This article examines the differences in pre-1914 France and the United States in two kinds of state policies regulating women's behaviour, those “protecting” the condition under which women participated in certain occupations and those providing infant and maternal protection. Those policies are examined to illuminate the argument that politics, including state policies, makes an important contribution to the maintenance and change of ongoing systems of social relations. Central to this argument is the notion that meaning systems around which actors constitute collective identities are a crucial analytic focus for understanding stability and change. At the end of the nineteenth century hegemonic societal paradigms, constructed out of the processes institutionalizing new social relations, emerged in France and the US. The French paradigm of “citizen-producer” and the American one of “specialized citizenship” had quite different implications for the patterns of gender relations embedded within them. These implications are visible in the treatment of women's work and maternity in these years of the emerging welfare state.

Language rights represent claims of entitlement not only on behalf of individuals, but also on behalf of linguistic communities. As such, they raise deep questions of identity and affinity for Canadians. This study, the first report of the Charter Project, investigates mass and elite attitudes toward language rights in Canada. Beginning with the problem of double standards—whether anglophones and francophones want to affirm certain rights for their own group but not for the other—this study finds that attitudes toward language rights are shaped by an interplay between core values to which citizens subscribe and their concern for the status of the groups, both linguistic and partisan, with which they identify.

The paradox of modern political theory which affirms individual autonomy and simultaneously seeks solid foundations for social belonging is approached here through its emergence in eighteenth-century France: first by a comparative reading of Montesquieu and Rousseau according to the exigencies of suitability and legitimacy of their respective political philosophies; then by an evocation of some of the echoes of their thought in the French Revolution around the themes of the exercise of power, of virtue and of religion.

This article explores the relevance of studies of judicial policy-making in the United States to the decision-making of the Supreme Court of Canada under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The article suggests that literature concerning the political legitimacy of judicial policy-making is minimally relevant, since a broad form of judicial review appears to be well established in Charter jurisprudence. The literature on institutional decision-making capacity has greater relevance, since the Canadian Court faces the same information-processing constraints as its American counterpart. The article concludes by suggesting that attempts to overcome problems of institutional capacity may produce additional questions of political legitimacy.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, “left-nationalist” dependency theories dominated Canadian political economy. However, Canada defied the predictions of dependency theory and developed all the class relations appropriate to advanced capitalist societies. The origins of Canadian industrial capitalism were not such that the country was locked into a staple-trap, notwithstanding the very real reliance of the economy on staple-export. In recent years, a number of political economists have offered an “orthodox” Marxist critique of dependency to account for these and other weaknesses in its overall framework. This article first summarizes the dependency arguments, then the arguments of its Marxist critics, and finally introduces a summary look at the ideas of Nikolai Bukharin, a little-examined but nonetheless important theorist whose insights on the relationship between the state as a capitalist and the growing internationalization of economic life are key to a Marxist re-theorization of Canadian political economy.

It has been suggested that recall questions are unreliable measures of change in party identification. Data reported in this article confirm that 50 per cent of respondents in the 1974-1980 Canadian National Election Study three-wave panel had inconsistent patterns of recall. This finding urges caution in analysis; more importantly, such inconsistency raises questions about how to interpret recall behaviour in the light of party identification theory. The available evidence and unclear theory seem to point toward the possibility that at least one-half of the national sample lacked a meaningful federal party identification.

This study examines the retrospective economic voting model for Canadian federal elections, 1930 through 1979. The analysis shows that change in personal or disposable income has a significant, direct impact on incumbency voting while inflation enters the voting calculus indirectly, as a (partial) deflator of nominal income, and unemployment has no effect. Disposable income is a better predictor of incumbency voting than is personal income, nominal income variables predict better than real values and variability in income performance is negatively related to incumbency voting. The study concludes that voter attribution of responsibility for income performance is focussed and specific, income stability as well as income growth are demanded through incumbency voting, and voters are affected by money illusion.