2023 Vincent Lemieux Prize

Winner: Rob Currie-Wood, Carleton

Re-Examining the Distribution of Decision-Making Power Within Canadian Political Parties

Excerpt from jury report: Building from the comparative literature on party reform, this thesis makes original theoretical and empirical contributions to the study of Canadian politics. How do parties develop power-sharing arrangements between their principal faces? What explains variation in these arrangements? The theoretical contribution pushes existing frameworks to view the formation of power-sharing arrangements as a cyclical process. The empirical contributions rest on the reforms undertaken within the Conservative, Liberal, and New Democratic parties since the early 1990s. As the drivers of reform exert pressures on party organizations, parties encounter complimentary pressures for decentralizing some aspects of an individual decision while centralizing others.