What if the Tea Party were an actual party?

Last week, I had the opportunity to take a quick tour of Canada as part of a State Department speaking engagement. I met with great folks at several universities in Halifax, Toronto and Calgary.

I was asked to go to explain to Canadian audiences what we know about the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, drawing in part on my research with Jon Mummolo and Mike Bailey. So we were talking about American politics.

But what if they had a Tea Party in Canada? As it turns out, there is an "eh"-saying version of the Tea Party: Alberta's Wildrose Party, which became the largest opposition party in the provincial election earlier this year. I got to sit down with Duane Bratt of Calgary's Mount Royal University, and then later with David McLellan, who was active in Wildrose as it moved from a small opposition coalition to a major party.

Wildrose is different from the Tea Party in important ways. McLellan emphasized that at least the element of the party that he was involved in was much more interested in compromise than we think the Tea Party is (Take that, stereotypes of Canadian politeness!). They are also not as extremely conservative (Take that, stereotypes of Canadian leftness!). And his element was not really interested in social issues, although many in the party were. The Wildrose of 2012 built on the exisitng Alberta Alliance party, which was primarily a home to social conservatives. And many candidates in the 2012 election were clearly motivated by social issues, even if Danielle Smith, the party's leader, was decidedly not.

But the real difference is that Wildrose is a party, and the Tea Party is not. The Tea Party is an ideological movement, but its political force is felt through the Republican Party. For a variety of reasons, Canada's political system is much more open to new and minor parties than ours is. Wildrose represents what could be the right-wing faction in the rightist Conservative Party, but they don't have to compete from within the party. They could have, but they had not been successful in Alberta (in part because the Conservatives are an overwhelming majority in Alberta, and so many moderates and liberals have joined the Conservative Party for electoral purposes, pulling the party toward them). Instead, the more conservative faction formed their own party. Bratt characterizes the division between Wildrose and the Conservatives as the "sons and daughters" of the leaders in the last Conservative split, Red Tories vs. Blue Tories. If you're American, you might compare that to Rockefeller Republicans vs. Goldwater Republicans.

Being an actual party may have consequences. Wildrose has to hold its coalition together. On the one hand, they need to accept some ideological diversity to stay large enough to matter. That may be why Smith and other leaders didn't denounce social conservatives on the campaign trail, even when they made embarrassing statements. At the same time, the party needs to be practical. They didn't win a majority, so they don't have to govern ... yet. But they do need to think about what message will help them grow in the next election. If it was the social conservatism that kept the party from winning more, which both Bratt and McLellan suggest, then the party might need to evolve away from that position.

And that, in a nutshell, is the difference between an ideological movement and a party. A party has to be strategic to win votes and win in the legislature. Ideologues do not.