For institutions as well as for people, turning 50 invites reflection on what's gone before and what's to come. This special 50th anniversary issue looks at Canadian political science and the profession—past and present—from a number of perspectives and explores ways in which they might or should change.

L'équipe éditoriale de la Revue canadienne de science politique/Canadian Journal of Political Science (ci-après, la Revue) vous propose pour son cinquantième anniversaire trois textes publiés en français qui jettent un regard critique sur son passé et son avenir et qui retracent aussi, plus généralement, les enjeux inhérents à la production et à la diffusion de travaux en science politique dans la langue française. Nous vous proposons également trois essais critiques qui portent sur différents thèmes de recherche abordés dans les pages de la Revue depuis sa création en 1968.

With the Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique now in its fiftieth year, as the founding English coeditor, I'm pleased to be able to reminisce about its first days.

This article surveys the first five decades of the Journal/Revue, with particular emphasis on patterns of change and continuity. The article presents a quantitative analysis of the articles published in the Journal/Revue, looking at, among other things, the balance of articles published in English and in French, the proportion of articles authored by women, the location and institutional affiliation of authors and the subject matter of published articles. Significant continuities emerge from the data, such as the predominance of Canadian-based authors writing on aspects of Canadian politics and the dominance of authors from large research-intensive universities. Yet change is also evident, for example in the number of women publishing in the Journal/Revue and in the emergence of articles in subfields not found in the Journal/Revue’s earlier days, most notably Aboriginal politics, gender and politics, and race and ethnicity.

Drawing on the CPSA's archival records, this article explores the origins of CPSA and the patterns of representation in its founding decades. We focus on the pre-World War II years, when disciplinary boundaries were fluid and scholars sought to shift policy discussion from moral reform to reform guided by science and professionalism. The CPSA's founding vision aspired to engage “typical citizens” in discussion of current issues. Despite the ambitious vision, a much narrower range of citizens participated. The CPSA's powerful melding of academic, corporate, state and political elites, in turn, shaped the CPSA's reflections on the development of the Canadian state and public policy. This historical legacy encourages us to reflect on the contemporary challenges of fostering independent scholarship on public issues.

The Canadian Journal of Political Science (CJPS) plays a leading role among Canadian and Quebec political scientists. It is one of the most important forums for researchers to publish their work. It is also a good source of information to identify their research questions and show the main trends within the discipline. Given its commitment towards linguistic duality, the article focuses on Francophone representation in the CJPS since 1968. Who are the authors who have published their work in French in the CJPS? Where do they come from? What are their themes and areas of publication? Does the concentration of Francophone governance of the Journal in three universities, Université Laval, Université de Montréal and the University of Ottawa, have a significant impact on the representativeness of works published in French? Despite its exploratory nature, the article shows that the question of representation raises issues for the French component of the CJPS, both in terms of its governance and the dissemination of researchers’ work.

Worldwide, the publishing industry has been compelled to change with digital media technology, and some traditional academic journals are struggling to adapt. This article examines the marketing and publicity actions available to the Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique and similar flagship journals in an environment characterized by open access (OA) and impact factor (IF) metrics. It reviews the opportunities and threats presented by a movement towards publishing in ungated forums and pressure in the academic community to prioritize bibliometrics. It then looks at the experience, characteristics and comparative position of the Journal/Revue before reporting on perceptions and recommendations drawn from depth interviews with journal editors, presidents of the Canadian Political Science Association, and a university librarian, which are supplemented by suggestions from editorial board members. It concludes with proposals to address these circumstances head on, many of which are generalizable to other journals wrestling with marketing and publishing in the digital age.

This study presents the results of a survey of Canada's francophone political scientists on the language of knowledge dissemination in political science. Although almost all francophone political scientists agreed with the statement that English has become the lingua franca of political science, French continues to be a significant part of the dissemination of knowledge. However, there are important variations in language usage depending on the language in which the dissertation was written, the disciplinary sub-field within the discipline, and academic rank. Language choices are largely motivated by the desire to reach the widest possible audience while garnering recognition from peers.

The article makes three contributions to our knowledge of the Canadian political science literature. First, it offers a historical survey of the methodologies and techniques used in the discipline. Second, the findings of this paper constitute a reference for future work interested in commenting the methods and techniques used in CJPS and provide scholars with data they can use to better situate their work within the broader literature. Finally, the paper answers three questions that permeate discussions of the Canadian political science literature. It investigates whether the proportion of qualitative works has declined over time, whether Canadian scholarship is more qualitative than quantitative today and whether there are important differences in the methodologies and techniques used in Canada and in the United States. The article concludes with a discussion of the future of political science methodology based on the findings.

The annual conference of the Canadian Political Science Association (CPSA) is a disciplinary bellwether that helps us trace the evolution of political science scholarship. This article analyzes research presented at the conference between 1965 and 2015. It shows growth in the gender and politics sub-field and in the presence of women in leadership positions in the CPSA. At the same time, gender-related research is often presented in gender-focused panels and not incorporated across the discipline's sub-fields. This means that gender scholars typically present their work to like-minded researchers, and scholars in other sub-fields have little exposure to gender perspectives. That such siloing occurs at the earliest stages of research dissemination is an important contextual factor in understanding gendered citation patterns, departmental hiring and rates of tenure and promotion. For Canadian political science to remain relevant, more needs to be done to incorporate gender perspectives across the discipline's sub-fields.

This article reviews the place of Indigenous politics in the last 50 years of Canadian political science. Focusing on the CJPS, it looks at broad themes and clusters in the literature over time, while also trying to explain how the roots of the discipline continue to impact the development of political science in Canada and thus CJPS. I argue that while at least 43 articles have dealt with Indigenous politics (solely or as a significant focus) and at least 18 have had some significant discussion thereof, there nonetheless remains a disconnect between Indigenous politics and the discipline. This disconnect exists because of the methodological and epistemological foundations of the discipline which have resulted in a focus limited to the Westphalian state. While the disconnect between Indigenous politics and the discipline has waned considerably (43 of 61 articles have been published since 2000) as there has been an awakening of sorts, a disconnect nevertheless still exists.

This article proposes a historiographical analysis of the franco-quebecois political science on Indigenous peoples. Political science participates in representing social realities of populations that, in the present case, have been historically marginalised. It is thus critical to understand the processes that underlie its production and diffusion. By exploring the political circumstances that impacted the development of research on Indigenous peoples, we conclude that franco-quebecois scholars have built a field of study that is distinct in terms of its volume, tone, and recurring themes. In particular, we suggest that the study of the place of Quebec within Canada shaped and eclipsed that of Indigenous peoples in the province. Finally, we situate the contributions and limits of franco-quebecois political science with respect to Indigenous peoples. In so doing, we uncover some of the most significant dynamics in the development of Canadian political science in this area of study and provide indications for future research in the field.

The research model that has dominated the discipline of political science in Canada is based on a top-down approach that defines and finds solutions to problems as researchers see them, and diminishes the real world concerns of social and political actors. Advocating a more collaborative political science, we argue for a partnership approach that engages those actors in the research process, including problem definition, research design, analysis and knowledge dissemination. This inclusion sharpens the focus of the research and produces more contextually valid and socially valuable knowledge. We draw upon our research experience working with Indigenous communities in Canada to illustrate the value of this approach, and carry out a review of partnership-based research published in The Canadian Journal of Political Science. We find little evidence of partnership-based research in our flagship journal and discuss the implications for the future of our field.

How “historical” is Canadian political science? This paper sets out to answer this question through an analysis of historically oriented articles that have appeared in this journal from its first volume, in 1968, to 2015. We suggest that historical research in this journal is at once enduring and uneven, a pattern that we then explore in more detail in a case study, spanning forty years, of historical articles that focus on the interconnected themes of the constitution, courts, and federalism. The unevenness of this pattern suggests that the intellectual and methodological foundation of “historical” Canadian political science may not be as firm as it appears. We therefore conclude with a description of some methodological and conceptual tools, originally fashioned within the historically oriented subfield of American political development in the United States, that Canadian political scientists might deploy to probe important and enduring questions of Canadian politics.

Fifty years ago, Canadian political science (CPS) debated whether there was an “Americanization problem” in the discipline. Today, the idea does not have the same force. This article revisits the debate by focusing on one of the main points of concerns: the doctoral training of CPS faculty. The article presents an original dataset of tenure and tenure-track faculty at CPS departments. It then provides analysis of where these tenure and tenure-track faculty received their doctorates, by sub-field and rank, paying particular attention to the country of doctoral training. Unlike fifty years ago, Canadian-trained scholars form a much larger share of the professoriate. There is no evidence of a trend towards more American-trained scholars among recent hires of assistant professors. However, the results also suggest a continuing status hierarchy between the two countries. It concludes by arguing that CPS needs to be more reflective about its position within this status hierarchy.

Over the last 20 years of our careers, we have witnessed a significant decline in the respect for the liberal arts and social sciences. This decline forces us to regularly respond to questions about the relevance, value and future of our discipline. We know that political science provides fundamental skills for our students to succeed in the 21st century. Yet we also believe that as teachers and scholars we can do a better job of connecting to the realities of our students, articulating the skills and attitudes that our students will develop, and adapting our teaching methods to include high impact practices (Kuh, 2008) that focus on student learning. Here we argue that there are four important conversations that we need to have that can strengthen the appeal and interest in our discipline: the articulation of learning outcomes, the inclusion of high impact practices, attention to information literacy that recognizes the significant change in the delivery and access of research materials and a deep integration of indigenous ways of knowing in our teaching.

Recent changes in government policy making and the labour market have created new opportunities for political scientists, provided that we have the skills to respond to them. We argue that changes need to be made in the area of methodology training in order to capitalize on these opportunities. Canadian political scientists should ensure that all our students acquire basic quantitative competencies, in addition to research design and qualitative analysis training, and that those graduate students interested in more sophisticated quantitative methods have the opportunity to develop those skills. We explain how expanding and deepening training in quantitative methods is one strategy for ensuring a role for political science in evidence-based policy making, for expanding labour market options for students, and for keeping apace with disciplinary trends. We caution, however, that special care needs to be taken to ensure that all political scientists have equal opportunities to develop such skills.

Mechanism-based explanations are gaining in popularity in the social sciences. Canadian political science has somewhat embraced these debates. Recent work has explicitly identified with mechanismic explanation and, at the same time, there is a point to be made about the compatibility of CPS's cannons with a mechanism-based understanding of causation. In this paper, we survey past and recent work aligned with this ontological approach. We demonstrate a heterogeneous engagement with the methodological literature regarding mechanisms and different understandings as well as uses of mechanisms in political analysis. This survey allows us to argue for the potential of mechanism-based explanations for CPS while also forcing us to advocate for a sober and discerning use of this approach.

In this paper, we initiate a discussion within the Canadian political science community about research openness and its implications for our discipline. This discussion is important because the Tri-Agency has recently released guidelines on data management and because a number of political science journals, from several subfields, have signed the Journal Editors’ Transparency Statement requiring data access and research transparency (DA-RT). As norms regarding research openness develop, an increasing number and range of journals and funding agencies may begin to implement DA-RT-type requirements. If Canadian political scientists wish to continue to participate in the global political science community, we must take careful note of and be proactive participants in the ongoing developments concerning research openness.

What a lovely challenge: describe the books that best contribute to our knowledge and understanding of Canadian society. My first reaction was to think of those books that I particularly enjoyed reading and piece them together in a sort of long and personal review of key books. Then I came to the idea of knowledge and understanding of Canadian society and decided that the fundamental theme of this review should be the path, albeit a very slow path, we are on to reinvent the foundation story of Canada. The basic foundation story of Canada—that the country was first discovered by European settlers, that it was built from the top by the British Empire and that its stability and success depends on its institutions being maintained—is being undone. We are slowly recognizing whose histories have been ignored in this foundation story. I decided my review should follow the path of this rewriting of the foundation story of Canada. I will organize the review by the waves of books that analyse, advocate and interpret these different calls—by places, groups, bodies, projects—for voice, recognition and inclusion.