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seldom fear sanctions from either the current or the incoming government. Thus, one would not
expect to see any evidence of strategic defection. We tested this expectation by examining
judicial behavior on the Supreme Court of Canada before and after two changes in party control
of government. The Liberal Party controlled Canadian government from March of 1980 until the
end of June in 1984. After winning the elections of 1984, the Progressive Conservatives
controlled the government until November of 1993. Under the leadership of Jean Chretien, the
Liberals regained control of the government at the end of 1993 and the party maintained control
through the end of 2003 when our data ends.
In the absence of any theoretical or empirical basis for predicting when the justices of the
Supreme Court may have been able to predict that either the first Liberal government or the
Progressive Conservative government was in danger of falling, we simply followed Helmke’s
lead and examined each six month period from six months until two years before the party lost
power. There were no substantial differences in the levels of support for government between
these different definitions of the transition period and so for simplicity’s sake we present only the
data using the entire two year periods before the downfall of each government as the transition
period in the analysis below.
Table 1 here
In Table 1, we present an analysis of case outcomes (rather than individual judge votes)
for all cases in which the government had an interest as well as in the “important” or “salient”
cases. Overall, the data are consistent with the expectations about judicial behavior in stable
democracies. While there was a modest increase in the rate of defection in the first transitional
period, the change was not statistically significant. In the second transitional period there was no
indication of any change in judicial behavior. The pattern for only the important cases closely
Convention