The years 1867–75 were ominous ones in the history of British trade unionism; they were also years of some of its greatest successes. The renewal in 1867 of trade union violence and murder by the Saw-Grinders of Sheffield created a widespread demand for suppression or at least investigation of the unions; and in the same year the Court of Queen's Bench in the case of Hornby vs. Close questioned the legality of unions and denied their funds the protection of the law. Legislation of some kind was certain to follow from these events and organized labour was therefore faced with a serious situation. The Conservative Government of the day decided to proceed by way of Royal Commission and it was only after the organization and practices of the unions had been examined exhaustively over a period of almost two years in 1867–9 that the first steps were taken in the direction of new legislation. Even then the Government—the first Gladstone administration had come to power—moved with exasperating slowness and the unions were kept uncertain of their fate until 1871. But the Liberal enactments of that year did not dispose of the problem; only with R. A. Cross's acts of 1875 were British trade unions set upon their modern foundations. Though long delayed, the two instalments of reform, in 1871 and 1875, constituted a complete success for the unionists, the first great legislative victory won by organized labour and a forecast of its power in the twentieth century.

Over 250,000 native-born Canadians moved west to the Canadian prairies and the American frontier during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Of this total, almost half settled on the American side of the border. This paper relates the geographical structure of this migration to economic opportunity, and focuses on the importance of economic factors in leading so many Canadian settlers to locate in North Dakota rather than in Manitoba.

Eighty years after his death, judgments of Disraeli tend to focus on two opposing impressions. One of them derives from the portrait which he created of himself in his own lifetime. Striving as he did to exaggerate his personality in social and public life, he inevitably left the impression of being too much the opportunist ever to be sincere. The word “charlatan” was attached to him before he was out of his twenties, and he never completely outgrew it. When he was in his forties even a maverick like Lord Brougham felt free to point him out on the street as “the greatest blackguard in England.” What annoyed so many of his contemporaries was not simply that Disraeli was a Jew or an upstart, but that he did not accept the moral patterns of English politics. He seemed always too ready to make alignments beyond the fixed boundaries of party, and to use even his conservatism as a means towards personal power and fame. Dislike of him on this ground existed in various quarters from earnest statesmen like Bright, Gladstone, and Shaftesbury on the one hand, to Tory aristocrats like Derby and Salisbury on the other. By the end of his life there had developed also the criticism that his political career had been essentially a failure. Walter Bagehot, for example, wrote in 1876 that Disraeli possessed an inaccurate mind with little capacity for the real business of parliament. J. A. Froude in 1891 was even more negative when he said that Disraeli's real triumph was of short duration, since “no public man in England ever rose so high and acquired power so great, so little of whose work has survived him.”

There is probably no other form of organized group life in the Canadian community which has been more unstable than the organization of religion. The history of Protestantism in the country is very largely a history of church unions and sectarian divisions. If account were taken of the activities of the Jesuit Order in New France, of the defection at various times of many Catholics to Protestant religious sects, and of recent anti-clerical movements in the province of Quebec and among the Catholic immigrant population in Western Canada, the same would be found to be true in a general way of Catholic development in the country.

The dream of the universal church, of the church which would unite all nations and all classes, has never been fully realized, in Canada as elsewhere in the Western World. Efforts to accomplish such an object, by the establishment of a state church, by the union of separate religious bodies, or by the initiation of a new religious movement which would transcend all other religious groups have invariably failed in face of the expression of strong separatist forces in religious organization. Out of every such effort to create an all-embracing religious body in the community have come new movements of religious protest, the religious sect.

On the other hand, the sect form of religious organization has proved equally unstable. The pure sect, the religious group organized exclusively in terms of the other-worldly or spiritual interests of its members, has never been more than an idealistic conception of religious organization finding expression in movements of religious reform at various times. The necessity of existing in a worldly society has led religious sects from the very beginning to accept to some extent a worldly outlook. Where they have not succeeded in developing into churches, or at any rate into types of religious organization accommodated to the secular community, they have perished. Almost from the moment of their inception, they have been forced to make such a choice between social accommodation or extinction.

When compared to research on the family and the school, the study of peer groups within the context of political socialization is a relatively neglected area. Somewhat more concern for peer-group effects has been indicated by non-political social scientists, especially social psychologists. But even though some of their work is suggestive, its application is often marginal for explaining political attitudes. Just as the existing theory on peer-group political socialization is weak, so are the existing data and analysis. The purpose of this paper is to examine the nature and extent of peer-group socialization among German students. This analysis is based on a survey of student attitudes at the University of Cologne. The survey is a random sample of 855 respondents and was carried out in 1968.

The renewal of the Canada-US North American Aerospace Defence (NORAD) agreement in March 1986 will not end the debate on the relationship between NORAD and trends in American strategy, including the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). This article reviews and explains the various strains of that debate. It points out why some in Canada argue that participation in NORAD will inevitably lead to Canadian involvement in the ballistic missile defence objective of the SDI. It also notes, however, why the military and other observers are concerned that strategic and technological trends in the US may make it difficult for Canada to remain active in North American aerospace defence, and indeed, even to provide for its own air sovereignty.

Evidence from other advanced industrial societies indicates that the traditional ideological contours of old states are being reshaped by the advance of a new political agenda. Using attitudinal survey data, this article explores the ways in which “new politics” has shaped the political belief systems of a segment of the Canadian population born after 1945. Findings indicate the presence of postmaterialist orientations among the young and a structuring capacity of postmaterialism versus left/right with respect to attitudes in different policy domains. Postmaterialism is also linked to greater mobilization potential and, among left identifiers, is shown to predict New Democratic party versus Liberal party support.

Students of urban politics have in the past tended to neglect the question of gender in their research. Since the early 1970s, however, this question has generated a significant number of studies. Investigation of the role of women in cities, in relation to the various components of urban structure such as transportation and housing, shows that women have a variety of relations with the organization of social space. The results of research to date allow us to define the main aspects of these relationships, and to assess the relevance of these kinds of enquiries. Several trends can be discerned in the literature in this emerging field. These indicate that the strengths and the weaknesses of future research will be at two levels: that of theory-building in the area of gender politics, and that of continuing investigations of this question in the context of more traditional approaches to urban politics.

Aristotle is reputed to be a thinker for whom nature is a standard which enables political judgments to avoid being arbitrary. By examining his discussion of acquisition in the Politics, this article reconsiders whether and how this reputation is deserved. Although Aristotle's discussion seems to represent a classic case in which theoretical reflections on nature issue in a moral condemnation of limitless acquisition, a subsequent distinction between theory and practice limits the practical consequences of his remarks on nature. This observation invites a rethinking of Aristotle's position on the relationship between nature and political life.

The notion that a relationship exists between social stratification and politics is axiomatic in political sociology. In Canada, as in other western industrial nations, we know that such elements of the stratification system as economic class, race, and religion are associated with political party choice (Reid, 1967; Meisel, 1967).

In traditional societies there tends to be a high correlation among the various dimensions of the stratification system. That is, a person who is of high status on one dimension will tend to be of high status on others, and vice versa. Since traditional societies also tend to be characterized by ascriptive stratification systems, individuals pass their relative advantages or disadvantages on to their children, and the class structure remains more or less stationary.

With the rationalization of economic systems through the process of developing industrial organization, achievement-oriented bases of social status become differentiated from traditional ascriptive bases, and assume increased importance. Thus, capable people from low status backgrounds may through education or skill enter high status occupations; that is, social mobility occurs.

Such social mobility confounds the relationship between stratification and politics, because the correlation between dimensions of social stratification becomes more imperfect. Some members of society who have little claim to status on the basis of ascriptive criteria find themselves in high status positions through their own achievements. At the same time, others from high status backgrounds find themselves earning through their own achievements lower status positions than their parents’ occupied.

This article presents tests of effects of social class background on voters' perceptions of most and least favoured federal parties, perceived party differences and subjective class voting. The data were taken from the 1984 Canadian National Election Study. The results show that subjective class voting extended to voters' beliefs about least liked parties. And the greater the perceived differences between voters' preferred parties and their second and third choice parties, the greater the level of class voting. An index which combined respondents' perceptions of the class orientations of most and least liked parties increased the estimate of the level of subjective class voting that takes place. The results suggest that this index provides an improved way of assessing subjective class voting. This index is a useful improvement upon previous measures because it incorporates information on the extent to which voters see Canadian politics as presenting class-based alternatives. This is the conceptual domain of the dependent variable in the literature on subjective class voting, but perceived class-based alternatives are seldom measured directly.

Résumé. Dans ce texte, nous tentons d'évaluer le rôle sociopolitique des journalistes en posant les éléments fondamentaux d'une conceptualisation du rôle des médias en démocratie et en analysant les résultats d'une recherche empirique sur l'engagement des journalistes envers la démocratie menée de l'été 2008 au printemps 2010. Notre étude prend appui sur la dichotomie entre un rôle actif des médias et un rôle instrumental face au système politique, dichotomie que nous faisons porter sur les journalistes. Nous prétendons que les médias et les journalistes jouent le rôle de « médiateurs » dans les sociétés libérales, c'est-à-dire d'agents individuels ou collectifs par qui transitent des messages explicites ou implicites; ces agents ajoutent une couche de sens par diverses méthodes dont la sélection des nouvelles, la hiérarchisation des sujets ou le cadrage de personnes ou d'événements.

Abstract. This paper aims to assess the sociopolitical role of journalists through a conceptual approach linking media and democracy and through an analysis of the data resulting from an investigation of journalists' commitment to democracy that was conducted from the summer of 2008 to the spring of 2010. Our study is founded on the dichotomy between an active role for the media and an instrumental one in the face of the political system, and this dichotomy is applied to journalists. We believe that the media and journalists function as “mediators” in liberal societies, that is, as individual or collective agents through whom explicit or implicit messages pass; these agents add a layer of signification by diverse methods, among which are the selection of news, the categorization of issues or the framing of individuals or events.

This article investigates whether the entry of a greater number of women into the political arena could transform gender relations. The opinions of female and male New Democratic, Liberal and Parti québécois candidates in the 1989 Quebec general election were polled, in order to clarify three main questions: Do the female candidates polled have opinions favourable to feminist demands? Do female and male candidates have the same opinions with respect to these demands? Do political party and political philosophy influence the opinions of each sex on feminist demands? The results show that, generally speaking, women have higher scores on a feminist index than men. More specifically, this gap between women and men varies in accordance with the thematics of feminism, and with political party and political philosophy.

Sixty years ago, in late 1953, Quebec launched the hearings of the Royal Commission on Constitutional Problems—or Tremblay commission. Commenting the publication of its report, political scientist Alexander Brady boldly argued in this journal that Quebec had been, until the late 1950s, the “guarantor” of Canada's fiscal system's flexibility (1959: 270). Emphasizing the system's evolution since the 1950s “constitutional problems,” some specialists now contend, as the economist Robin Boadway does, that Canada became the “textbook best-practice of fiscal federalism” (2007: 99). The Tremblay commission's sixtieth anniversary and the termination, in 2014, of the current agreement on federal transfers, provide an opportunity to reassess this evolution and question the validity of this kind of statement.

Résumé. Ce texte examine les différents projets de réforme électorale proposés depuis le tournant du millénaire dans les provinces canadiennes et au Nunavut, et ce, avec le souci de mettre au jour la place qu'ils aménagèrent à l'objectif d'accentuer la féminisation des assemblées législatives. L'idée maîtresse qui l'inspire veut que les propositions réformatrices aient réservé une importance le plus souvent nulle, bien que parfois accessoire, mais jamais centrale, à cette question. Pourtant, le Québec, et surtout le territoire du Nunavut, se démarquent par l'attention qu'ils portèrent au problème de l'effacement des femmes de la scène politique et leurs propositions de réforme ont offert des réponses plus à même de le solutionner.

Abstract. This essay examines the different electoral reform projects proposed since the turn of the millennium in Canadian provinces and the territory of Nunavut, in order to reveal what accommodation they have made to the objective of increasing the feminization of legislative assemblies. My guiding idea is that most reform proposals have given no, or sometimes peripheral, emphasis to this question but have never made it a central issue. However, Quebec and, even more, Nunavut stand out for the attention that they have paid to the absence of women from the political scene, and their reform proposals have included responses that might offer a solution.

Résumé. Selon Fung et Wright, la mise en place d'une gouvernance participative impliquerait l'apparition de contre-pouvoirs spécifiques, différents de ceux qui caractérisent les espaces politiques «agonistiques» dans lesquels opèrent les mouvements sociaux. Nous discutons ces conclusions à partir d'une comparaison des rôles joués par des comités de citoyens à Marseille et à Québec dans l'émergence et l'activité d'instances participatives nouvelles. À l'inverse des deux auteurs, nous soulignons que, dans certains cas au moins, la mise en place d'une gouvernance plus participative ne saurait se passer de l'existence de mouvements sociaux, et que certaines des «qualités» que Fung et Wright prêtent aux contre-pouvoirs spécifiques des nouvelles instances participatives peuvent favoriser, au contraire, des logiques de cooptation, néfastes aux pratiques de la démocratie participative. Nous terminons cette discussion par une réflexion plus générale sur les façons de penser le conflit en science politique et sur leur pertinence épistémologique et heuristique.

Abstract. According to Fung and Wright, the establishment of participatory governance involves specific stakeholders, different from those characterizing the “antagonistic” political spaces in which social movements operate. We discuss these conclusions via a comparison of roles played by citizens' committees in Marseille and Quebec City in the emergence of new participatory instances. Contrary to the two authors, we stress that, at least in certain cases, the establishment of more participatory governance could not occur without the existence of social movements. More precisely, some features that Fung and Wright attribute to participatory stakeholders could, on the contrary, favour co-optation, harmful to the practices of participatory democracy. We complete this discussion with a more general overview of ways of perceiving the conflict in political science and their epistemological and heuristic relevance.

Section 2(a) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees freedom of conscience and religion. In interpreting the Charter, the courts have interpreted this provision to prevent the legislatures from discriminating against religious minorities by promoting particular religious practices. Judges have been much less willing to protect religious minority groups from secular laws that interfere with their religious convictions. The religion cases hold important implications for those concerned about cultural diversity and the equality of Canada's many ethnic communities, as well as for the debate over the increased power of courts under the Charter.