This article suggests the existence of two rival solutions to the political problem of territorial possession and appropriation among states. If we take territorial control as the analytical starting point, it is possible to examine the evolution, over the last two centuries, of two divergent solutions to this issue. The nineteenth-century European response of supreme sovereignty within the context of a true community of states may be contrasted with that of the comity of republican American states sharing a moral vision and, more recently, US refinements of an aterritorial logic. The US invasion of Panama in 1989 may be understood as marking the resumption of the historical rivalry between these two logics and the widening of the application of US state practices and principles. Tracing the expansion of the American logic in this way helps to explain the greater focus among states on problems of economic production and distribution and the lesser focus on territorial appropriation.

The transition from military to civilian rule in Latin America has thrown a searchlight upon the legacy of military repression from the era of the national security states, and the problem of still-powerful and unrepentant armed forces. These intertwined problems have profound implications for the possibility of fundamental change in a region long characterized by extreme social inequality and political instability. As Rouquié notes, civilianization of the military state does not necessarily mean the democratization or demilitarization of power. How to deal with the perpetrators of state terror is a burning and controversial issue throughout the region. During the process of transition, the major demand of the military in virtually all states was for guarantees against accountability for human rights crimes—widely called impunity in the region—a demand that implicitly places the military above the law. This issue strikes at the very heart of the transformation of national security states and the democratization of power. Additionally, despite the transition from military rule, structures of the national security apparatus remain embedded within the civilian regimes. An examination of the question of impunity and those embedded structures exposes the tensions between democratization and persisting military prerogatives and power.

During the first decades of this century, British and United States census officials constructed social classifications based upon the opposition between intellectual and manual occupations, the former being ordered according to their more or less professional character and the latter according to skills. Logically, one would have expected Canadian statisticians to follow the same path: but the “professional” model never took root in Canada. When census officials here developed a classification of occupations, they did not attempt to create a unilinear scheme of large homogeneous classes using occupation as privileged criterion; following the definitions of classical political economy, they rather set upon themselves to measure the extent of the division of labour. This article seeks to explain the peculiarity of the Canadian case by relating it to three conjoined factors: first, the highly centralized character of Canada's statistical system; second, the important role played by nascent Canadian political economy as the intellectual milieu of statisticians; finally, the fact that the Canadian economy was characterized at that time by the persistence of an important correlation between industry and occupation.

Recently, students of public policy making in North America have added the analysis of “political discourse” to the tools of their trade. According to the “political discourse” school, the extent to which policy ideas gain acceptability cannot always be explained rationally in terms of their logical or empirical validity, nor instrumentally in terms of the interests they serve. Often, their careers must be accounted for, at least in part, by a detailed exploration of their ideological assumptions and appeal, and their rhetorical structure and persuasiveness. Despite its many plausible and promising features, this type of analysis has, to date, rarely been performed in specific instances of policy discourse. The author presents a “political-discourse” analysis of the 1985–1988 debate over Canada's Bill C-82, “An Act Respecting the Registration of Lobbyists.” That debate brought together some of Canada's most factually informed and instrumentally motivated policy actors. Nevertheless, the participants uniformly based their arguments on broad assumptions unsubstantiated by empirical analysis, and advanced those arguments in the rhetoric of the public good and democratic theory. The author concludes that underlying the two basic positions taken in debate over C-82—support for a regime of substantial disclosure of lobbying activity on the one hand, and opposition to disclosure on the other—were two competing sets of assumptions concerning the nature and workings of the faculties of reason and perception in politics.

This article explores the constituency dimension of campaign financing in the 1984 and 1988 federal elections in Canada. The analysis uncovers considerable variability in the capacity of constituency parties to attract campaign donations. These variations appear to be related to the past local and regional strengths of parties, to the expected closeness of the current contest, and to whether incumbents are running for re-election. Multivariate analyses suggest that these political variables have a broadly consistent impact on fund-raising after other features of the socio-economic diversity of constituencies have been controlled.

Contracting out of rent control is possible if the tenant's right to a controlled tenancy is made legally transferable, thereby allowing the landlord to decontrol the property by purchasing the right to a controlled tenancy. This article outlines the basic features of contracting out and compares three forms of contracting out with vacancy decontrol. It argues that one form of contracting out may be much more politically feasible than other methods of decontrol because of the way it distributes the benefits of decontrol between landlords and sitting tenants.