Political Parties

Another possible topic: Political Parties and environmental policy.

I think this would be a good topic considering that we are in a political science course. We could ask whether or not people think that the party in power (cons, lib, ndp, green) have an impact on environmental issues. Or ask people to rank which parties are best equipped to deal with environmental issues or something of that nature.

Ya I think this question could be interesting, such as rank the parties in the strength of their environmental policy. I also think you should ask people how important the environment is to them, and which party the prefer overall. Then you could also ask how much a parties environmental policy plays a role in whether they support them or not.

Sadie, I think it is a great idea to ask a question that involves people's opinions or perceptions on different parties capabilities to effectively deal with environmental issues. Were you thinking of having people give a score to each party individually or have them rank them from most effective to least? It may be a good idea to have them score each party with a number (1-5) individually, thus giving people the opportunity to rank two or more parties with the same score if they feel the parties are equally proficient?

I also like Thomas' suggestion of including an additional question regarding "how much parties environmental policy plays a role in whether they support them or not".

I'm not so sure about this one. Though we are a political science class, I don't think this is politics class. Sure, it would be interesting to find out what people think of each individual party's contribution to environmental policies, but this assumes people will give neutral, non-biased answers that do not reflect their views on the party's other policies. Some people are strongly passionate about certain parties, while they hate others. Assuming we do remove the most biased and skewed answers (from the already limited group of people who know anything at all about ALL the parties' environmental policy), I still think it would be very difficult to get anyhing useful out of this question.

But that's just my opinion on the people and their attitude towards political parties directly. I think we'd be better off doing something more appealing and directly related to people.

I think Marie's idea of ranking is probably the best way to go about it, because it gives people the ability to rank the parties the same. Unfortunately, this numerical system is quite arbitrary, which I see as a bit of a problem. But honestly, I would personally like to know peoples ordered preferences of parties, compared to one another, so in that respect I would like the most effective to least scale.

I forsee two problems with this one:

a)Party loyalty, as mentioned above but perhaps more significantly, specifically because of the nature of our topic...

b)"mainstream" versus "protest/interest" party -the two main federal parties, liberal/conservative, have the most control at the national level -however, when we talk about "best equipped" it is probably the Green Party, as they specialize in/take part in/fund etc. environmental research and advocate policy based on this (a sort of bias, I guess?) -therefore, we can't really say "most effective"; the Green Party would be the most effective but they will not take power any time soon in Canada. The Conservatives are "most effective" in that they are the ones making up environmental policy, however are probably not saving/protecting/sustaining the environment as well as the Green Party would (or perhaps even the Liberals.)

Basically, the power of the party in the legislature i.e. whether they have a large legislative majority, or a minority (as is recently prevalent) to a large extent determines its "effectiveness". This would confuse the issue with environmental policy.

That said, if we could somehow overcome the obstacles, it's an interesting question...

Jennifer explains my point better than me. I think the issue of specific parties would be an interesting question, and could perhaps be one of our question related to the issue, but I don't think it should be a primary one, or even one related to others. It could be an aside, or like a bonus question: "and final question, which party would you deem the most fit to solve the issue of X?", X being Alberta Tar Sands or whichever issue we've asked them about. 'deem the most fit' can then relate to which party has the best and most realistic ideas to bring to the table.