R. Kenneth Carty, D. Munroe Eagles and Anthony Sayers, "Candidates and Local Campaigns: Are There Just Four Canadian Types?" Party Politics, 9 (September 2003), 619-636.

First Paragraph:
Conventional accounts of modern election campaigns portray them as nationalized, centralized and leader-dominated affairs (e.g. Farrell and Webb, 2000; Mughan, 2000), a characterization widely applied to Canadian electotal contests (Bell and Fletcher, 1991). This interpretation is increasingly being challenged by evidence that points to the relevance and importance of national parties' local campaigns (Carty and Eagles, 1999; Denver and Hands, 1997; Pattie et al., 1994; Whiteley and Seyd, 1992, 1994). A recent study of the candidate and campaign process at the grass roots in Canada extends this rethinking of the place of local organization and activity in the electoral process (Sayers, 1999). It draws on a close observation of 25 individual campaigns in 7 federal electoral districts by the candidates of the (then) 3 major Canadian parties during the 1988 Canadian federal election. This political anthropology provides the basis for a theoretical model that integrates the essence of the nomination process with the characteristic elements of resulting local campaign organizations. Simply put, the argument suggests that:

[I]n choosing a nominee, nomination meetings are also harbingers of the type of election campaign a party will run in a riding. The type of candidate that is successful and the support that he or she receives profoundly affects local campaigns. (Sayers, 1999: 51)

Despite the enormous political, geographic, and socio-economic variation across the constituency map, the hypothesis is that Canadian elections are fought by just four kinds of candidates.

Figures and Tables:
Table 1: Operationalizing Sayer's typology for statistical reasoning
Table 2: Candidate types and campaign team characteristics
Table 3: Candidate types and local party autonomy
Table 4: Candidate types and campaign resources
Table 5: Confirmatory factor analysis of campaign types

Last Paragraph:
It would appear that the genetic material governing the conduct of local elections in Canada is to be found in the characteristics of the nomination Process. That being the case, the considerable local autonomy long possessed by local party associations over the nomination process may be one of the most important keys to understanding electoral politics in Canada.