A Tale of Two Liberalisms or a Story of Social Identities?

Abstract

It appears that in Quebec, liberal values are associated with support for restricting minority religious symbols, while in Canada outside of Quebec, the opposite is true (Turgeon et al., 2019). Turgeon et al. (2019) explain this in terms of Quebec’s distinct strain of liberalism. However, there is an alternative explanation: that different social groups—i.e., political parties—mobilize liberal values in different ways in Quebec as compared to the rest of Canada, and that social group members—i.e., party identifiers—adopt their group’s, or party’s, cues. We repeat Turgeon’s (2019) original study with new data but also include a measure of partisan identity to clarify whether liberal values or partisan attachments explain differences between preferences for restricting minority symbols in Quebec and the rest of Canada. We find that identification with a Quebec nationalist party explains the relationship between liberal values and support for restricting minority symbols in Quebec in our dataset.