The Polls and the 1995 Quebec Referendum

Abstract: We perform a meta-analysis of 23 voter polls reported in the news media during the two-month period preceding the 1995 Quebec sovereignty referendum. Contrary to common interpretations of the course of the referendum campaign, we find that there was a smooth and general increase in support for the sovereignty option during this period, and that Lucien Bouchard's dramatic intervention on behalf of the "yes" campaign on October 9 apparently had little effect on voters' stated intentions. The same was true of other putatively consequential events that transpired during the referendum campaign. We conclude that the pre-referendum polls slightly, but systematically, exaggerated the level of support for sovereignty. Resume: Nous executons une analyse "meta" de vingt-trois sondages qui sont annonce dans les journaux devant une periode de deux mois avant la 1995 referendum sur la souverainte du Quebec. En contraste des interpretations conventionelle pendant le cours de la referendum, on trouve un tendance positive pour la souverainte dans tout la periode et que l'intervention de Lucien Bouchard au commencement de 9 d'octobre sera pas de consequence. Ni les interventions des autres evenements touche la direction. On conclus que les sondages avant le referendum, exagere, un peut, le support pour la souverainte du Quebec. The October 30, 1995 Quebec sovereignty referendum is surely the most dramatic electoral event in recent Canadian political history. Substantial attention has been paid to the referendum in the popular press and, to a lesser extent, in the scholarly literature, both during and after the event. Nevertheless, while there is substantial commentary on pre-referendum polls, we are aware of no careful statistical analysis of the dynamics of the campaign as revealed in the polls -- a task that we carry out in this paper. The period leading up to the 1995 Quebec referendum was notable for the intensity of political polling -- 23 general polls of voters were reported in the news media in the two-month period preceding the referendum, and by all accounts many more private polls were commissioned by interested parties. (1) Characterisations of the Referendum Campaign In an analysis of the 1992 Canadian constitutional referendum, LeDuc and Pammett (1995: 5) argue that while referenda in parliamentary democracies can be understood in much the same terms as elections, "their outcome is even more dependent on the short-term elements of the campaign. " At the start of the 1995 Quebec referendum campaign, the "yes" forces were under the formal leadership of the then-premier of Quebec, Jacques Parizeau. The "no" forces were captained by the leader of the Quebec Liberal Party, Daniel Johnson. Parizeau's leadership was widely regarded as ineffective. On October 9, in a dramatic gesture, Parizeau ceded direction of the "yes" campaign to Lucien Bouchard, then the leader of the Bloc Quebecois. Just as Parizeau's leadership was considered ineffective, Lucien Bouchard's takeover of the campaign was widely interpreted as giving the "yes" forces an important boost -- an interpretation that persists to this day. For example, on the day after the referendum, the Toronto Globe and Mail ran an article with the headline, "Bloc Quebecois Leader Lucien Bouchard brought big gains when he took over the reigns of the Yes committee" (Picard, 1995). (2) It would not be difficult to produce literally dozens of similar statements. While the dominant interpretation, the efficacy of Bouchard's intervention on the referendum campaign is not universally accepted. Writing in the Montreal newspaper La Presse, Quebec sociologist Pierre Drouilly (1995b) pointed to a generally rising trend of support for the "yes" option in polls conducted during the pre-referendum period. Likewise, in a paper published shortly after the referendum, Universite de Montreal political scientist Edouard Cloutier identified four potential "turning points" in the referendum campaign (Cloutier, 1995: 37): On September 24, Claude Garcia, Chief Executive Officer of the Standard Life Insurance Co. …