Canada is a member of the very select club of the seven most industrialized countries. However, since the beginning of the 1970s the federal government has been trying to define a strategy allowing for a more favourable insertion of the Canadian economy in the world economy. Historically, the exportation of merchandise has always been essential to the growth of the Canadian economy, but the world market is more and more competitive and economic renewal is necessary if the Canadian economy is not to be marginalized. This article analyzes the decline of Canada's place in the world economy, external and internal constraints which are at the origin of this situation and the two strategies that have been put forward by the federal government in order to ensure the restructuration of the Canadian economy. Finally, the article demonstrates that the traditional dichotomy of weakening/strengthening is inadequate to understand the nation-state's role in relation to economic space.

Nordlinger's thesis regarding the capacity of state officials to act autonomously is examined by focussing upon the behaviour of elected officials in New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island during a debate to reform the potato marketing system. The article argues that Nordlinger overstates the autonomy of elected officials by failing to appreciate that dominant societal groups can deploy many of the same autonomy-enhancing instruments available to state officials. Their relative success in doing so is a function of the political economy of the geographic unit, and in particular the extent to which it is market-oriented, relatively underdeveloped and characterized by a traditional political culture. Federalism and the nature of the policy issue under debate are additional factors which affect elected state officials' steering capacity.

Investigations with respect to proposals for government intervention generally deal with values, ideologies or strategies of party leaders. Theoretical studies predict that, in an environment where information is imperfect and costly, politicians have incentives to formulate interventions, the benefits of which are concentrated while their costs are diffused. The authors elaborate a theory of supply of government intervention which predicts the characteristics of interventions that increase the number of votes as well as the characteristics of actions that lead to vote losses. The predictions of this theory are tested by using the proposals for government intervention in the official programmes of the political parties of Quebec during the 1960–1981 period. The two basic findings are that (1) the prediction relative to the anti-consumer and anti-taxpayer bias of the political market is not supported by the facts, and that (2) the party leaders prefer to finance the cost of their proposals of government intervention through the mode of fiscal illusion instead of hoping for inattention on the part of consumers and taxpayers.

Recent research on voting in United States presidential elections has begun to disentangle long-term and short-term components of electoral choice. This has been achieved through the use of complex models involving instrumental variables and two-stage or three-stage least squares regression. These techniques are particularly appropriate to understanding the voting decision in Canada because of the short-term variability of partisan identifications. Modelling voting choice, using simultaneous equations and data from the 1979 Canadian National Election Study, it was found that the major attitudinal determinants of voting—party identification and attitudes towards issues and party leaders—were strongly related to one another and to the direction of vote whereas sociodemographic characteristics were only weakly related to political attitudes and behaviour. In addition, the strength of these variables may vary across the major parties in any given election.

This study will investigate the problematic character of externalization theory, which posits that national leaders sometimes engage in foreign conflict in order to restore domestic cohesion. The first stage is a reassessment of the behavioural literature that, for two decades, has failed to support the theory, despite commonly held expectations to the contrary. Some significant discrepancies between theory and testing are uncovered during the review. These missing elements of externalization subsequently are incorporated in a crisis-oriented model. This model of crisis resolution, based on domestic conflict change as the independent variable and war versus de-escalation as the dependent variable, is tested using International Crisis Behaviour Project data from 1948–1975. The results are encouraging to the theory and suggest the value of further research in the area.

This article argues that the three volumes of the Macdonald Commission research output devoted to international political economy (vols. 28 to 30) demonstrate a bias toward what might be labeled “neo-realist” analysis. As a result, they nearly all are steeped in a degree of pessimism regarding Canada's place in the evolving international political economy—a pessimism that extends not only to future prospects for the. multilateral trading system, but for the bilateral Canada-US one as well. While this sense of limited options might indeed be justified, this article argues that a serious omission from the set of studies was the relative lack of attention accorded to the security arrangements underpinning the postwar trade and monetary order. That being said, the author finds that the volumes will likely have a lasting significance for scholars, even though their relevance for public policy may not be so great or lasting.

The Social Sciences Citation Index was canvassed for citations of all articles, notes, review articles, comments and replies published in volumes 1–10 of the Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique. The data show that nearly three-quarters of the 335 items published between 1968 and 1977 were cited at least once, with a greater likelihood of the citation appearing in non-Canadian than in Canadian publications. English-language items were cited four times as frequently as French-language ones, on the average, and those with at least some Canadian content were cited nearly twice as frequently, on the average, as those with no Canadian content.