Abstract. A literature has emerged in American voting studies noting a “marriage gap”—the propensity for married voters to support the Republican party. Using Canadian Election Study data, we establish the existence of a significant marriage gap in Canada. We also seek to determine if the marriage gap is driven by socio-demographic factors or attitudinal ones. We find that while socio-demographic factors contribute to the marriage gap, they explain relatively little variance. In probing the attitudinal basis of the marriage gap further, we find that married Canadians differ from the unwed very strongly on issues of moral traditionalism, but much less so on other issues that measure generalized conservatism.

Résumé. Des travaux sont apparus dans les études américaines sur le vote remarquant l'existence d'un “écart mariage” (marriage gap) – la tendance des électeurs mariés à soutenir le parti républicain. Utilisant des données sur les élections nationales canadiennes, nous établissons l'existence d'un écart significatif au Canada. Nous cherchons aussi à déterminer si ce phénomène est poussé par les facteurs socio-démographiques ou les facteurs d'attitude. Nous constatons que bien que les facteurs socio-démographiques contribuent à cet écart, ils n'expliquent que relativement peu de variation. En recherchant davantage la base attitudinale, nous constatons que les canadiens mariés diffèrent très fortement de ceux qui ne sont pas mariés sur les questions de traditionalisme moral, mais cependant beaucoup moins sur les questions de conservatisme géneral.

Abstract. Identity politics have been much maligned by the Left as politically divisive and philosophically untenable. But the need for identification in the process of countering demeaned identities and fostering counter-hegemonic projects has been underestimated by poststructuralist critics. Good at dismantling identities and deconstructing existing strategies of inclusion, the poststructuralists are not particularly helpful in thinking through forms of subjectivity and/or collective action that would contribute to coalition building. Beauvoir provides a worthy model for coalitional politics. Her theory of relational subjectivity avoids essentialism and fosters collaboration, if that work is premised upon connected existences, rather than identity. Her theory of alterity, or Othering, acknowledges power differentials and accommodates both cultural and economic forces of oppression, moving away from static, centralized and binary relations of power that have become associated with second-wave feminism and conventional Marxism.

Résumé. La politique identitaire a été largement décriée par la gauche qui l'accuse de créer des dissensions et d'être philosophiquement insoutenable. Pourtant, le besoin d'identification dans le processus de soutien des identités dévaluées et de promotion de projets anti-hégémoniques a été sous-estimé par la critique post-structuraliste. Doués pour la déconstruction des identités et le démantèlement des stratégies d'inclusion, les post-structuralistes ont moins de talent pour concevoir des formes de subjectivité ou d'action collective qui contribueraient à la construction de coalitions. Simone de Beauvoir fournit un modèle précieux de politique de coalition. Sa théorie de la subjectivité relationnelle évite l'essentialisme et encourage la collaboration, si cet effort est basé sur des existences liées les unes aux autres plutôt que sur l'identité. Sa théorie de l'altérité reconnaît les différentiels de pouvoir et tient compte des forces oppressives, à la fois culturelles et économiques, abandonnant ainsi les rapports de pouvoir statiques, centralisés et binaires qui ont été associés avec le féminisme “ deuxième vague ” et le marxisme conventionnel.

By way of a critical assessment of the leading authorities on the critics of the Judicial Committee, this article argues that the proper appreciation of what the law lords did to the terms of the BNA Act can be found in an understanding of their perception of their unique function. Supporters of the Judicial Committee's decentralization of the terms of the British North America Act have tended to rely on either G. P. Browne's book on the subject or Alan Cairns's article in this Journal (4 [1971], 301–45). The purpose of this article is to challenge those authorities and offer an alternative explanation.

Aggregate cross-national analyses of political participation have reported correlations between civic literacy, political knowledge and election turnout. Enhancing civic literacy among Canadian voters, in part by encouraging greater newspaper readership in the general population, has been put forward as a strategy for combating falling turnout in national general elections. The idea is evaluated comparatively at the level of individual voters, using data from the British Election Study. Newspaper readership is related to political knowledge, but increased newspaper reading does not translate into a greater propensity to vote.

Focus group research is a useful methodology within and beyond the field of political science, as a source of core or supplementary data. The focus group literature is rich and full of guidance, but advice on using digital tools in certain stages of focus group research is relatively scarce. Aiming to fill those gaps, this article draws on experience with two projects in order to outline how researchers can harness technologies for focus group recruitment and data analysis. While traditional recruitment and data analysis techniques are useful, we identify advantages of technology-assisted approaches, particularly for focus group research with marginalized communities. Geared to both new and existing focus group users, the article identifies fruitful ways to harness a wider range of technologies for conducting focus group research while maintaining consistency with established principles and practices.

I examined the use of Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic to find out how many Twitter users started to follow relevant Canadian political and health authorities, and I investigated their activity and interests. To this end, I analyzed 398,037 Twitter accounts. The results reveal that the Twitter accounts of relevant authorities gained a significant number of new Twitter followers during the pandemic. The Twitter users who joined during the pandemic were rather passive; they tweeted and liked fewer tweets than Twitter users who registered in the months prior to the pandemic. They also chose to follow Twitter accounts predominantly related to news, politics and governmental agencies. These findings suggest that during the pandemic, numerous information-seeking citizens joined Twitter for the purpose of obtaining information about public health matters, which in turn suggests that authorities should incorporate Twitter into their information dissemination tools, especially during emergencies, to meet the public demand for information.

There is no unifying theory to guide the study of partisan political staff. The literature suggests staffers may be variously mechanisms for resolving principal-agent problems, extensions of centralized political control or spoils given as rewards inside the core executive. Annual Public Accounts data, available only since 2007, offer a promising new addition to the debate over federal exempt staffs. This paper presents descriptive and linear regression results on staffing expenditures for five years of federal data in Canada. Using the construct of “revealed preference,” predictors of variance in ministerial spending on staffing may provide new, objective information on their function in Canadian government. Results of this study demonstrate that quantitative methods can be applied to the study of political staff and may be a helpful addition as the field continues to develop, test and refine theory.

Partly because of the extensive range of his thought and partly because of the diffuseness of his style, Veblen is a difficult thinker to classify. Several writers have made passing references to traces of anarchism in his works but most of them consider it a minor aspect of his thought. The thesis of this paper is that Veblen's political and social thought can be most clearly understood and evaluated in terms of philosophical anarchism.

Anarchism is as old as society itself; at least it has been traced back to Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoic philosophy. The Greek derivation of the word is “without a ruler,” not “without order.” Elements of anarchism form a more important part of many political theories than is sometimes recognized, and it has found able exponents in Bakunin, Kropotkin, Tolstoy, Thoreau, and Whitman. What distinguishes the anarchists from other political philosophers is the degree to which they carry their attack on existing institutions and believe in a principle of harmony in nature or human nature which will emerge if these institutions are eliminated. This principle, if followed, will eliminate the need for coercion and the state which they think is based on coercion. Only voluntary functional associations will remain in the anarchist's society but the principle of harmony will prevent the emergence of chaos. Quite clearly this is a philosophy of extremes and suffers the advantages and disadvantages of such a philosophy. In a unique way it forces its critics to examine their fundamental assumptions afresh. But because of the extreme assumptions made, anarchists' writings in general, and Veblen's in particular, abound in contradictions between freedom and authoritarianism.

The article makes three contributions to our knowledge of the Canadian political science literature. First, it offers a historical survey of the methodologies and techniques used in the discipline. Second, the findings of this paper constitute a reference for future work interested in commenting the methods and techniques used in CJPS and provide scholars with data they can use to better situate their work within the broader literature. Finally, the paper answers three questions that permeate discussions of the Canadian political science literature. It investigates whether the proportion of qualitative works has declined over time, whether Canadian scholarship is more qualitative than quantitative today and whether there are important differences in the methodologies and techniques used in Canada and in the United States. The article concludes with a discussion of the future of political science methodology based on the findings.

Michael Oakeshott's contribution to political philosophy has been overshadowed by the widespread belief that the proper context for his writings is modern conservatism. The legend of Oakeshott's conservatism is shown to rest on a misunderstanding of the way in which his view of politics as a specific and limited activity is derived from a more general, sceptical account of the relation between belief and conduct. His scepticism here is not a Burkean rejection of the relevance of general beliefs, but a Humean call for “speculative moderation” appropriate to the occasion. This is not to say that Oakeshott's writings are without political significance. In fact, their significance lies in their powerful critique of modern conservatism in Europe and America.

Indigenous peoples have, to varying degrees, turned to the courts to litigate their ongoing disputes with Canada's settler colonial governments. Scholars have examined well the ways courts are used for strategic political ends by a variety of Indigenous and non-Indigenous litigants and are laden with settler values and institutional logics that are foreign to Indigenous peoples. However, it is less clear what effect turning to the courts in pursuit of strategic goals has on specific relationships between Indigenous peoples. This gap is more pronounced in Métis scholarship where there have been few final appellate cases. This paper argues the interaction between the Manitoba Métis Federation and Treaty 1 peoples seeking leave to intervene at the Manitoba Court of Appeal in MMF v. Canada illuminates the way litigating Indigenous-settler disputes can advance divisive, exclusionary, zero-sum political relationships between Indigenous peoples. These fractious interactions serve to undermine the construction of a co-ordinated and related inter-Indigenous decolonizing politics.

Using data based on Quebec municipalities with more than 20,000 inhabitants, this article tests the hypothesis that the conjunction of economic conditions and labour unrest contributed significantly to the defeat of the Liberal party in the 1976 Quebec election. This hypothesis, suggested by the results of the election polls, follows from the conceptual framework furnished by political economy models. These models and the controversies they have given rise to are discussed first from a theoretical perspective. This discussion is followed by a brief review of empirical studies which could shed light on these controversies. Much of the theoretical discussion and most of the empirical results suggest that economic conditions generally have a significant influence on election results.

In the second part of the article, after a methodological discussion, we present the results of empirical tests conducted to examine our hypothesis about the influence of economic conditions on the November 1976 general election in Quebec. These results show that increased “fiscal pressure” between 1975 and 1976, union unrest, and the unemployment rate in 1976 had significant negative effects on the Liberal vote.

We conclude by raising questions about the effect economic factors could have on the results of the referendum on sovereignty-association.

The aim of this study is to provide an empirical basis for theories about political coalitions formed to apply economic sanctions against a target country. An excellent example is the economic blockade of Cuba by the United States, during which successive Republican and Democratic administrations have pursued economic measures to achieve a political objective. This study investigates the degree of cooperation and cleavage among Washington's capitalist-bloc allies with this effort to establish multilateral economic pressures against the Cuban Revolution. The analysis suggests that, despite the growth of economic competition during the 1960s and 1970s, such strains were not reflected at the level of political relationships.

This article examines how the changing environment faced by and context within the Canadian feminist movement is reflected in the beliefs and strategies of recruits to the movement at a given point in time. The framework for the investigation is Whittier's generational approach (1997) that posits that different political generations—defined as cohorts of recruits who join a social movement during distinctive periods of protest—introduce change to its collective identity given the formative experiences faced by each generation. Using an original large sample data set, I provide evidence that the changes experienced by the Canadian feminist movement from the 1980s onwards are reflected in noticeable shifts in the collective identity and activist strategies of subsequent waves of feminist recruits. The findings suggest that further research into cohort recruitment and replacement is essential for understanding the forces at play in shaping the contemporary Canadian feminist movement.

Pretendianism is a problem in academia (and of whiteness). Its long-standing existence is well researched and analyzed in the academic record, and it has been brought to wider audiences through news and social media. In response, task forces, committees and advisory councils are being created in universities to determine stronger identity validation policies, with emphasis on engaging relationships with local Indigenous nations, communities, elders, and knowledge holders. Policy making, including processes and procedures of identity validation, will be a powerful apparatus going forward to administer indigeneity in universities. This approach will also lead to the intensification of Indigenous definition and regulation by predominantly non-Indigenous institutions. This article proposes a set of complementary extrapolicy practices addressing pretendianism worth exploring and that emerge from the everyday embodied vantage points of Indigenous academics. We must (continue to) name whiteness, model Indigenous relationality and learn from Indigenous women's leadership.

Résumé. La publication d'un nouveau guide d'étude destiné aux immigrants qui souhaitent acquérir la citoyenneté canadienne en 2009 constitue la première réforme de cet ouvrage depuis sa parution en 1995. Notre analyse se penche sur les réactions dans la presse écrite anglo-canadienne et franco-québécoise entourant cette nouvelle publication. Contrairement au postulat d'un « choc des identités » au Canada, nos résultats démontrent qu'une alliance implicite s'est forgée entre « les deux solitudes» canadiennes dans leur compréhension de la citoyenneté, alors qu'est reconnue, dans les deux groupes de quotidiens, l'importance de protéger les « acquis » de la société canadienne contre les croyances et les pratiques de l'« Autre » non-civilisé. Toutefois, la prudence est de mise: la convergence des représentations médiatiques de la citoyenneté canadienne, renvoie-t-elle vraiment à une identité collective partagée au Québec et au Canada?

Abstract. The release of a new study guide for immigrants aiming to become Canadian citizens in 2009 was the first major reform of this document since its inception in 1995. This paper examines the coverage of the Anglo-Canadian and Franco-Québécois press surrounding the new citizenship guide. Rather than supporting the widely accepted thesis that Canada is marked by a « collision of identities », our study suggests the emergence of an implicit alliance between the two Canadian “solitudes” with respect to their understanding of citizenship. In particular, the two groups of newspapers agree upon the necessity to protect « acquired gains » of Canadian society against the beliefs and practices of an uncivilized « Other ». Nevertheless, we should not jump to conclusions: does the convergence of media representations of Canadian citizenship really reflect the emergence of a shared collective identity in Quebec and Canada?