The inter–institutional dynamics between courts and elected governments under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms have recently, and widely, been characterized as a "dialogue" over constitutional meaning. This article seeks to expand the systematic analysis of "dialogue" to lower courts of appeal, using Canadian federal government responses as a case study. In the process, the article clarifies the hotly debated operational definition of this metaphor, and develops two methodological innovations to provide a comprehensive measure of dialogue. The article's findings suggest that there is more dialogue with lower courts than with the Supreme Court of Canada. However, the evidence indicates that dialogue in the form of government appeals to higher courts–which explicitly signal the government's disagreement with the lower court–is as prevalent as legislative sequels, and the dominant form following judicial amendment.

This paper investigates the relationship between diffuse support for the Canadian Supreme Court (general, lasting attachments to the institution) and specific support (attitudes toward its policy outputs). We hypothesize that diffuse support for the Court will not be closely related to specific support until after 1988, when the Court began making a number of controversial decisions. Using data from 1987 and 1997 we test multivariate models of the determinants of diffuse support and discover that it is indeed correlated more with democratic norms than with attitudes toward specific policies in 1987, while the reverse is true in 1997. The fact that support for the Court now appears to be more closely tied to its outputs could have important political implications for the Court and its decisions.

This paper reports the results of a content analysis of election–related headlines in Canada's two English–language national newspapers, The Globe and Mail and The National Post, over the course of the 36–day 2000 federal election campaign. We found that the two national newspapers' headlines revealed differences in issue emphasis, leader portrayals and party assessment. Yet both newspapers embraced a game frame for election coverage–by focusing on the horse–race, leader personalities and campaign strategies–to the neglect of campaign issues and ideological distinctions between parties. These findings suggest that media game framing can result in troublesome consequences for constructive citizen engagement in election activities.

Je tiens à remercier André Blais qui a dirigé le mémoire de maîtrise à l'origine de cet article, ainsi qu'Anne–Marie Gingras et Louis Massicotte qui l'ont évalué. Je remercie aussi Angelo Élias pour avoir lu et commenté une version antérieure de ce texte, de même que les évaluateurs anonymes de la Revue. Je tiens à souligner que la réalisation de cette recherche a bénéficié de l'aide financière du Département de science politique de l'Université de Montréal et du Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture.

En matière de règle électorale, la recherche, d'approche « institutionaliste », s'est longtemps attardée sur les effets des différentes règles électorales sur les systèmes de partis, négligeant peut-être un peu les modes de confection et de modification de ces règles ainsi que leur usage politique.

Recent studies of the effects of campaign spending by political parties and candidates at elections in Canada and elsewhere have established the importance of local constituency campaigns. However, particular claims to measure the effects of campaign spending on the vote have been questioned on methodological grounds. This article revisits the question of whether local spending matters in Canadian federal elections. Responding to some criticisms of earlier work, this analysis presents the results of two parallel regression analyses (the first employing two–stage least squares estimation, the second using three–stage least squares techniques) of the effects of local spending in the 1993 and 1997 elections. The results offer strong confirmation that comparatively greater local spending by candidates enhances their vote shares, and diminishes that of rivals, albeit to different degrees for different parties and elections.

For historical institutionalist scholarship, partisanship's impact on public policy is mediated by institutions; however there is disagreement about whether globalization has altered this nexus. In view of the importance of labour market policy for the equity and efficiency objectives of left– and right–wing parties, it is particularly significant as a domain for testing partisanship's continuing relevance. This article examines the link between partisanship and policy outcomes, using the case of labour market policy in Ontario during the 1990s as its point of reference. It concludes that, in relation to three selected aspects of this field, institutions affected left– and right–wing partisan agendas quite differently, but that globalization has not transformed this relationship in recent years. Because of inter–sectoral institutional variations, this conclusion cannot be extended to other policy domains without further research.

This project examines the policy process surrounding Canada's latest reforms of its financial–services industry legislation. The banks lobbied for a broadening of their eligible activities to mirror those of the multi–function banks in Europe and the United States and for mergers to permit them to compete with those banks on an equal footing. The government denied the institutions' requests and the pressure for action was deflected to a task force. My analysis of the policy change process is informed by the public choice paradigm and portrays the activities in the policy “black box.”

In their article, C. J. Pattie and R. J. Johnston (2003) do me the honour of putting a key aspect of my approach to the relationship between civic literacy and political participation to the test. Do recent British data, they ask, confirm my expectation that newspaper reading enhances civic literacy, and thus voter turnout? Though I am gratified that they chose to address this issue, and in such a thorough manner, and though there is much in the article which is valuable, I must ultimately take issue with their methodology and, thus, the central conclusion they draw.

Henry Milner's response (2004) to our original article (2003) is typically thorough and thoughtful, raising a number of new (and testable) hypotheses in the process. He mounts a robust defence of the civic literacy argument and takes us to task on two grounds. First, he challenges our modeling strategy. Second, he mounts a defence of aggregate level analysis of civic literacy, and points to the limitations of individual–level models. In this brief reply, we take up the challenges he sets.