Re-introducing Structure: An Historical Analysis and Structural Account of Political Cultures in the Prairie Provinces

Abstract

In this paper, I conduct an historical structural analysis to explain the preservation of political cultures across the Canadian Prairie Provinces. Taking into account Alberta’s historically conservative climate and bootstrap individualism, Saskatchewan’s historically left-leaning policy environment, and Manitoba’s moderate culture between its two prairie compatriots, I explain how these different cultures have persisted using a “polity-centred” approach. Perhaps the most popular explanation for such a “prairie paradox” is “fragment theory”, or looking at different “waves” of settlers including Loyalists, Americans, and early Ontarians, across the prairies. Scholars like Alan Cairns and Jared Wesley have critiqued this approach, arguing that it is the structure of federalism itself that preserves these cultures over time, or that it is the agency of political parties and their campaign literature that reflects political culture back at their populations. A “polity-centred” approach, as I present it here, synthesizes these two critiques of fragment theory to look at how structures both affect political agents and provide tools to affect political culture in their provinces. This is done through, first, a more general examination of how the Canadian federal structure influences political parties, and second, how political parties use structure to affect discourse in a province and preserve or change the political culture. I conclude that polity-centred approaches should be taken more seriously by sociologists and political scientists when looking at political cultures, and that this approach is useful for examining the cultures of other states and substates.