Why do Canadians vote the way they do? For more than forty years, the primary objective of the ongoing Canadian Election Studies (CES) has been to investigate that question. This volume brings together principal investigators of the Studies to document the history of this impressive collection of surveys, examine what has been learned, and consider their future. The wide-ranging collection of essays provides useful background and insights on the relevance of the CES and lends perspective to the debate about where to steer the CES in the years ahead.

Academic studies of elections are not in the business of predicting outcomes. They are in the business of explaining them. The best studies treat voting data as raw material with which to explore socio-psychological processes such as individual decision-making and such sources of influence as issues, personality, media, socio-economic background, and party loyalty. The ebb and flow of ideologies and the comparative workings of different political systems are core topics on which election studies shed light. Looking back on more than fifty years of voting research, some of its major practitioners and critics reflect here on what has--and has not--been accomplished.

Taken together, the five studies provide a useful overview of the effectiveness of various forms of campaign communication in informing voters. Much of the material presented here is not readily available elsewhere.

Can election results be explained, given that each ballot reflects the influence of countless impressions, decisions, and attachments? Leading young scholars of political behaviour piece together a comprehensive portrait of the modern Canadian voter to reveal the challenges of understanding election results. By systematically exploring the long-standing attachments, short-term influences, and proximate factors that influence our behaviour in the voting booth, this theoretically grounded and methodologically advanced collection sheds new light on the choices we make as citizens and provides important insights into recent national developments.

The Canadian party system is a deviant case among the Anglo-American democracies. It has too many parties, it is susceptible to staggering swings from election to election, and its provincial and federal branches often seem unrelated. Unruly and inscrutable, it is a system that defies logic and classification – until now. In this political science tour de force, Richard Johnston makes sense of the Canadian party system. With a keen eye for history and deft use of recently developed analytic tools, he articulates a series of propositions underpinning the system. Chief among them was domination by the centrist Liberals, stemming from their grip on Quebec, which blocked both the Conservatives and the NDP. He also takes a close look at other peculiarities of the Canadian party system, including the stunning discontinuity between federal and provincial arenas. For its combination of historical breadth and data-intensive rigour, The Canadian Party System is a rare achievement. Its findings shed light on the main puzzles of the Canadian case, while contesting the received wisdom of the comparative study of parties, elections, and electoral systems elsewhere.

Election studies have reached a critical point in their development. In 1999, directors of election studies in Great Britain, Canada, the Netherlands and the USA, together with the directors of the European Elections Studies program and the Comparative Study of Election Systems group, met to discuss the conduct of election studies. After the conference, attendees responded to issues raised at the meeting by writing the chapters contained in this volume. There is unanimity among the investigators that studies based upon the Michigan model have reached the limit of what they can achieve. "The Future of Election Studies" considers the nature of new research questions facing electoral scholars, why conventional pre- and/or post-election studies are ill-equipped to address these questions, and how such studies are adapting to meet the challenges faced by scholars today and in the future.

The Canadian Federal Election of 2015 is a comprehensive analysis of all aspects of the campaign and the election outcome. The chapters, written by leading academics, examine the strategies, successes, and failures of the major political parties, and the changing nature of Canadian electoral politics.