Elite Strategy, Social Structure and Catholic-Protestant Cleavage in the Canadian Provinces

The persistence of many electoral cleavages beyond the disappearance of their initial causes is a central mystery of political science. Siegfried (1913) examined how left-right orientations that emerged from the French Revolution survived many generations, Lipset and Rokkan (1967) puzzled over how the party systems of the 1960s reflected the social divisions of the 1920s, and Wittenberg (2006) demonstrated how Hungarian cleavages survived the disap- pearance of democracy itself. While voting is often considered a rational, individual act taking into account current issues and political campaigns, understanding the role that the legacies of the past play in influencing elections is equally critical. This dissertation considers one such long-standing question of cleavage persistence: why do Catholics and Protestants in Canada have different voting patterns? By analyzing orig- inal data on the long-term history of Catholic-Protestant cleavages in Canadian provincial elections, two factors structure patterns of religious cleavage: elite strategies and social structure. Elite strategies, such as elite accommodation or policy positioning over religiously contentious issues such as Catholic education, affect both the likelihood of existence, and partisan direction of the cleavage. Additionally, variables related to social structure, such as whether a province has separate school systems for Catholics and Protestants, provide mechanisms for reproducing these cleavages in the long term. In providing these answers, this dissertation contributes to the debate over Catholic- Protestant cleavage by shifting the analytical focus away from surveys of individuals to quantitative historical comparisons. Rather than searching for individual-level factors to control for the religious cleavage using election studies, this project considers election-level variables to explain the existence and partisan direction of cleavages. Such an approach represents a new style of explanation in this literature. Additionally, it more firmly sets the question in a comparative, rather than more parochial, setting. That is, the effects of elite strategies and social structures on the Catholic-Protestant cleavage in Canada can be viewed as an instance of the historical legacies of conflict regulation on electoral cleavages. The decisions that governments made decades ago over how to regulate Catholic-Protestant conflict (which ranged from changing the electoral system to reduce inter-religious tensions to segregating school children by religious affiliation) continue to influence how these groups divide at the ballot box today

Study protocol for Attachment & Child Health (ATTACHTM) program: promoting vulnerable Children’s health at scale

Background Children’s exposure to toxic stress (e.g., parental depression, violence, poverty) predicts developmental and physical health problems resulting in health care system burden. Supporting parents to develop parenting skills can buffer the effects of toxic stress, leading to healthier outcomes for those children. Parenting interventions that focus on promoting parental reflective function (RF), i.e., parents’ capacity for insight into their child’s and their own thoughts, feelings, and mental states, may understand help reduce societal health inequities stemming from childhood stress exposures. The Attachment and Child Health (ATTACHTM) program has been implemented and tested in seven rapid-cycling pilot studies (n = 64) and found to significantly improve parents’ RF in the domains of attachment, parenting quality, immune function, and children’s cognitive and motor development. The purpose of the study is to conduct an effectiveness-implementation hybrid (EIH) Type II study of ATTACHTM to assess its impacts in naturalistic, real-world settings delivered by community agencies rather than researchers under more controlled conditions. Methods The study is comprised of a quantitative pre/post-test quasi-experimental evaluation of the ATTACHTM program, and a qualitative examination of implementation feasibility using thematic analysis via Normalization Process Theory (NPT). We will work with 100 families and their children (birth to 36-months-old). Study outcomes include: the Parent Child Interaction Teaching Scale to assess parent-child interaction; the Parental Reflective Function and Reflective Function Questionnaires to assess RF; and the Ages and Stages Questionnaire – 3rd edition to examine child development, all administered pre-, post-, and 3-month-delayed post-assessment. Blood samples will be collected pre- and post- assessment to assess immune biomarkers. Further, we will conduct one-on-one interviews with study participants, health and social service providers, and administrators (total n = 60) from each collaborating agency, using NPT to explore perceptions and experiences of intervention uptake, the fidelity assessment tool and e-learning training as well as the benefits, barriers, and challenges to ATTACHTM implementation. Discussion The proposed study will assess effectiveness and implementation to help understand the delivery of ATTACHTM in community agencies. Trial registration Name of registry: https://clinicaltrials.gov/. Registration number: NCT04853888 . Date of registration: April 22, 2021.Medicine, Faculty ofNon UBCMedical Genetics, Department ofReviewedFacultyResearcherOthe