EVALUATING THE CITIZENS CONSTITUTION THEORY

The Citizens' Constitution Theory, formulated by Alan Cairns, provides a powerful explanation of the changes in Canadian politics during the 1980s. It tackles a research question that has far-reaching implicati ons for the fundamental dynamics of Canadian political life-namely, ho w does constitutional change affect political participation? Cairns's thesis has gained widespread acceptance in the relevant Canadian liter ature, but the linkages between attitudes and behaviour at the core of the theory have never been subjected to systematic tests with attitud inal research data. The purpose of this investigation, then, is to mak e operational the Citizens' Constitution Theory and to evaluate the em pirical support for it. The authors outline the central elements of th e Citizens' Constitution Theory and discuss how Cairns relates the cor e concepts to each other. They then suggest that the same concepts and their linkages might also be explained by an alternative theoretical perspective that comes from one variant of New Politics Theory. The em pirical section of this analysis uses recently collected survey result s to mount three different tests of the two theories. In the first ins tance, the focus is on the question: how well do both theories predict each set of linkages that can be found in the Citizens' Constitution Theory? The second test treats both theories comprehensively, as causa l models, and examines the empirical support for them using path analy sis. The final section evaluates the generalizability of both theories . The main finding is that New Politics Theory provides as good an exp lanation-and by some standards, a better explanation for recent change s in the patterns of Canadian political participation than does the Ci tizens' Constitution Theory.