Résumé. De mars 2006 à décembre 2007, le Québec a été secoué par un débat sociétal sur la question de la gestion de la diversité culturelle. Cette «crise» aurait été alimentée par un tsunami médiatique traitant de divers cas d'accommodements juridiques ou d'ajustements administratifs accordés dans les services publics à des citoyens québécois issus de l'immigration dans la grande région de Montréal (Giasson et coll., 2008). Par le biais d'une couverture étendue, les médias ont attiré l'attention de la population sur ces pratiques d'accommodement. L'article présente les données exploratoires d'une analyse de contenu de la couverture faite par onze journaux québécois du climat de l'opinion des Québécois en matière de diversité et d'immigration pendant la phase intensive de développement du débat. L'étude montre que dans leur analyse des sondages d'opinion et dans la présentation générale des tendances de l'opinion publique sur les accommodements raisonnables, les journaux ont mis l'accent sur l'évaluation du malaise des répondants envers l'immigration et la diversité religieuse plutôt que sur l'ouverture de la population québécoise envers la diversité et sur l'apport social de l'immigration, renforçant ainsi davantage l'impression populaire qu'une crise sociale majeure se déroulait et qu'il existait un fossé entre les Québécois «de souche», les Québécois issus de l'immigration et les autres Canadiens.

Abstract. From March 2006 to December 2007, the province of Quebec experienced a contentious public debate on diversity. The “crisis” was fueled by a “media tsunami” during which news outlets actively reported on numerous cases of reasonable accommodation practices or administrative agreements in public services granted in the Greater Montreal region to citizens of immigrant background (Giasson et al., 2008). Through this extensive coverage, the media brought these instances of accommodation to the public's attention. The research studies the press coverage that 11 daily newspapers dedicated to the state of public opinion in Quebec during the active and intense development phase of the “crisis”. The study shows that in their analysis of polls and their general framing of the mood of public opinion towards reasonable accommodation, newspapers focused mostly on the malaise in the population toward immigration and religious diversity rather than on its openness to diversity and to the positive social outcomes of immigration. In doing so, the media further anchored the popular impression that a serious social crisis was ongoing and that a wide gap in tolerance existed between Francophone Quebeckers, Quebeckers of recent immigrant background and other Canadians.

Abstract. This article demonstrates that though the political nature of race is evident and constitutes an important area of research, there is a dearth of literature on race in English Canadian political science particularly as compared to other social sciences. The article provides explanations for this disciplinary silence, including methodological fuzziness, dominant elite-focused and colour-blind approaches to the study of politics, and the prevalence of ideas and foci about the nature of Canadian politics. In order to avoid the danger of disciplinary lag, it concludes with several ways of addressing this disparity between the political science and the society it purports to analyze.

Résumé. Malgré l'essence politique évidente du concept de «race» et son importance indéniable comme sujet de recherche, la littérature de science politique canadienne-anglaise s'y attarde très peu, surtout en comparaison des autres sciences sociales. L'article explique les causes de ce silence disciplinaire. Celles-ci incluent un flou méthodologique, une approche surtout centrée sur l'élite, une perspective «daltonienne» concernant l'étude de la politique, ainsi que la prédominance de certaines idées quant à la nature de la politique canadienne. Afin d'éviter un danger de lacune disciplinaire, l'article propose des solutions permettant de réduire l'écart entre la science politique et son objet d'étude, soit la société réelle.

It is generally known that John Stuart Mill spent his working career in the service of the East India Company, but very little has been written about him in this capacity. As an administrative official of the company, the home government of India, John Mill's activities have been greatly overshadowed by the influence exerted upon Indian policies by his father, James Mill, historian of British India and a member of the Examiner's Office of the Company from 1819 until his death in 1836. Like his father, John Stuart recognized the company's government of India for what it actually was—a despotism of an alien race, which, despite the good accomplished by it in the last decades of its existence, was established by conquest, treaty, and annexation. And yet, he spent almost half of his life as an official of this establishment, drafting dispatches to the India government, and, in defence of the company's rule against extinction by Parliament, wrote what Lord Grey described as the ablest state paper he had ever read.

How did John Mill, the great exponent of nineteenth century liberalism, reconcile his employment as an official of a despotic government with his espousal of the principles of civil and political freedom? How, in other words, did he reconcile this freedom with colonialism? What conceptions did he entertain concerning: (1) the place of India in the history of civilization; and (2) its eventual emergence from British rule as an industrially transformed self-governing nation? These questions, arising out of Mill's career with the East India Company, have not been discussed in any of the numerous treatises on the great man. In considering them here we hope to fill this gap in the literature. Other questions, such as Mill's administrative skills and his influence upon the company's policies, cannot be taken up in this paper. The author does not share the view that Mill's influence at India House was insignificant. He is inclined to a moderate version of Henry Fawcett's opinion that all the important principles for governing the great dependency of India were laid down by Mill in the documents he drafted for the East India Company.

The authors tested predictions concerning the effects of respondents' identification with governing versus opposition political parties on feelings of political efficacy and trust, using data from the 1984 Canadian National Election Study. Dependent variables were political competence, perceived system responsiveness, and political trust, each measured federally and provincially. Respondents who supported the party in power scored significantly higher on perceived responsiveness and trust than those who supported opposition parties, although mainly at the provincial level. Whether respondents' preferred party was in power or not interacted with strength of party identification on the responsiveness and trust measures, both federally and provincially, as expected. Effects were much less pronounced for feelings of political competence. The authors suggest an interpretation to explain the weaker and inconsistent federal results. The article concludes with some observations concerning the relationship between partisanship, on the one hand, and efficacy and trust, on the other.

The study explored the sources of political knowledge using data from the 1984 Canadian National Election Study. Two dimensions of political knowledge were measured: factual knowledge, in which respondents were asked to name the 10 provincial premiers; and conceptual knowledge, in terms of respondents’ abilities to define and use the concepts of left and right. The authors tested four explanations of people's levels of political knowledge; these dealt with education, political participation, media effects and region, with controls for income, residency in several provinces, age and sex. Education was significantly associated with both forms of knowledge, but especially with conceptual knowledge. Reading about politics in newspapers and magazines was strongly related to the two knowledge variables. The effects of reliance on television for political information, however, were much weaker. There were significant effects for region, with the patterns depending on the type of knowledge. The study concludes with some observations about the role of knowledge in political behaviour.

Abstract. Electoral engineering determines prospects for centripetal politics in postconflict societies. Lebanon's postwar elections have been contested by interethnic electoral alliances in multi-ethnic electoral districts. Interethnic coalitions, vote pooling and bargaining have structured the results of these elections, as have the electoral laws demarcating the boundaries of electoral districts. Democratization, peace building and ethnic harmony have been the main victims of these cross-ethnic alliances, however. This paper seeks to explain this Lebanese puzzle by examining the institutional determinants of cross-ethnic electoral alliances in the 1992, 1996 and 2000 parliamentary elections.

Résumé. Dans les sociétés post-conflictuelles, l'ingénierie électorale détermine l'éventualité de politiques centripètes. Les élections libanaises d'après-guerre se sont disputées entre des alliances électorales interethniques dans des districts électoraux multiethniques. Les coalitions interethniques, le “ vote pooling ” et le marchandage, de même que les lois électorales qui déterminaient la configuration des circonscriptions électorales, ont structuré les résultats de ces élections. Or, la démocratisation, la construction de la paix et l'harmonie ethnique ont été les victimes principales de ces alliances interethniques. La présente analyse vise à expliquer ce paradoxe libanais en étudiant les déterminants institutionnels des alliances électorales interethniques lors des élections parlementaires de 1992, 1996 et 2000.

What impact do local candidates have on elections in single member district plurality electoral systems? We provide new evidence using data from a large election study carried out during the 2015 Canadian federal election. We improve on the measurement of local candidate effects by asking over 20,000 survey respondents to rate the candidates in their constituency directly. We present three estimates. We find that when all voters are considered together, local candidate evaluations are decisive for approximately 4 per cent of voters. Second, these evaluations are decisive for the outcome of 10 per cent of constituency contests. Third, when models are estimated for each constituency, we find significant evaluation effects for 14 per cent of candidates.

It has been argued that rapid membership turnover in the Canadian House of Commons robs the institution of a dedicated and experienced group of MPs and produces a Parliament stocked with political amateurs. Both electoral defeat and voluntary retirement have been seen to play a role in the amateurism phenomenon. The authors explore the roots of amateurism and critically examine the argument that a frustrating career structure in the House of Commons encourages voluntary vacancies. Using a random sample of former MPs, the authors find support for both a “frustration” and an “exhaustion” model of career choice. The article concludes that while amateurism—in the sense of short political careers—may be problematic, not all MPs are amateurs and the problem of amateurism cannot be addressed simply by satisfying frustrated ambition.

Abstract. “Trade, not aid” has long been a catchphrase in international development discourse. This paper evaluates whether the “trade, not aid” logic has driven bilateral aid allocations in practice. Using a dataset that covers development assistance from 22 donor countries to 187 aid recipients from 1980 to 2002, we find that donor countries have dispersed bilateral aid in ways that reinforce their extant bilateral commercial ties with recipient countries. Instead of “trade, not aid,” bilateral aid disbursement has followed the logic of “aid following trade.” The policy implication is that bilateral aid allocation patterns have reinforced the disadvantages of poor countries that have a limited ability to participate in international trade due to a variety of factors such as geography and a lack of tradable resources.

Résumé. «Le commerce et non l'aide» est un slogan qui continue d'occuper une place importante dans le débat sur le développement international. L'article qui suit vise à évaluer la mise en pratique de ce principe dans les allocations de l'aide bilatérale. S'appuyant sur une base de données recouvrant l'aide distribuée par 22 pays donateurs à 187 pays récipiendaires entre 1980 et 2002, notre analyse révèle que l'aide a été allouée en fonction des liens commerciaux bilatéraux existants et les a renforcés. C'est donc le principe de «l'aide après le commerce» qui a prévalu. Les allocations d'aide bilatérale ont ainsi aggravé les désavantages des pays pauvres dont la capacité à bénéficier du commerce international est limitée en raison de divers facteurs, dont la situation géographique et le manque de ressources marchandes.

Election studies must optimize on sample size, cost and data quality. The 2015 Canadian Election Study was the first CES to employ a full mixed-mode design, aiming to take advantage of the opportunities of each mode while preserving enough commonality to compare them. This paper examines the phone interviews conducted by ISR-York and the online questionnaires from panellists purchased from a sample provider. We compare data quality and representativeness. We conduct a comprehensive comparison of the distributions of responses across modes and a comparative analysis of inferences about voting. We find that the cost/power advantages of the online mode will likely make it the mode of choice for subsequent election studies.

The “leader factor” in Canadian voting has received surprisingly little research attention. In this article, the authors employ data from the 1974, 1979, 1980 and 1984 Canadian National Election Studies to examine the organization of respondents' images of the major political party leaders. The central thesis developed here is that respondents' images of the leaders are not typically idiosyncratic to the leader or to the election in question. The images are shaped by a prototypical leader schema that affects the information about leaders that is processed and recalled. The authors test several implications of this thesis. They demonstrate that there is considerable commonality in the content of a citizen's images of leaders in any one election, and that there is evidence of both aggregate and individual-level stability in the structure of images across elections. The authors test an additional hypothesis from schema theory concerning individual differences in image content. In this regard, they demonstrate, contrary to some of the literature, that better-educated respondents are more likely than less-educated respondents to cite task-relevant dispositional attributes of the leaders.

This study tests explanations of the growth of Canadian provincial governments that draw from the political budget cycle approach. The approach assumes that governments jointly respond to electoral and partisan goals. When the next election is not expected soon, the government uses its discretionary power to pursue its ideological target. When the next election is near, politicians in government, fearing electoral defeat, deviate from their normal behaviour and engage in a re-election effort by undertaking an expansionary policy. This study suggests that provincial governments behave in the opportunistic fashion described by the model. Moreover, there is no sign that this opportunistic behaviour has been affected by government cutbacks in the 1990s.

The most important source of data for research into Canadian society is the federal census. These decennial inventories, of which there have been nine since Confederation, contain hosts of numbers, most of them unfortunately rather widely ignored by social scientists. Of the battery of questions to which every individual is subjected, a few are singled out as yielding fundamental facts, and appear again and again in the tabulated product in cross-classification with other subjects. The three basic attributes, which are the sine qua non of a personal census, are age, sex, and geographical location. Next to these in importance, if we may judge by the volume and detail of published tabulations and analysis, is origin. Now the intriguing circumstance about this highly emphasized piece of information is that it remained undefined until 1951. There was no explicit indication of the operations required to identify the referent of the term. Furthermore, the answers obtained and published clearly applied to an array of different types of evidence, which could easily overlap for a given individual.

Consider, for example, the 1941 census, and its question, there termed “racial origin.” The “Instructions to Commissioners and Enumerators,” which are required reading for anyone making serious use of census statistics, give the following clues:

What is racial origin? The word “race” signifies—“Descendants of a common ancestor.” [It may be asserted that this does not specify a practicable operation.] … a person's racial origin and nationality very often are different …. The name of a country from which a person came to Canada gives no indication of that person's racial origin …. The word “Canadian” does not denote a racial origin, but a nationality; the same applies to the word “American” …. What determines racial origin? As a general rule a person's racial origin is to be traced through his father ….

This article assesses the impact of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms on the Canadian political system. Unlike some commentators who have minimized the effect of the Charter, the author finds that the Charter is inducing significant and permanent changes in the conduct of Canadian politics. Canadian judges have shed their pre-Charter style of deference and self-restraint, and are playing a bolder and more influential role in the governing process. Charter decisions are remolding the Canadian criminal law process along the lines of the “due process” model and away from the “crime control” model of the pre-Charter era. The Charter has also begun to change the way the Canadian political system operates. Interest groups have responded by making greater use of Charter constitutional litigation as a tactic to pursue policy objectives. Law-making areas once solely the prerogative of provincial governments are now being threatened with uniform national standards laid down by the Supreme Court in the course of Charter decisions. Political executives are using the reference procedure to pass Charter issues on to the courts in order to avoid dealing with political “hot potatoes” such as abortion and minority language education. In sum, the predicted “judicialization of politics” is well under way.

Abstract. In recent years there has been a debate about how to evaluate Alexis de Tocqueville's defense of colonialism. Some scholars have argued that there is a tension between the key doctrines of Tocqueville's political theory and his enthusiastic promotion of the French conquest and colonization of Algeria. Others have concluded that the apparent contradiction can be explained by paying careful attention to the nuances of his work or the logic of liberalism. This article advances this debate by reconstructing Tocqueville's theory of martial law, a dimension of his work that has been frequently overlooked. In a series of letters, notes and parliamentary reports on Algeria, Tocqueville criticized of the use of martial law in governing French citizens and defended its use against native Algerians. Tocqueville's writings on Algeria make it clear that he treated the rule of law not as a natural right held by all people but rather as a technique of government that was appropriate in communities already united by social ties.

Résumé. Récemment, l'interprétation de la défense du colonialisme par Alexis de Tocqueville est devenue l'objet d'un débat important. Certains auteurs discernent une tension entre les principes centraux de la philosophie politique de Tocqueville et sa promotion enthousiaste de la conquête et la colonisation de l'Algérie par la France. D'autres ont conclu que la contradiction apparente s'explique lorsqu'on regarde de près les nuances de ses écrits sur la logique interne du libéralisme. Cet article contribue à ce débat en reconstruisant la théorie de la loi martiale de Tocqueville – une dimension de son oeuvre trop souvent négligée. Dans une série de lettres, notes et rapports parlementaires sur l'Algérie, Tocqueville a critiqué l'usage de la loi martiale dans le gouvernement des citoyens français, mais l'a défendu contre les indigènes. Ses écrits sur l'Algérie démontrent que Tocqueville considérait l'État de droit non comme un droit naturel inhérent à la personne, mais plutôt comme une technique de gouvernement s'appliquant principalement aux communautés déjà unies par des liens sociaux.

This article reviews the place of Indigenous politics in the last 50 years of Canadian political science. Focusing on the CJPS, it looks at broad themes and clusters in the literature over time, while also trying to explain how the roots of the discipline continue to impact the development of political science in Canada and thus CJPS. I argue that while at least 43 articles have dealt with Indigenous politics (solely or as a significant focus) and at least 18 have had some significant discussion thereof, there nonetheless remains a disconnect between Indigenous politics and the discipline. This disconnect exists because of the methodological and epistemological foundations of the discipline which have resulted in a focus limited to the Westphalian state. While the disconnect between Indigenous politics and the discipline has waned considerably (43 of 61 articles have been published since 2000) as there has been an awakening of sorts, a disconnect nevertheless still exists.

“Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.” Lionel Robbins' well-known definition of their subject is one which most economists would probably accept, at least as a description of their workaday activities. The definition allows—and it was specifically framed by its author to allow—for the pursuit of other ends than purely material ends; but in practice economists devote themselves predominantly to the study of the allocation of material means between ends conceived and defined in material terms. Inherent in the way economists set about their task is the implicit assumption that material means are scarce and material wants are pressing—in short that economic society is materially poor, and resources must not be wasted.

This assumption permeates the theoretical apparatus of the subject; it also directs what economists have to say about economic policy. In the debate which has been going on over the general problem of inflation, for example, economists have been divided between those who stress the loss of production and potential growth of output that results from anything less than full employment of labour, and those who stress the loss of production and potential growth of output that results from the misallocation of resources brought about by inflation. Again, in making comparisons between the Russian and Western economic systems, economists have generally tended to accept as their standard of performance the rate of growth of output per head, a standard which gives away most of the positive points on the Western side. In both cases, the adoption of the output standard implicitly assumes that the economic problem is of prime importance.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has put substantial pressure on individuals to adapt and change their behaviours. As the hope of a vaccine remains at least a year away, everyone is urged to take action to slow the spread of the virus. Thus, “flattening the curve” has become vital in preventing medical systems from being overrun, and it relies on massive collective action by citizens to follow specific public health measures such as physical distancing, hand washing, and physical isolation for vulnerable individuals. Despite the recommendations, the public has often been confronted with the reality that some individuals are not respecting them, including elected officials (Aguilar, 2020).

Between 1985 and 1995, 12 provincial parties in Canada elected their leaders by a direct vote of their membership. This article examines the motivation behind the switch to direct election, the direct election procedures used and whether the expected benefits have been realized. Claims that direct elections are more democratic than traditional conventions and that they can revitalize a party membership are scrutinized.