Relatively recent contributions to the policy literature have called into question the utility of the "network" approach to the study of public policy making, including a challenge to long-held views concerning the impact of the structure of policy subsystems on policy change. This article uses empirical evidence accumulated from case studies of four prominent Canadian federal policy sectors over the period 1990-2000 to address this issue. It sets out a model that explains policy change as dependent upon the effects of the articulation of ideas and interests in public policy processes, and generates several hypotheses relating different subsystem configurations to propensities for paradigmatic and intra-paradigmatic policy dynamics. It suggests that the identification of the nature of the policy subsystem in a given policy sector reveals a great deal about its propensity to respond to changes in ideas and interests.

This article re-evaluates Graham Allison's approach to bureaucratic politics in the second edition of his Essence of Decision, authored with Philip Zelikow. Although the renewed analytical framework still appears to be an excellent tool for describing policy decision-making processes, the numerous criticisms it received in the past with respect to its difficult operationalization is a problem left unsolved. To respond to this major difficulty, the author of this article combines Vincent Lemieux's structuration of power with Allison's approach. In order to validate the ensuing model, an empirical test is then conducted using the case study of the 1987 Canadian White Paper on Defence. This original proposition opens up avenues of research in the fields of foreign as well as public policy making.

Rebuilding of the welfare state in post-industrialized societies is no longer organized around the male worker but around the parent-producer figure. This shift in the focus of social policies results in a greater mix between employment policies and policies towards families and children. In Quebec, this change appears as a fundamental one; the core of social public action is redefined by federal and provincial governments. By comparison, in France the fight against unemployment is still dominant.

The meaning of reconciliation in South Africa remains ambiguous and contested. A distinction is drawn between moral and political approaches to reconciliation that invoke thick and thin accounts of solidarity. The discourses of forgiveness and healing are "too thick" because they demand public coherence at the cost of private difference. The promotion of deliberative democracy protects difference, but is "too thin" to enable a substantial basis for reconciliation. Apology, as the fullest expression of "shared history," furnishes the moral transformation necessary for the democratic culture to take root. In this model, reconciliation strikes a balance between solidarity and plurality.

The fortunes of local, regional and provincial economies have often been linked to geographical variation in electoral outcomes, and nowhere more so than in Canada. This article examines economic localism in Canadian voting behaviour by estimating a model of voters' decisions in the 1993 and 1997 federal elections. Individual-specific determinants of the vote measured in the Canadian Election Study are supplemented by measures of voters' local economies and of the local impacts of policy changes. Voters punish the federal government for bad times in their locale and for policy changes that hurt the local economy. This effect is independent of what voters think about their own finances and about the provincial and national economies. The electoral impact of the local economy does not depend on whether government is acknowledged as a potent economic actor, or on the voter's level of political information. However, the relevance of the local economy for national-level electoral behaviour can be "primed" by campaign events, just like any other criterion of voting choice. The response to local economic conditions is part of a broader explanation for geographic patterns of electoral support in Canada.

The 1993 Canadian election campaign clearly mattered; the fortunes of the Conservative and Reform parties underwent a fundamental re-orientation during the campaign. Previous research has indicated that Reform's success in 1993 was related to the activation of people who were opposed to the welfare state, but this represents only one dimension of Reform's appeal. This article examines the effect of issues on Reform support during the campaign and considers the actual process by which issues affect party support. While it is sometimes said that a candidate primed or made important certain issues for voters, it may be that some of what is labeled priming is actually something else. This article makes a conceptual and empirical distinction between campaign learning and priming. If voters do not know where a party stands on an issue, they cannot adequately use it in their overall evaluation. The evidence demonstrates that the increased importance of attitudes toward the welfare state was largely a function of the distribution of new information or learning, while the increased importance of cultural questions represented priming.

This article examines the impact of issues and the economy in the 1997 Canadian election among voters outside Quebec. The authors show that both factors affected individual vote choice and provide estimates of how much difference the issues and the economy made in the election. It appears that the issues were decisive for 9 per cent of the voters and the economy for 4 per cent. Issues mattered more than the economy for individual vote choice. The net impact of both the issues and the economy on vote support for the different parties was practically nil. The findings indicate that the Liberal victory cannot be imputed to the economy or the issues.

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