Drawing on the CPSA's archival records, this article explores the origins of CPSA and the patterns of representation in its founding decades. We focus on the pre-World War II years, when disciplinary boundaries were fluid and scholars sought to shift policy discussion from moral reform to reform guided by science and professionalism. The CPSA's founding vision aspired to engage “typical citizens” in discussion of current issues. Despite the ambitious vision, a much narrower range of citizens participated. The CPSA's powerful melding of academic, corporate, state and political elites, in turn, shaped the CPSA's reflections on the development of the Canadian state and public policy. This historical legacy encourages us to reflect on the contemporary challenges of fostering independent scholarship on public issues.

Railway nationalization, the anvil on which national public enterprise was hammered together between 1917 and 1923, forms a misunderstood episode in the development of the Canadian state. This article examines the convergence of domestic politics and international economics that facilitated an unprecedented transformation of Canada's capacity to control its economy. State autonomy was used to create public enterprise as an instrument by which the gains of industrial restructuring could be distributed to favoured domestic financiers while its costs were imposed upon foreign investors. This power to manage the gains and losses arising from industrial change formed a new expression of economic sovereignty, one that ought to be viewed as an important step in the transition from imperial to national governance.

The political tolerance and urban sociology literature indicates that urban residence is positively linked to tolerant attitudes and behaviour. Because the city favours more contacts with unconventional groups and individuals, urban dwellers develop a higher level of political tolerance. The present article tests the empirical relevance of the rural/urban cleavage in the Canadian context. The paper shows that ''urban'' political tolerance may be specific to the United States.

The purpose of this research is to confirm that there are different conceptions of equality in the United States, English Canada, and French Canada.

Beginning with the Aristotelian distinction between numerical equality and proportional equality, the article establishes first a typology for the concept of equality. A review of the literature on the subject reveals that Americans and English Canadians can be said to be partial to proportional equality while French Canadians favour numerical equality.

It is then demonstrated that Von Neumann's and Morgenstern's theory of games can be interpreted as an egalitarian theory since the non-discriminatory solution proposed by Von Neumann and Morgenstern corresponds exactly to a proportional division of the stakes according to the strategic importance given to each of the players by the characteristic function of the game.

A series of tests conducted in Quebec and the US and utilizing a three-party game invented by Riker reveals that French Canadians take a numerical-egalitarian stance while Americans and English Canadians play according to a proportional-egalitarian model.

Finally, the results are analysed to try to find the possible reasons for the difference.

Why has Australia not followed Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom in adopting a formal bill of rights at the national level? We argue that the Australian Constitution has made the difference. The Constitution has underpinned a comparatively strong parliamentary check on the executive, weakening the rationale for a bill of rights and impeding legislative initiatives towards this end; thwarted the drive for a constitutional bill of rights; and helped delegitimize statutory approaches to a bill of rights in general and the “dialogue model” in particular. The article ultimately questions the notion that a common approach to rights protection can apply across Westminster democracies.

At the end of the 1970s, the corporatism growth industry in political science passed from its competitive stage (articles in journals) to its organized stage (articles collected in books). In the founding text of the new stage, Trends Towards Corporatist Intermediation, Philippe Schmitter explained that corporatism was not itself a theory capable of generating explanations and predictions. Rather, it was a phenomenon that had to be theorized within one of the major competing paradigms of social structure and social change, which he identified as those associated with Durkheimian and Parsonian “structural differentiation,” the historical materialism of Weberian and Marxist-revisionist “organized capitalism,” and the Marxist political economy tradition wherein he located the theories of the state popular at the time. Yet, it was perhaps inevitable, given the accumulation of academic capital associated with growth industries in the social sciences, that Schmitter's (and others') sound advice would be ignored and that grandiose claims would be made for corporatism as a theory in its own right.

Error from September 2003 issue (36:4) of The Journal (Michael Lusztig, Patrick James, and HeeMin Kim, "Signaling and Tariff Policy: the Strategic Multistage Rent Reduction Game".

Can a phenomenological analysis of political reality tackle the issue of norms? We try to answer this question through an analysis of the opposition between Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut's Kantian philosophy of human rights and the phenomenological approach of Claude Lefort. Lefort's project is an attempt to elucidate reality and not to justify principles. But the normative dimension is not entirely absent from his thought. Lefort conceives of human rights not only as a political phenomenon but also as a sign of liberty, which he supports. Is this inconsistent with the nature of his phenomenological project?

In recent years numerous critics, generally those with strong nationalist inclinations, have attempted to demonstrate that Canadians are no longer autonomous in cultural and educational pursuits. Whether or not such autonomy ever existed to any substantial degree, especially for non-French Canada, might itself be disputed. Indeed, a good case can be put forward for the proposition that the gradual diminution of British practices, norms, and expertise in many facets of Canadian education, if not in Canadian culture generally, was accompanied by a concomitant increase in American practices, publications, and personnel rather than by any emerging period of distinctly Canadian expression. That most of the substantial Americanization in postsecondary education and many other areas was occasioned by Canadian invitation tends, however, to be widely ignored. Be that as it may, most critics now prefer to focus on the actual state of affairs and the continuing trends rather than on historical causes.

Canada is a member of the very select club of the seven most industrialized countries. However, since the beginning of the 1970s the federal government has been trying to define a strategy allowing for a more favourable insertion of the Canadian economy in the world economy. Historically, the exportation of merchandise has always been essential to the growth of the Canadian economy, but the world market is more and more competitive and economic renewal is necessary if the Canadian economy is not to be marginalized. This article analyzes the decline of Canada's place in the world economy, external and internal constraints which are at the origin of this situation and the two strategies that have been put forward by the federal government in order to ensure the restructuration of the Canadian economy. Finally, the article demonstrates that the traditional dichotomy of weakening/strengthening is inadequate to understand the nation-state's role in relation to economic space.

American or Australian readers will not be surprised, at least at first glance, that a province should have kept a bicameral system for so long as Quebec since in their own country all but one of the states has a second legislative chamber. For other readers, and Canadians particularly, the survival of a Legislative Council poses a whole series of problems which, for the most part, are explained by the economic and social evolution of Quebec.

Why has Quebec maintained an upper chamber for so long when the other Canadian provinces have never had one or have abolished it a long time ago? The facts here presented confirm on several counts the classical theories about bicameralism, and add to them certain points arising specifically from Quebec's unique socio-cultural context: the overrepresentation of privileged social classes, irrespective of partisan attachment; or the representation in the Legislative Council of the English-speaking minority whose spokesmen were, however, closely tied to the French-speaking members by a community of economic interests.

It was during the last century that the Legislative Council exhibited most energy; it frequently interfered with the most progressive projects of the different Liberal governments. In the twentieth century, however, it was thought wiser to adapt itself to the changing mood, and it gradually became more self-effacing with respect to the elected chamber. Therefore its reasons for existence became doubtful as it either adopted without question all the proposals of the Legislative Assembly (and so provoked the accusation that it did nothing), or if it did object to anything in any way, it was accused of going against the wishes of the elected representatives of the people. Groups which had supported it finally decided that the council had become obsolete and their representatives have allied themselves with the enemies of the council to vote out of existence the last provincial upper chamber in Canada.

This research note considers the complex relationship between the electoral and party systems in Canada from 1921 to 1993. By drawing on Douglas Rae's theoretical model, the note demonstrates that the electoral system exerts a powerful influence on the party system and makes the case that important regional information is often washed out in national-level results. Furthermore, a novel approach is taken to the measurement of regional data in a federal election—a comparison of the indices of fragmentation of the regions and the country provide an interesting explanation for some of the stunning changes in parliamentary representation in 1993. In interpreting the 1993 Canadian general election in this framework, the author argues that although the results in parliament seem to indicate momentous changes in Canadian politics, the voting patterns are, nonetheless, consistent with Canadian political history.

Recent work in the field of liberal political philosophy has focused on the value of cultural communities for the individual. The claim that liberal theory can give explicit recognition to the fact that individuals are rooted in a social context has produced an important debate about the preservation of minority cultures and a liberal defence of nationalism. This literature should be of interest to scholars of nationalism because liberal theorists have used concepts related to the nation, such as self-determination, in ways that go against conventional usage, and liberal theorists have made claims about the relationship of the right and the good with which some students of nationalism would disagree. This article presents a nationalist response to the liberal conception of community by developing one possible nationalist argument for the priority of the good over the right by claiming that the nation is a communal good. The author illustrates this argument with examples of the political projects of nationalists-in-government in the developed West. Liberals need not be concerned with this reality since democratic institutions will set some limits on nationalist projects by ensuring that they are the outcome of democratic processes. On this view, the importance of self-determination is that it provides the context for the creation of institutions for a debate about the relationship of the right and the good. Self-determination does not, as some liberal nationalists argue, constitute an automatic right to cultural preservation.