This article studies the varied fortunes of public administration in Quebec political discourse. After being the object of both discussion and reforms from 1840 to 1870, the administration was largely neglected for the next 90 years, except in the context of political scandals. Then, after two decades of great attention, the administration fell under attack in the 1980s. After looking at the enduring themes of this discourse, the article concludes that, in addition to the conditions prevailing in all the provinces, in Quebec the apolitical nature of traditional ideology prevented the development of a local theory of the state.

Public Housing in Hull

The purpose of this article is to explain the program of public housing construction in Hull. The first section evaluates the construction completed. Basing their appraisal on several indices, the authors conclude that the municipality began the program enthusiastically but that its activity has decreased since then. Certain factors which could explain these two phases are identified. The authors point out the importance of relating public housing to urban renewal, although the latter would not explain the whole situation by itself. After having noted that pressure groups played a negligible role, the authors examine the chain of communication among the local political elite. One thing they show is how the perceptions of the elite can sometimes be influenced by a certain bias in the information that comes to them from the public. Finally, the authors note the impact of “external” information which connects the local elite to those in other Quebec municipalities and in the neighbouring province.

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.

Cet article étudie les attitudes des Québécois à l’égard des personnes assistées sociales. Il s'intéresse à la variation du niveau d'aide mensuel que les Québécois sont prêts à leur accorder en fonction du profil de prestataires. L'article vise plus spécifiquement à étudier l'influence de l'aptitude au travail en tant qu'heuristique de mérite structurant l'opinion des Québécois. Nos résultats indiquent que les Québécois sont d'avis que les prestataires de l'assistance sociale devraient recevoir des soutiens mensuels inférieurs à ce qu'ils considèrent être le revenu minimum nécessaire pour couvrir les besoins de base. L'opinion des Québécois quant au niveau adéquat d'aide devant être offerte aux personnes assistées sociales est aussi fortement structurée par la question de l'aptitude au travail et par la perception que les individus sont en contrôle de leur situation. Finalement, la notion d'aptitude au travail se distingue clairement d'une variété d'autres caractéristiques individuelles pouvant influencer les opinions des Québécois.

In response to Putin's invasion of Ukraine, the West imposed a package of unprecedented sanctions that has failed to generate meaningful domestic backlash against Putin's war. Leveraging extant research on the survival of authoritarian regimes under economic sanctions, I show that their devastating economic costs notwithstanding, sanctions are unlikely to destabilize Putin's regime or pressure him to withdraw his troops from Ukraine. The key to explaining this outcome is to zero in on the incentive structure of the groups of individuals that make up Putin's inner circle.

Various observers of the North American scene have called attention to the problem of mass passivity and political apathy in our culture. Myrdal has pointed out that the masses in America “are accustomed to being static and receptive. They are not daring but long for security. They do not know how to cooperate and how to pool risks and sacrifices for a common goal. They do not meet much. They do not organize. They do not speak for themselves: they are the listeners in America. They seldom elect representatives from their own midst to Congress, to state legislatures or to city councils. They rather support friendly leaders from the upper strata, particularly lawyers.”

Myrdal's description of American mass passivity is an accurate one for most parts of the United States and Canada. There are, however, certain areas on this continent where the political behaviour of the people contradicts the assertion that the American lower economic classes, the workers and farmers, are politically apathetic. The Wheat Belt regions of the United States and Canada have repeatedly given rise to large-scale “class-conscious” political organizations which were genuine mass movements. The Greenback, Populist, and Non-Partisan League organizations in the United States, and the Progressive party and the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (C.C.F.) in western Canada involved large numbers of people in agrarian political action. The recent success of the C.C.F. in attaining power in the Wheat Belt province of Saskatchewan is the latest instance of a mass North American “people's party.”

The language of political discourse abounds in metaphors and laments. The general tendency to make abstract ideas more intelligible by expressing them through concrete analogues accounts for the former. The latter are most commonly the reaction to disenchantment with conditions that have failed to come up to expectation.

From the dictionary definition of a metaphor as “the figure of speech in which a name or descriptive term is transferred to some object different from, but analogous to, that to which it is properly applicable” (OED), it follows that the function of a metaphor is to express similarity rather than identity. In practice, however, the degree of similarity implied by a metaphor has a wide range of variation from the most far-fetched comparison to so nearly complete an identification that it is difficult to distinguish the metaphor from a literal description. Thus, for example, a fringe of organismic thinkers—though not the mainstream of political organicism as T. D. Weldon has suggested—maintained that the state was not merely like an organism but was in fact an organism, and therefore imagined that the laws which control a biological organism should apply equally to the political or social organism.

Ambiguity may stem either from imperfections inherent in a particular metaphor or from lack of precision in establishing the extent of identification implied. In addition, the assumption of similarity between two objects or two ideas which have many, but not all, of their attributes in common may serve to withdraw attention from their unique attributes which, on occasion, may prove to be the most significant ones.

Wee hope to plant a nation, where none before hath stood.—Alexander Whitaker, Good Newes from Virginia, 1613.

Anthropological studies have shown that the myth of destiny, along with the myth of origin, has exerted a tremendous influence in shaping tribal mentality and sustaining tribal solidarity. In the history of many modern nations the influence of the myth of destiny can also be perceived. Thus, the belief in a peculiar destiny which had already been formulated among the separate colonies throughout the early period of American history was of special import in the growth of a consciousness of national identity among American colonists during the years of their struggle for independence.

This study aims at scrutinizing the changes in the formulation and meaning, during the revolutionary era, of the myth of a peculiar destiny and the impact of the doctrine of natural law in bringing about these changes. The main theses are, first, that the American colonists met the need felt during the revolutionary era for new evidence of and support for an American “destiny” by appealing to the seemingly secure tenets of the doctrine of natural law; and, second, that, as a consequence of this intermingling of “destiny” and “natural law,” the assertion of an American destiny was transformed from a “faith” to a “certainty,” or, more accurately, from a dream to an appointment “manifest.”

By “agricultural policy” I mean the pattern of those acts of government, especially of national governments, which specifically concern the agricultural segment of society. The discussion of agricultural policy, like that of any other social problem, involves all the social sciences, perhaps one should say all the sciences. Economic analysis, dealing as it does with a limited range of abstractions, cannot pretend to give an “answer” to any social problem, agricultural policy included. Sociological, political, legal, historical, psychological, technical considerations obviously enter into the discussion. Nevertheless it may be useful to ask what are the insights yielded by economic analysis, as a discipline of thought and as a system of related propositions, in approaching a problem of this degree of generality. The case for economics, or for any other discipline of thought, is the case for specialization. The problems involved in the study of even so relatively simple a problem as agricultural policy are beyond the wit of any single mind to explore fully. To appreciate the problems of agriculture fully one would need to be an economist, sociologist, political scientist, social psychologist, biologist, chemist, physicist, botanist, zoologist, and much more; and in these days no one man can hope to be expert in all fields. The only way in which we can even begin to encompass any problem is by specialization; but, according to what is almost the first proposition in economics, specialization is useless without exchange. The aim of this paper is a little intellectual trade, a small offering of an economist to other disciplines, in the hope perhaps of some enlightenment in return.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Simon de Montfort would have enjoyed the clash that recently took place in the Federal Republic of Germany between the adherents of increased direct democracy and the proponents of a system of pure representative democracy. At stake was the crucial issue of atomic armament for the West German defence forces. Should the basic decision be made by the people through a referendum, or by their representatives in parliament? This constitutional and political question was referred to the Federal Constitutional Court, which reached a verdict of importance to the future of the Republic-and to political scientists.

This essay is designed to serve as a case study of a nation in the twentieth century in debate over the scope of direct democracy within a representative system. It also seeks to assess the rationale of transferring, on occasion, the power to make decisions in the realms of foreign and military policy from the executive and parliament to the people themselves. And finally it attempts to evaluate the interplay of political parties and interest groups, and the conflict over jurisdiction between the national government and the constituent Laender in the context of the proposed referendum.

In 1921, when I came to Canada, Canadian economics was “colonial” in character; English and American influences blended but there was little native thought or work. The re-establishment of the Canadian Political Science Association in 1929 (it had been founded in 1913 and had foundered in 1914) was a symptom of the growing strength of the native elements, and it quickly contributed towards further strengthening of these elements. Harold Innis had foreseen this and worked hard but quietly for the development of the Association. He had recognized, too, the necessity for a Canadian outlet for Canadian writing on economics; not because the Canadian papers then being written could not be published in English and American periodicals but because he foresaw a great stimulus to Canadian economists to write more when they had their own journal. The example of the Canadian Historical Review with its effect on Canadian historical scholarship was not without influence. With the support of E. J. Urwick, Harold Innis had been able in 1928 to establish Contributions to Canadian Economics, published by the University of Toronto Press. Then in 1930 came the first of the new Proceedings of the Canadian Political Science Association (called volume II, since volume I had been published in 1913), edited by Clifford Curtis and printed by the Jackson Press in Kingston.

The theory of economic growth is concerned with the behaviour over time of the major economic aggregates—among them consumption and investment, wages and profits. At the present time growth theory is the field of a methodological dispute between the so-called “neo-classical” and “neo-Keynesian” schools of thought. In this paper, in the course of a brief consideration of recent major works in this area, an attempt is made to discover the nature of the disagreement.

Let us begin with Meade's Neo-classical Theory of Economic Growth. In a lucid introductory chapter, the assumptions common to the two sides in the dispute are set forth. We are to consider a closed economy, with no government expenditure or taxation. There are two types of goods: machines and a homogeneous consumption good, each produced by means of machines and labour (and perhaps land). The assumption of competitive conditions throughout the economy is interpreted somewhat differently by different authors. To Mrs. Robinson in her Essays (p. 8), it means that in long-run equilibrium a uniform rate of profit rules in all sectors of the economy. To Meade it means, in addition, that each factor of production receives as payment the value of its marginal product.