The Theory of Democratic Elitism Revisited Again

In their response to our article "Regional Perspectives on Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms: A Re-examination of Democratic Elitism,"' Sniderman, Fletcher, Russell, Tetlock and Prior2 raise a number of issues to which we are responding briefly. In our article, we do not deny that the Sniderman et al. thesis3 may be correct or partially correct (or wholly wrong for that matter). However, we argue that the sample design and the analysis they employ are not up to task at hand. Furthermore, we argue that our re-analysis in which we employ region/culture, a variable they ignore in their book, is more consistent with the data than is their analysis. Sniderman et al.'s critique of our article is organized around a number of approaches that are largely unresponsive to our analysis. In this brief reply we restate our claim that (1) their sample design is inadequate to the task at hand because it provides a nested linkage of region and party, making the analysis they employ and the conclusions