In this address, I argue that the organizational and ideational evolution of political science is closely interconnected with Canada’s history and unequal social relations since Confederation. This is because organized political science in Canada was really at heart a national venture. As a consequence, in order to understand the ideas animating early political scientists we have to consider Canada’s foundational status as a settler colony in the North American space, with a privileged place in the British Empire. This perspective may also help to highlight the distinct features of the colonial present which are giving rise to multiple sites of knowledge production-or multiple knowledges.

We evaluate the Canadian parliamentary hearings on The Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act to determine whether respectful and fair deliberation occurred. Our focus is on the content, tone, and nature of each question posed by committee members in hearings in both chambers. We find that, on the whole, the vast majority of questions met this baseline but that committee members were biased toward witnesses in agreement with their position and against witnesses in opposition to it. In addition to our substantive findings, we contribute methodological insights, including a coding scheme, for this kind of qualitative text analysis.

This article offers a new reading of Lord Durham's recommendations concerning municipal institutions, included in the last section of his famous report. By placing the document in the context of the debates raised by the constitutional and administrative reforms conducted in Britain during the 1830s, it shows that its author understood autonomous municipalities as essential components of a modern mixed government. Such language was then employed by reformist Whigs in order to justify the policies which they thought were necessary to strengthen the country's political institutions by adapting them to changing social circumstances. The analysis presented here challenges the interpretation provided by most contemporary commentators on the report. Many of them have concluded that Lord Durham's understanding of local institutions is based on a liberal conception of political life, found in the writings of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. These studies tend to reduce early British liberalism to philosophical radicalism. They seek to demonstrate that liberals wish to deprive local communities of their political autonomy by integrating their institutions into the juridical structure of a highly centralized State. By focusing on the rhetoric used by Lord Durham to write his report, this article allows us to appreciate the heterogeneity of the definition of the municipality developed by liberalism.

The paper uses the concept of path dependence to explain the challenges and complexities of institutional adaptation at the subnational level. The notion of path dependence is rooted in the well-established research tradition of historical institutionalism, one of the variants of neoinstitutionalism. The academic literature on the new institutionalism, however, has tended to focus on the national level of analysis. But there is a growing recognition of cities and regions as the main engines of socioeconomic change in the current age of seismic global economic perturbation. Their historic and current significance has thus made them arguably more organic units of governance than modern states or supranational regimes. The discussion focuses on the Niagara region in Canada to illustrate the institutional infrastructure of governance underpinning the economic landscape of city-regions and the challenges of reform that such local regions face in an age of unprecedented global socioeconomic change.

Election studies must optimize on sample size, cost and data quality. The 2015 Canadian Election Study was the first CES to employ a full mixed-mode design, aiming to take advantage of the opportunities of each mode while preserving enough commonality to compare them. This paper examines the phone interviews conducted by ISR-York and the online questionnaires from panellists purchased from a sample provider. We compare data quality and representativeness. We conduct a comprehensive comparison of the distributions of responses across modes and a comparative analysis of inferences about voting. We find that the cost/power advantages of the online mode will likely make it the mode of choice for subsequent election studies.

A theory of voting under federalism requires that attributions of responsibility moderate the strength of retrospective voting. Scholars have spotty evidence that voters do this but put this down to the effects of institutions and citizens’ capabilities. I show that political variation also affects electoral accountability. Using panel surveys across provincial and federal elections and qualitative media content analysis, I show that voters only live up to a federal theory of voting when governments make policy changes independent of the other level and those changes and their consequences are prominent in political discourse. Federal institutions affect electoral accountability through the politics that they generate.

This article examines the Canadian Charter with reference to “the British connection” and “the Americanization thesis.” It also attempts to demonstrate the importance of Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws in addressing these issues. Pierre Trudeau insisted that a Charter of Human Rights would provide Canadians with a new beginning and settle difficult questions about the Canadian identity. His critics said that fundamental rights were already protected because Canada had a constitution similar in principle to the United Kingdom, and that the proposed Charter was a step in the Americanization of Canada. What a Montesquieuean analysis helps to identify are significant limitations in both “the British connection” account and “the Americanization thesis.” And, by the avoiding the abstract universalism of Trudeau's “inalienable rights” theorizing and Dworkin's “rights as trumps” regime, a Montesquieuean analysis also helps to demonstrate the distinctiveness of Canadian constitutionalism from Confederation to the Charter.

Over the last several decades, nationalist movements in liberal democracies have challenged their community's relationship with the state. One such case that has drawn relatively little attention is Puerto Rico. A peculiar feature of Puerto Rican politics is that powerful nationalism coexists with several distinct status options: a reform of the current Commonwealth, statehood (becoming an American state), free association and independence. This article examines the various sources for Puerto Rican nationalism and discusses the relationship between nationalism and each of the status options. It also explains why none of the options has succeeded in gathering majority support amongst Puerto Ricans and why, therefore, the constitutional status quo has so far remained on the island.

We address two questions: How many voters particularly like a candidate from another party? And do these voters vote for their preferred party or their preferred candidate? We use the Making Electoral Democracy Work data for the 2015 Canadian federal election in three provinces (British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec). We find that one voter out of ten particularly liked a candidate from a party other than the one he or she preferred. For two out of five of such voters, the preference for the local candidate trumped the party preference.