Short-term factors played a greater than usual role in the 1984 national election. Media coverage of the campaign therefore had a crucial impact. This study documents the coverage of leaders, parties and substantive issues by the major television and radio networks and 18 newspapers selected by region and language. A major finding is that the media reported results of public opinion polls to an unprecedented degree. This was one facet of the featuring of “horserace” issues over more substantive socio-economic ones. The data lend credence to the fears of those who feel that essential democratic goals of the electoral process are being undermined. The study also suggests rethinking the “no effects” theory of polling and electoral behaviour.

In Book V of the Republic Socrates appears to abandon one of the most fundamental characteristics of Socratic philosophy, that is, the attempt to understand what makes human beings distinct, in favour of an understanding of human life in terms of the activity of animals. This suggests that the purpose of Book V is not to present the best political order as Socrates understands it but rather to illustrate the dangers of any attempt to understand political life from a perspective which, in simplifying the complexities of human life, distorts that life. As the drama of Book V indicates, such proposals are dangerous because of their appeal to those whose desire for control can lead them to embrace radical but simplistic reforms.

Identifying the effect of macro-economic performance on levels of partisan support in Canada has attracted considerable attention. Findings in Canada, as elsewhere, often diverge depending upon whether aggregate or individual-level data are used. This study employs individual-level data from 1974 to 1984 to examine the effect of changes in unemployment and inflation on support for the various parties. Controlling for partisan and leader effects, we find that the electoral effect of inflation and unemployment is highly variable over time, and is in an unstable partisan direction. Indeed, at times the partisan effect was perverse.

This article seeks to provide an overview of the political thought of Egerton Ryerson (1803–1882), the influential political controversialist and educational reformer of nineteenth-century Upper Canada. It attempts to unravel Ryerson's thought in such a way as to go beyond earlier interpretations which have insisted that, despite the presence of certain countervailing reformist tendencies in his politics, Ryerson was at bottom a thorough conservative. In contrast to this view it is argued here that Ryerson was a thoroughly modernist thinker who accepted the basic teachings of the liberal tradition. It is also suggested that Ryerson was aware of certain key problems which a society premised on these teachings must inevitably face, problems such as narrow selfishness, private individualism and vulgar materialism. The article concludes that it was Ryerson's intention to correct these strong tendencies in liberal society by emphasizing the centrality of public spirit, moral cultivation and religious belief to a free polity's well-being.

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.

Samuel LaSelva has challenged the argument that mandatory retirement is a form of age discrimination and, as such, is unjust and unconstitutional. However, the alternative view that justice requires mandatory retirement seems incompatible with a liberal conception of justice. Moreover, the argument that liberal justice permits mandatory retirement, because of a conflict between rights of different generations, requires a balancing of those rights against one another, and hence against the consequences of their infringement. Such an assessment leads to the conclusion that mandatory retirement is neither constitutional nor just.

In an assessment of Louis Hartz's fragment theory, H. D. Forbes contends that its basic weaknesses are most easily exposed in the case of French Canada. This article argues the opposite: Hartz's approach in this case is particularly illuminating rather than representing its Achilles’ heel. Hartzian analysis is consistent with the historiography of French Canada. The growth of liberalism in the nineteenth century that Forbes points to in the French-Canadian fragment pales when placed in a comparative perspective as Hartz's theory requires. It is the mix of feudal and liberal ideas in the twentieth century that helps to explain the rise of social democratic forces like the Parti québécois.

A rejoinder to a rejoinder must be brief, even if the issues it discusses are complex. Nelson Wiseman's rejoinder to my article on Hartz and Horowitz raises no important questions about my presentation of Hartzian theory, so I shall concentrate on his objections to my interpretation of French-Canadian history.

Professor Drummond has raised so many objections to my study of mandatory retirement that I cannot reply to all of them without taxing the patience of readers of this JOURNAL. But one of his criticisms articulates a conception of liberal justice under the Charter, and it is to this important issue that I shall confine my reply.

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.

Leo Panitch is at the same time far too generous and mistaken when he sees my book as representing the coming of the monopoly stage in the development of the growth industry of corporatism. If I were, by writing the first book-length work on the theory of corporatism, to succeed in cornering the vigorous international market in ideas, then this would be praise indeed. Of course, the notion is absurd and is as flawed as Panitch's reading of the book.