The “correct” approach to the theory of distribution in economics is by way of a theory of productive organization; in fact, a sound distribution theory is hardly more than a corollary or footnote to an exposition of the mechanism by which resources are apportioned among different uses, and organized in each use, under the forces of price competition. The “sense” in economics as a subject for study is derived from the idea of increasing the efficiency of action (i.e., of “economy of resources”) through mutual rendering of services by individuals. Historically, the development of the science may be imputed to the realization that purchase and sale represent and mediate such an exchange of services; with a few individual exceptions, men seem never to have had this realization before the eighteenth century, but to have regarded it as axiomatic that what anyone gains in a pecuniary transaction, someone else must lose. Under analysis, a socially general effort to profit by exchange relations takes the form of a tendency toward a maximum (viewed as a state of equilibrium for the society as a whole) through the attraction of every increment of service capacity into its “best” use for the mutual advantage of both parties, i.e., the owner of the increment of capacity and the consumer of its service (who gets the service in exchange for that of some increment of capacity owned by him). If it is seen that this urge on the part of individuals as owners of service capacity is the organizing force in all price relations, and in the economic life which prices mediate and reflect, it becomes truistical to remark that the distribution of the product of all service capacity, considered as acting jointly, is on the basis of increments of yield.

In the recently recovered Preface to the French edition of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money Keynes refers to Montesquieu (1689–1755) as the greatest French economist. Addressing the French public Keynes writes that “Montesquieu was the real French equivalent of Adam Smith. The greatest of your economists, head and shoulders above the physiocrats in penetration, clear-headedness and good sense (which are the qualities an economist should have).” The admiration that Keynes expressed for Montesquieu in that document led me to undertake an investigation of Montesquieu's works. This research has made it possible to show that Montesquieu, though never fancying himself as an economist, had been creatively concerned with a crucial economic problem: the comparative statics of economic welfare.

Keynes was conscious mainly of Montesquieu's interest theory. He admired this theory in passing in the French Preface, but mentioned in no other of his works the influence that Montesquieu had on him. Nowhere did Keynes undertake to elaborate on or indeed justify any of his extraordinary remarks about Montesquieu. There is no reference to Montesquieu in the text proper of either the English or the French edition of the General Theory, or in any other of Keynes's works. As it stands, Keynes's sudden conviction that Montesquieu was the greatest French economist is hardly convincing. In this essay on attempt has been made to collect some of the evidence necessary for us to appraise the economic work of Montesquieu. I hope to vindicate the introduction of Montesquieu as an economist to the Anglo-Saxon world and to put Keynes's extraordinary contentions into proper perspective.

Abstract. The gap between child care research and policy is growing in BC. While policy changes are what one would expect from the right-of-centre Liberal government, the gap runs contrary to its expressed commitment to the design of early childhood development policy on the basis of ‘science.’ The BC child care domain thus provides a rich context in which to examine how ideology mediates the consumption of research in the political arena. This article argues that the government's ‘choice’ discourse facilitates the articulation of neoliberal principles in a rhetorically neutral way while casting doubt on scholarship that illuminates gender and class inequalities.

Résumé. L'écart entre les recherches au sujet de soins d'enfant et la politique s'élargit en Colombie-Britannique. Pendant qu'on prévoit ces changements d'un gouvernement libéral droit-du-centre, l'écart dément son engagement de concevoir la politique de development de la petite enfance d'après la “science”. Ainsi la domaine de soins d'enfant en Colombie-Britannique fournit un contexte riche pour examiner comment l'idéologie s'interpose dans la consommation de recherches dans l'arène politique. Cet article soutient que la soi-disant dialogue de “choix” du gouvernement facilite l'articulation des principes néolibéraux d'une manière neutraliste pendant qu'on soulève du doute à l'érudition qui illumine des inégalités de genre et de classe sociale.

If the importance of one-party dominance as a determinant of the rise of third parties were to be evaluated on the basis of the attention it has already received from political scientists, we would have to conclude that it must not be negligible. Obviously, however, this would not be a proper way of evaluating a theory. Fortunately, its importance rests on other grounds. Apart from my own quantitative and qualitative evidence, there is now Graham White's evidence, presented above in his article “One-Party Dominance and Third Parties,” which, as will be seen, I read to be in line with my own. And while André Blais, in “Third Parties in Canadian Provincial Politics,” above, concludes that he was “impressed with the number of negative results of the tests [he] used” (I am not!), he nevertheless showed an unusual reluctance to discard the theory and finally maintained that “one-party dominance is not irrelevant,” though it is “not a crucial factor.” We shall see later that his evidence is far from being that negative. Another critic of the test of the theory at the district level maintained, nevertheless, that the theory itself was very sound (“inattaquable”) and that its tests at the provincial level were convincing.

The 2015 Canadian federal election campaign put into focus relations between Muslim communities in Canada and wider Canadian society, featuring debates around banning the niqab, and a “barbaric cultural practices” hotline. At the same time, challenges in relations between Muslims and majority-group Canadians were not a new development in 2015: they had in the past faced periodic strains due to terrorism-related events, and attacks targeting Muslims in Canada. The Canadian case is in fact reflective of a challenge in intergroup relations facing several Western democracies. In light of this, what accounts for majority-group Canadians’ attitudes toward Muslims in Canada? Drawing on data from the 2011 and 2015 Canadian Election Studies and theories linking outgroup perceptions to intergroup contact (friends), local demographic context at both the micro-level (neighbours) and meso-level (townspeople), and political factors (parties), this article seeks to explain why majority-group Canadians hold alternately positive or negative views of Muslims.

Abstract. This study analyses the French-language scholars' place in Canadian foreign policy. More precisely, it measures and compares their productions in French and in English (output) and the citations to this output (impact) in works by English-language scholars. The output is measured using the Canadian Foreign Relations Index. Then a representative sample of bibliographies taken from books and articles written by English-language scholars and published between 1997 and 2007 is analyzed. Various conclusions on the place of French and French-language scholars in the field are drawn from these data, including their small contribution to Canadian foreign policy and the absence of citations to works in French by English-language scholars. Political implications of the results are discussed.

Résumé. Cette analyse examine la place des chercheurs francophones dans l'étude de la politique étrangère canadienne. Plus précisément, elle mesure et compare leurs publications en français et en anglais (la production) et les citations tirées de cette production (l'incidence) que l'on retrouve dans les travaux des chercheurs anglophones. La production est mesurée à l'aide du Canadian Foreign Relations Index. Puis un échantillon représentatif de bibliographies de travaux anglophones publiés entre 1997 et 2007 est analysé. Ces données permettent de tirer diverses conclusions sur la place du français et des chercheurs francophones dans ce champ d'étude. Il apparait, notamment, que la contribution des francophones au domaine de la politique étrangère canadienne est réduite et que les chercheurs anglophones ne citent pratiquement jamais les travaux en français. Les auteurs dégagent, en conclusion, les conséquences politiques de ces résultats.

Abstract. We identify frequent inaccuracies in journalistic interpretations of the horse race (“who is ahead?”) and of change over time (“who is gaining?”) in poll reports during the Canadian election of 2008. We test two explanations. The “mistaken mindset” hypothesis holds that journalists exaggerate the horse race because they systematically miscalculate the margin of error. The “follow-the-pollster” hypothesis holds that journalists follow the horse-race interpretations that they find in pollsters' reports. We find strong support for the “follow-the-pollster” hypothesis in the data and in interviews with pollsters and journalists and conclude that pollsters' reports should be a key element to consider in any attempt to improve the level of accuracy in media reports of the horse race.

Résumé. Les journalistes ont souvent commis des erreurs d'interprétation de la marge d'erreur dans les résultats de sondages pendant la campagne électorale canadienne de 2008. Cela les a conduits à surestimer l'avance du parti gagnant et le changement dans le score d'un parti entre deux sondages successifs. Comment expliquer ces erreurs fréquentes? Une première hypothèse affirme que cette surestimation provient du fait que les journalistes se trompent systématiquement dans le calcul de la marge d'erreur. Selon une deuxième hypothèse, les journalistes connaissent tellement mal la marge d'erreur qu'ils se fient à l'interprétation qu'en font les maisons de sondage. Les données empiriques et les réponses aux questions d'entretiens soutiennent la deuxième hypothèse. Nous en concluons que pour mieux porter fruits, les efforts pour améliorer l'interprétation de la marge d'erreur devraient cibler les maisons de sondage autant que les journalistes.

The philosophy of Karl Popper has rarely been examined with respect to its fruitfulness and relevance for political theory. While his contributions to the philosophy of science may appear to be of only marginal significance for the fundamental concerns of political theory, his own forays into the field, particularly in The Open Society and Its Enemies, have been polemical in tone and explicitly political in motivation. This article re-examines Popper's critique of the theory of sovereignty and his own approach to political theory by employing a largely neglected element of his critical approach, namely his problem-oriented method.

Canadian legislatures’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have raised questions about whether and how parliaments should continue to meet during the pandemic (Reid, 2020; Thomas, 2020a). The purpose of this research note is twofold: (1) to document how Canadian legislatures have changed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and (2) to assess the effect of these responses on legislatures’ ability to fulfill their core functions. Through an analysis of parliamentary records from all elected federal, provincial and territorial legislatures in Canada, we find that the role of parliaments as sites of citizen representation has suffered the most, whereas the scrutinizing and legislative functions of parliaments have tended to be preserved, albeit in a significantly truncated form. We argue that patterns in legislatures' varied responses to the pandemic reveal which aspects of parliamentary functioning these bodies de facto prioritize and which are at risk of being eroded.

Recent northern First Nation land claim agreements have created a new category of First Nation citizenship. Although many embrace the category as an essential aspect of First Nation sovereignty, others reject it as a colonial imposition that constrains the possibilities for indigenous politics. There does indeed appear to be a gap between the legal category of First Nation citizenship and northern indigenous peoples’ ideas about political society. For one thing, the latter includes animals, while the former does not. In their recent book, Zoopolis, Donaldson and Kymlicka develop a model of animal citizenship. Although not primarily concerned with First Nation citizenship, they do assert the universality of their model, including its compatibility with indigenous ideas about proper human-animal relations. In this article, I assess those claims and show that, to the contrary, their model is in many ways antithetical to the knowledge and practices of northern indigenous peoples.

This article examines the criticism of the activist Supreme Court of Canada in Canadian political science, as exemplified by the work of F. L. Morton and Rainer Knopff. It compares the debate over the legitimacy of judicial review with a previous generation's debates over the same question with reference to the role and impact of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council on the development of Canadian federalism. The article argues that, particularly in examining the role of groups in the litigation process, we need to return to the lessons of the previous debate on the JCPC by emphasizing the ways in which group politics and litigation are connected to power relations in Canadian society. In the conclusion, the article offers an alternative approach to exploring the theoretical and empirical relationships between collective actors and litigation based on the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Among the several inductive studies of the international transfer mechanism, Professor Viner's investigation of Canada's foreign borrowings in the period 1900–13 has provided the most convincing substantiation of the classical price-specie-flow mechanism. Yet, on the theoretical level, the neo-Keynesian theory of international trade now makes it difficult to accept the classical view of the transfer process as a complete explanation. And, on the empirical level, the availability of more comprehensive statistics and further research in Canada's economic history now allow us to understand in greater detail the forces of economic growth which were particularly strong in Canada during the years of foreign borrowing. Should we not therefore attempt to supplement Professor Viner's study by recognizing the relevance of income analysis and the historical context of economic development?

To place Professor Viner's study in this wider frame of analysis is the objective of this paper. Section one briefly recalls the conclusions of Professor Viner's investigation. The second section establishes some significant features of Canada's economic development, while the final section relates these features to the operation of the transfer mechanism and revises Professor Viner's interpretation.

This article explores the implications of changes in Canadian Supreme Court jurisprudence on Aboriginal rights since the 1990s. While recognizing the Court's valuable contributions in the period from Calder to Sparrow, the author argues that the 1996 Van der Peet decision deals a serious blow to the legal status of Aboriginal rights, particularly the right to self-government. The standard of legal recognition established in Van der Peet constitutes a decided step back from the Court's prior jurisprudence, and is insufficient as a means of securing its stated ends: the survival and well-being of Aboriginal communities and cultures. The author concludes by arguing that the Court can repair the recent damage it has done to Aboriginal rights by revisiting the concept of the quasinational status granted to Aboriginal peoples within the context of the sui generis Crown-Aboriginal relationship.

For different reasons, identification with political parties has been on the decline everywhere. Using polling data, we show that political identification in Chile increased in times of polarization before 1973 and in the transition to democracy in 1990 and fell under democratic consolidation. The decline comes primarily from falling identification with the largest party, the centrist Christian Democratic Party (PDC). Assessing the determinants of party identification, we report that while in the 1960s the PDC had a wide appeal as it attracted voters identified with the left, centre and right, in recent years the PDC attracts support from centrists and older people.

La perception ordonnée de l'idéologie des partis politiques canadiens

La plupart des chercheurs acceptent comme évident l'énoncé selon lequel les partis politiques canadiens peuvent être ordonnés selon le critère droite-gauche : lendpétant perçu comme étant à gauche, le Parti libéral au centre, le Parti progressisteconservateur à droite et le Crédit social à l'extrême droite. La présente étude a pour objet de vérifier la véracité de certaines propositions implicites à cette approche : (1) un seul critère suffit pour situer les partis les uns par rapport aux autres; (2) ce critère est applicable de pareille façon partout au Canada; (3) l'appartenance à un parti n'influence pas la perception ordonnée des partis.

A l'aide de données provenant de sondages effectués en 1965 et en 1968, il est démontré qu'aucune de ces propositions n'est valide. S'il apparait que les électeurs ont une perception relativement claire d'un continuumnpd – Libéral – Conservateur, ils ne s'entendent pas sur la place à assigner aux Créditistes. De plus, les résidents de la Colombie Britannique et des Prairies ont une égale tendance à concevoir les Conservateurs comme situés à gauche des Libéraux, et les Libéraux comme à gauche des Conservateurs. Enfin, certains partisans politiques (et notamment ceux dundp) ordonnent les partis d'une façon différente des autres.

L'auteur en conclut que le critère droite-gauche, bien que pertinent, ne saurait décrire à lui seul les perceptions spatiales globales de l'idéologie des partis. Il propose que le critère centre-périphérie soit utilisé comme seconde dimension des perceptions idéologiques ordonnées.

This article is devoted to a study of business interest associations in Canada in the light of the basic question: Why do they exist? The purpose is to demonstrate that business interest associations might be profitably considered distinct from other types of pressure groups. When their organization and activities are considered at length, it also becomes clear that these groups have an importance for their members that is not often perceived. These arguments are developed by drawing upon a case study of business associations representing selected sectors of the Canadian food processing industry.

This work extends the authors' earlier work on incumbency by examining, riding by riding, results in 10federal elections from 1926 to 1980. Regression results indicate that incumbency generally had a significant impact, and between 1957 and 1980 incumbency was worth about four points for the Liberals, Conservatives and New Democrats, and significantly more for the Social Credit. The results vary and seem to be smaller than those observed in Ontario provincial elections, but this may be due to the greater instability in federal politics, since general shifts in party allegiance seem to reduce incumbency effects.

Recent works on economic voting have shown that the economy's impact on electoral behaviour could sometimes be mediated by differences in political conditions. This article specifies and tests the mediating role of one such factor, namely regionalism, on economic voting in Canada. The potential effect of two structural factors is tested: the regional configuration of the federal party system (clarity of available alternatives), and the regional structure of the economy. The data used come from the last four Canadian Election Studies (1988 to 2000). The results show that economic voting slightly differs among regions according to the presence or not of strong regional political parties, Quebec being the region where the relationship between the economy and the vote is the weakest. Even more significant differences in economic voting behaviour can be observed between ''have'' and ''have not'' regions, the shape of economic voting in the Atlantic provinces being distinct from the one in Ontario and the West.