Making sense of regional voting in the 1997 Canadian federal election: Liberal and reform support outside Quebec

This article uses a regression decomposition approach to explore the meanin g of the gaps in electoral support for the federal Liberal party between On tario, the West and Atlantic Canada, as well as the gap in Reform party sup port between the West and Ontario in the 1997 federal election. The analysi s proceeds in two stages. The first stage involves determining whether the regional vote gaps reflect "true" regional differences or whether they can be explained simply in terms of differences in the sociodemographic makeup of the regions. Having ascertained that the gaps are not spurious, the seco nd stage of the analysis probes the beliefs and attitudes that underlie the m. The authors conclude that the gaps are driven not just by differences in political orientations and beliefs from one region to another, but also by more fundamental differences in basic political priorities.