very important' in developing party policy
Table 7. Mean factor scores, factor 3 (opposition to leader appointment)
Table 8. Mean factor scores, factor 5 (support for intra-party egalitarianism)

Last Paragraph:
The specific contours of the model of intra-party plebiscitary democracy that have been identified in this article are to some extent specific to the Canadian case. Certainly, the conflict between differentiated and undifferentiated conceptions of party membership and between deferential and egalitarian conceptions of intra-party membership may be sharper in the Canadian case, as both have been the source of controversy within Canadian parties over the past two decades. This Canadian specificity speaks to the need for more extensive comparative research to identify the common and disparate elements of an emerging plebiscitary ethos within political parties. While acknowledging that the Canadian variant of plebiscitary democracy within parties may not be identical to that found in other advanced democracies, the findings presented in this article do lend credence to the argument that this is a cross-national trend