Abstract. Regime change in Eastern Europe affords an excellent opportunity for investigating linkages between age and politics in times of social turmoil. Using data from three waves of the World Values Survey, this paper explores life cycle, generational and period effects on protest potential in Yeltsin's Russia. The study finds that an individual's position in the life cycle is the strongest predictor of protest potential in the post-communist state. Furthermore, the analysis suggests that citizens socialized during periods of relative socioeconomic stability exhibit the highest protest potential under conditions of uncertainty characteristic of the transition period.

Résumé. Les changements de régime en Europe de l'Est permettent d'examiner la relation complexe entre l'âge et la politique pendant les périodes d'instabilité sociale. S'appuyant sur les données de trois vagues du World Values Survey (sondage mondial sur les valeurs), cet article explore l'incidence du cycle de vie, de la génération et de la période sur le potentiel protestataire dans la Russie d'Eltsine. L'étude démontre que la position de l'individu dans le cycle de vie est le plus puissant facteur de prédiction du potentiel protestataire dans la société postcommuniste. En outre, les citoyens socialisés pendant des périodes de relative stabilité socio-économique présentent le potentiel protestataire le plus élevé dans des conditions d'incertitude caractéristiques de la période de transition.

This study deals with what P. Sorokin calls “inter-generation occupational mobility.” It endeavours to ascertain the extent to which occupation is transmitted from father to son, and the occupational transfers that occur when sons do not follow their fathers' occupations. Similarity of occupation between father and son is called occupational stability; change of occupation from father to son is referred to as occupational mobility. Our study is concerned with both occupational stability and occupational mobility.

We started with the conviction that research of this kind can contribute to the knowledge of social stratification and social mobility in the province of Quebec. In fact, it is not easy to study social stratification as such. In almost any contemporary society what we call social stratification is a generalized concept which may refer to one or the other of several scales of stratification depending on the point of view adopted. Sorokin, for example, distinguishes three scales of social stratification. “Concrete forms of social stratification are numerous. The majority of them may, however, be reduced to three principal classes: the economic, the political, and the occupational stratification. As a general rule, these forms are closely intercorrelated with each other.”

Elite groups, from the point of view of sociological theory, are composed of individuals who are the effective decision-makers and co-ordinators of the social system. These individuals occupy, as Professor Mills has put it, “the command posts” of the institutional hierarchies of modern complex society. Empirical studies of élite groups are concerned with at least three problems. The first is an attempt to discover the principles on which a social system allocates certain types of individuals to the élites, or positions of power, and thereby denies power to others. In all social systems the allocation of these roles is orderly, and supported by a widely held ideology. There need be no correspondence between the ideology held and the realities of power. In most social systems certain biological and social characteristics stand out as putting an individual in a preferred group for recruitment to positions of power. Power is not exercised by youth and rarely by women. Religion, ethnic affiliation, educational experience, social class and other social characteristics may form the basis of preference. Thus a study of preferred social types is an initial step in the analysis of the structure of power.

In their efforts to analyse the behaviour of households and firms, economists have traditionally assumed that each of these units maximizes an index, such as a utility function, a profit function, or a present value function, which is taken to characterize its own interest. However, in analysing government policies these same economists have generally shied away from the maximization-of-own-interest assumption and have instead assumed that governments maximize a social welfare function or the common good; or they have proceeded by developing ad hoc hypotheses for each different problem. This is regrettable, for the returns to the maximization-of-own-interest assumption in the analysis of household and firm behaviour have been impressive, even when due consideration is given to the simplification of reality that is involved. One cannot help suspecting that they might also be high in the analysis of government behaviour.

In consequence, in the present paper, following the lead of Schumpeter and Downs, I suppose that governments are not primarily interested in maximizing a social welfare function, or the common good, or the public interest—whatever these may be—but that instead they seek to maximize their own interest. Specifically, following Downs and Wilson, I assume that governments maximize the probability of their re-election, a probability which is dependent on the policies that are implemented as well as on the degree to which they are implemented. This relationship rests on the view that governments and their electorates are engaged in a sort of exchange in which policies are traded for votes; to maximize the probability of their re-election, governments endeavour to “produce” those policies which can be exchanged for the largest possible quid pro quo, that is, for the largest number of votes. Thus an analysis of government behaviour following a change in the preferences of consumer-voters, for example, would be to a large extent an analysis of changes in government policies. The potential number and variety of these policies, however, is so large that at first glance it seems impossible to proceed with a systematic analysis.

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.

Abstract. This paper expands on the work of Higgins, whose 1979 review remains the only synthetic overview of the field, by presenting an updated analysis of the study of municipal, local and urban issues in Canadian political science. We conclude that despite several discursive shifts—from the descriptive works of the 1950s and 1960s, through to the blossoming of interdisciplinary research in the 1980s and 1990s—Higgins' principal conclusion, that the various streams of urban politics continue to be studied in relative isolation from each other, still rings true. Despite the recent broadening of the literature, productive scholarly debates within and across research clusters are rare, and where debates do emerge, they are more often driven by current events and normative claims than by theoretical innovations. To remedy these deficiencies, we propose several bases for a new urban research agenda that is more methodologically and theoretically diverse and connected to work in other disciplines.

Résumé. Dans la foulée des travaux de Higgins, cet article présente une mise à jour sur les enjeux municipaux, locaux et urbains en science politique canadienne. Higgins publia en 1979 la seule synthèse des travaux dans ce domaine disponible à ce jour. Il y concluait que les diverses problématiques associées aux politiques urbaines étaient étudiées de manière isolée les unes par rapport aux autres. Cette conclusion nous apparaît encore juste, malgré les nombreux changements de discours qu'a connus ce domaine d'études. En effet, les travaux descriptifs des années 1950 et 1960 ont fait place, dans les décennies 1980 et 1990, à un foisonnement de recherches interdisciplinaires. Or, malgré ce récent élargissement de la littérature, les débats productifs dans et entre les différents champs de recherche sont rares. De plus, lorsque des débats émergent, ils sont plus souvent motivés par les événements de l'actualité et les opinions émises que par l'innovation théorique. Pour combler ces lacunes, nous proposons plusieurs avenues ouvrant sur un nouvel agenda de recherche en politiques urbaines à la fois plus diversifié sur le plan méthodologique et théorique et davantage connecté aux travaux réalisés à l'extérieur de la science politique.

Multiple regression analysis is used to test the existence of a link between the programmes of the Progressive Conservative, Liberal and New Democratic parties and subsequent government spending priorities. The analysis shows that the programme of the governing party is a poor predictor of government policies. Instead, public expenditures have been sensitive to changes in the programmes of opposition parties. The analysis also shows that government spending priorities in some important policy areas have been more sensitive to opposition party programmes when the popularity of these parties was rising. While public support has favoured the Liberals for most of the period of analysis, the fragile nature of this support has left the governing Liberals uncertain about their prospects of subsequent victory at the polls. This uncertainty has led the governing Liberals to compromise with the Progressive Conservatives on some issues and to mirror the proposals of the New Democratic party on other issues.

What drives individuals toward a career in politics? Prior research on political ambition has often focused on socio-demographic variables while generally ignoring the importance of individual personality differences. Yet personality consistently predicts political knowledge, interest and participation, suggesting that individual differences may matter in addition to resources and the social environment. To this end, we assess the impact of both the HEXACO and Dark Triad models of personality in predicting nascent political ambition (that is, the initial desire to run for elected office) while controlling for well-established socio-demographic variables (for example, gender, income). Overall, we find considerable support for the predictive power of personality, especially the traits of honesty-humility, extraversion and narcissism. These results have important implications for understanding the kinds of people who are interested in a political career.

The article examines how political ideas of environmentalists support as well as impede relations between the environmental movement and other progressive movements. This requires examination of the role and meaning of social justice and democracy in the discourse of environmentalism. This study focuses such an examination on a sample of environmental activists in British Columbia. Q methodology is used to discern patterns of association between particular sets of environmental ideas, and beliefs and values related to democracy and social justice. The authors identify four environmental/political perspectives: alienated ecocentrism, civic communitarianism, insider preservationism and green egalitarianism. These perspectives share a perception of justice focused on fair democratic procedures. Fairness is linked to inclusion and equal treatment.

This article introduces a new dictionary for the automated analysis of the tone of French media. We named it the French Lexicoder Sentiment Dictionary (LSDFr) in reference to the English lexicon developed by Young and Soroka (2012), the Lexicoder Sentiment Dictionary (LSD), from which the LSDFr was built. We compare the LSDFr to the only other French sentiment lexicon, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). First, we detail the construction of the dictionary. We then test the internal validity of the LSDFr comparing it with a corpus of manually coded texts. Finally, we test the external validity of LSDFr by measuring how the media tone, calculated using our dictionary, predicts voting intentions in the last four Quebec elections. Our goal is to enable other researchers to conduct media analyses with a comparable corpus of texts in French.

Interest group litigation is often seen as pitting social interests against the state. This view matches a wider perspective that judicial review is a battle between state and social actors. Recently, neo-institutionalist and postpluralists have led political scientists to question the assumptions that underlie these traditional views of judicial review and interest group litigation. If the state is an active patron of interest group litigation then the way we see interest group litigation and judicial review must change. This article traces the history of the Court Challenges Program of Canada and concludes that the Program's evolution challenges the traditional views of judicial review and interest group litigation. It shows an embedded state at war with itself in court.

This article examines the impact of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms on social movement politics in Canada using the case of the gay liberation movement. Drawing on the comparative social movement literature, the article situates equality seeking as a strategy and meaning game that legitimates new political identities and that is aimed at mobilizing a movement's constituency. The article demonstrates that equality seeking was a strategy and a meaning frame that was deployed in the lesbian and gay rights movement (exemplified by the gay liberation movement of the 1970s) prior to the entrenchment of the Charter. Thus, it concludes that some claims about the Charter's impact on social movement organizing have been exaggerated.

Abstract. The Americanization of the Holocaust has encouraged some notable activists, purportedly acting on behalf of indigenous peoples, to present European colonization as a “holocaust,” repackaging colonial history in starkly black-and-white terms. I pay particular attention to discussions in America and Canada over the genocidal implications of indigenous residential schooling. There is a twin danger involved. At one level the Holocaust is subjected to a process of trivialization. At another level, framing history through the Holocaust decontextualizes group histories by re-reading past victimization through a distinctive and different series of events. While comparing historical atrocities can be academically fruitful, activists will do better to highlight the traumatic effects of atrocities on individuals and families, noting their intergenerational legacies. This may be a better way of representing history, and of building bridges between diverse groups.

Résumé. L'américanisation de l'holocauste a encouragé d'éminents activistes, prétendant agir au nom des autochtones, à présenter la colonisation européenne comme un “holocauste”, reformulant ainsi l'histoire coloniale en termes crûment arrêtés. Je porte une attention toute particulière aux discussions menées au Canada et aux États-Unis concernant les implications génocides de la scolarité des autochtones en internat. Deux dangers se présentent. D'une part l'holocauste est exposé à un processus de banalisation. D'autre part, formuler l'histoire par l'holocauste isole de leur contexte les histoires des groupes en relisant les persécutions passées sous le jour d'une série d'événements distinctive et différente. Bien qu'il soit intellectuellement utile de comparer les atrocités historiques, les activistes feront mieux de souligner les effets traumatisants des atrocités sur les individus et les familles et le triste héritage laissé aux générations suivantes. C'est peut-être une meilleure façon de représenter l'histoire et de faire des rapprochements entre des groupes divers.

Abstract. While the last few decades have witnessed increased political significance of the Canadian Supreme Court, the Court has also managed to safeguard its institutional legitimacy as evident in the high degree of support it enjoys among the Canadian public. Indeed, how do the Supreme Court of Canada, and high courts everywhere, ensure the attainment and retention of institutional legitimacy? The paper develops an answer to this question by presenting a strategic theory of legitimacy cultivation. The theory is applied and tested in the context of the 1998Secession Reference case. The paper sheds a new light on the case, shows that patterns of judicial strategic behaviour can provide important insights into how the Supreme Court acquires institutional legitimacy and points out the significance of extending the strategic approach to the study of the Canadian Supreme Court.

Résumé. L'importance politique de la Cour suprême du Canada s'est accrue de manière notable au cours des dernières décennies. Malgré tout, la Cour a réussi à maintenir sa légitimité institutionnelle, comme en fait foi le niveau de soutien élevé pour la Cour que manifeste la population canadienne. Mais comment la Cour suprême du Canada, ainsi que les cours suprêmes ailleurs dans le monde, s'assurent-elles de développer et de maintenir leur légitimité institutionnelle? Cet article propose une réponse à cette question en présentant une théorie stratégique du développement de la légitimité. La théorie est appliquée et testée dans le contexte du Renvoi relatif à la sécession duQuébec de 1998. Cet article jette un regard différent sur cette décision en démontrant que certaines tendances dans le comportement judiciaire stratégique peuvent fournir des indices importants quant à l'acquisition de la légitimité institutionnelle. L'article souligne aussi l'importance d'étendre l'utilisation de l'approche stratégique à l'étude de la Cour suprême du Canada.

We examine (1) how trust in foreigners and trust in political institutions affect attitudes toward immigration and (2) the moderating effect of economic development on those impacts, analyzing data from the fifth wave of the World Values Survey. We find that natives who trust foreigners are more tolerant toward immigration and that economic development positively moderates the impact of trust in foreigners on the attitudes. Meanwhile, we find only mixed evidence for the impact of trust in political institutions and the moderating role of economic development in the impact. We conclude by discussing the implications of the findings.

The majority of Canada's women premiers were selected to that office while their parties held government. This is uncommon, both in the comparative literature and among premiers who are men. What explains this gendered selection pattern to Canada's provincial premiers’ offices? This paper explores the most common explanation found in the comparative literature for women's emergence as leaders of electorally competitive parties and as chief political executives: women are more likely to be selected when that party is in crisis or decline. Using the population of women provincial premiers in Canada as case studies, evidence suggests three of eight women premiers were selected to lead parties in government that were in crisis or decline; a fourth was selected to lead a small, left-leaning party as predicted by the literature. However, for half of the women premiers, evidence of their party's decline is partial or inconclusive. As a result of this exploration, more research is required to draw generalizations about the gendered opportunity structures that shape how women enter (and exit) the premier's office in Canada.

We report on findings from alternative ways of assessing the meaning given to “left” and “right” by respondents in the 1984 National Election Study. Approximately 40 per cent of the sample supplied definitions of the concepts; in comparison, about 60 per cent stated their feelings toward left-wingers and right-wingers and described their political orientations using a seven-point left/right rating scale. Left signified socialism or communism for about one-half of those who supplied definitions, and dislike for left-wingers seemed to be associated with these conceptions of left. Right, which was much more highly regarded than left, signified conservatism for one-quarter of those who defined the term. We also factor analyzed respondents' self-ratings on the left/right scale along with their answers to 15 attitude statements. Left was weakly associated with support for labour's use of the strike weapon. In a criterion group of respondents who had completed university and who had ventured definitions of left and right, self-ratings correlated with factors tapping attitudes toward the military and toward economic disparity and social welfare. As expected, respondents' ratings of themselves on the left/right scale were more similar to their ratings of their preferred parties than to their ratings of other parties. The relationship between self-ratings and ratings of preferred parties generally varied directly with the strength of party identification. We conclude with some observations about the political utility of political labels such as left and right.

The various subtables of Table i, or some variant of them, must be familiar to every teacher and to every student of Canadian voting behaviour. While most of our history books, and certainly all of our current concerns, focus on cultural differences in Canada, all our voting and party identification data suggest that the primary line of political division is between Roman Catholics and non-Catholics. The leftmost tables in the two rows of Table i indicate that religious differences are approximately three times as strong as ethnic ones, regardless of the index chosen. The percentage difference in Liberal identifiers is 20 across religious categories, but only 6 across the ethnic ones; the phi coefficient is.21 as compared to.06, while Yule's Q is.42 as opposed to.13. Nor is this simply an artifact. The same finding shows up for vote as for party identification, for a linguistic dichotomy as for an ethnicity dichotomy, and for undichotomized as for dichotomized variables. Similarly, the religious dichotomy need not be imposed, but emerges quite freely when similar data are analysed with the aid program. Indeed, one need not depend on using dichotomies at all, though the analysis becomes more complex. In each case, however, the basic generalization holds.

In Canada, voter turnout at the municipal level is lower than in elections at other levels of government. The reasons that might explain this low turnout are still unclear. The research tests 15 hypotheses to explain municipal electoral participation based on the case of the province of Québec (mayoral elections in 2005 and 2009 in all municipalities in the province, n = 949). The results show that four factors explain voter turnout and its variations: the size of the electorate, the presence of elderly voters, the margin of victory, and the number of candidates. These results improve our understanding of the cost of voting at the municipal level and they stress the need for conducting additional monographic investigations on this topic in Canada, especially in larger municipalities where voter turnout is often lower.