Outlooks toward Government Institutions in Quebec

Abstract

The 2012 Quebec election campaign began with opposition parties claiming that factors such as corrup tion and false promises (among others) had made Quebecers leery of their government institutions. The time had come to clean house and get the province back on track to good governance and prosperity. In this paper, we employ new data from the Quebec component of the Comparative Provincial Election Pro ject to examine Quebecers’ outlooks toward various government institutions. How confident are Quebe cers in their political parties, governments, legislatures and civil service? Is there any evidence to suggest that Quebecers’ views on these specific government institutions are any different across various levels of government? And what accounts for any negativity that Quebecers may feel? More specifically, this analysis considers a variety of plausible explanations, including poor government performance, pervasive cynicism, rising levels of cognitive mobilization, the rise of post-materialist values and declining levels of interpersonal trust, just to name a few.