A theory of voting under federalism requires that attributions of responsibility moderate the strength of retrospective voting. Scholars have spotty evidence that voters do this but put this down to the effects of institutions and citizens’ capabilities. I show that political variation also affects electoral accountability. Using panel surveys across provincial and federal elections and qualitative media content analysis, I show that voters only live up to a federal theory of voting when governments make policy changes independent of the other level and those changes and their consequences are prominent in political discourse. Federal institutions affect electoral accountability through the politics that they generate.

The Canadian Journal of Political Science (CJPS) plays a leading role among Canadian and Quebec political scientists. It is one of the most important forums for researchers to publish their work. It is also a good source of information to identify their research questions and show the main trends within the discipline. Given its commitment towards linguistic duality, the article focuses on Francophone representation in the CJPS since 1968. Who are the authors who have published their work in French in the CJPS? Where do they come from? What are their themes and areas of publication? Does the concentration of Francophone governance of the Journal in three universities, Université Laval, Université de Montréal and the University of Ottawa, have a significant impact on the representativeness of works published in French? Despite its exploratory nature, the article shows that the question of representation raises issues for the French component of the CJPS, both in terms of its governance and the dissemination of researchers’ work.

Do Canadians’ preferences for Canada's role in the world depend on who Canada acts with and not just what Canada does? This question is particularly important in the context of overseas military intervention, which Canada never undertakes on its own. This paper presents a survey experiment measuring how support for a hypothetical peace operation changes with the leader of the mission. Missions led by the United Nations and by Canada's European allies receive more support than American-led missions do, especially among respondents who also favour peace operations for substantive reasons. The finding suggests that the UN and the European connection are alternative ways for a mission to benefit from a preference for multilateralism. While the results confirm some tension between American-led missions and internationalism, European partnerships may offer a way of reconciling an interest in alliances with the internationalist Canadian public.

I argue in this article that migrant workers’ resistance to neoliberalism, as seen through their participation in the migrant organizations highlights their ability to establish ‘spaces of power’ amid debilitating living and working conditions. This, then, illustrates how feminism in the 21st century is alive and well. In fact, the strengths of their activism show the transformative and radical possibilities of feminism by highlighting that structural transformations, and not only liberal attempts at inclusion, are necessary for gender justice.

Research on gendered political behaviour has been heavily influenced by feminist scholarship in understanding gender inequalities. Yet it has been more difficult to integrate the insights of more recent waves of feminist critics, notably among intersectional scholars. The focus has been on differences between women and men, rather than among differently situated women. This article addresses the difficulties of integrating intersections into large-n style studies of political behaviour using “situated comparisons” (Dhamoon, 2010). It then provides an analysis of gender gaps in turnout and civic engagement across ethnoracial groups in Canada using the Ethnic Diversity Survey (2002).It concludes by arguing that the study of gender and political behaviour must find a place for intersectional feminist approaches.

This article examines the Canadian Charter with reference to “the British connection” and “the Americanization thesis.” It also attempts to demonstrate the importance of Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws in addressing these issues. Pierre Trudeau insisted that a Charter of Human Rights would provide Canadians with a new beginning and settle difficult questions about the Canadian identity. His critics said that fundamental rights were already protected because Canada had a constitution similar in principle to the United Kingdom, and that the proposed Charter was a step in the Americanization of Canada. What a Montesquieuean analysis helps to identify are significant limitations in both “the British connection” account and “the Americanization thesis.” And, by the avoiding the abstract universalism of Trudeau's “inalienable rights” theorizing and Dworkin's “rights as trumps” regime, a Montesquieuean analysis also helps to demonstrate the distinctiveness of Canadian constitutionalism from Confederation to the Charter.

Il est un paradoxe démocratique régulièrement mis en avant : les peuples qui ne connaissent pas la démocratie l'appellent de leurs vœux, alors que, là où elle existe, la démocratie est fortement critiquée. Cela ne signifie pas que les citoyens qui vivent sous la démocratie veulent s'en débarrasser, mais que leur confiance dans le fonctionnement du système démocratique est fortement érodée. Cet article étudie le soutien démocratique en s'interrogeant sur sa mesure, à partir d'une enquête sur un échantillon représentatif de la population wallonne en Belgique. Pour ce faire, il compare deux méthodes de classification des citoyens : la méthode dite « a priori », classiquement utilisée dans la littérature, et une méthode dite « inductive », inspirée de la psychologie sociale. Trois profils, dont les contours varient partiellement selon la méthode, émergent –les « non-démocrates », les « démocrates satisfaits » et les « démocrates insatisfaits »– et sont analysés au travers de quatre approches théoriques : les ressources, la modernisation, l'idéologie et l'identification nationale.

Worldwide, the publishing industry has been compelled to change with digital media technology, and some traditional academic journals are struggling to adapt. This article examines the marketing and publicity actions available to the Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique and similar flagship journals in an environment characterized by open access (OA) and impact factor (IF) metrics. It reviews the opportunities and threats presented by a movement towards publishing in ungated forums and pressure in the academic community to prioritize bibliometrics. It then looks at the experience, characteristics and comparative position of the Journal/Revue before reporting on perceptions and recommendations drawn from depth interviews with journal editors, presidents of the Canadian Political Science Association, and a university librarian, which are supplemented by suggestions from editorial board members. It concludes with proposals to address these circumstances head on, many of which are generalizable to other journals wrestling with marketing and publishing in the digital age.

This study presents the results of a survey of Canada's francophone political scientists on the language of knowledge dissemination in political science. Although almost all francophone political scientists agreed with the statement that English has become the lingua franca of political science, French continues to be a significant part of the dissemination of knowledge. However, there are important variations in language usage depending on the language in which the dissertation was written, the disciplinary sub-field within the discipline, and academic rank. Language choices are largely motivated by the desire to reach the widest possible audience while garnering recognition from peers.

The influence of party connection on the selection of judges has long been an issue in Canada This article considers whether such connections adversely affect the appointment of women judges to federally appointed courts. The answer appears to be yes. Using political donations as a proxy for party connection, the data analyzed here suggest that as the number of appointees with connections to the government rises, the number of women appointees falls. However, for appointments to provincial courts by the government of Ontario, the prevalence of political connections among judicial appointees is less prominent, suggesting that different systems of judicial appointment may help to lessen these effects.

Quebec's Bill 60 (or Charter of Values), legislation prohibiting public officials from wearing religious symbols and garb, provides a complicated case of a minority nation grappling with culture and gender, while also illustrating the more contingent condition of Canadian multiculturalism, equality and feminisms. Quebec has adopted interculturalism versus multiculturalism; moreover, its multilayered women's movement remains a legitimate force, unlike in the rest of Canada. Despite the intricacies of these distinctive developments, this article reveals how Charter of Values justifications asserted the Quebec nation's distinctiveness and alleged egalitarian pre-eminence over others, not only homogenizing and instrumentalizing multiple cultures, but also various feminisms. Yet, when culture, gender equality and feminisms become reified and essentialized through a strategic depiction of certain minority women's rights, Canada's already well-worn claims to diversity and equality are further frayed both subnationally and nationally.

Over the last several decades, nationalist movements in liberal democracies have challenged their community's relationship with the state. One such case that has drawn relatively little attention is Puerto Rico. A peculiar feature of Puerto Rican politics is that powerful nationalism coexists with several distinct status options: a reform of the current Commonwealth, statehood (becoming an American state), free association and independence. This article examines the various sources for Puerto Rican nationalism and discusses the relationship between nationalism and each of the status options. It also explains why none of the options has succeeded in gathering majority support amongst Puerto Ricans and why, therefore, the constitutional status quo has so far remained on the island.

We address two questions: How many voters particularly like a candidate from another party? And do these voters vote for their preferred party or their preferred candidate? We use the Making Electoral Democracy Work data for the 2015 Canadian federal election in three provinces (British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec). We find that one voter out of ten particularly liked a candidate from a party other than the one he or she preferred. For two out of five of such voters, the preference for the local candidate trumped the party preference.

This paper describes the digitization and enrichment of the Canadian House of Commons English Debates from 1901 to present. We start by laying out the general framework in which this project took place and then present the structure of the database and provide guidelines to prospective users. The paper concludes with the introduction of www.lipad.ca, an online platform designed as a hub for archiving Canadian political data, with the parliamentary proceedings at the centre of its architecture.

The article makes three contributions to our knowledge of the Canadian political science literature. First, it offers a historical survey of the methodologies and techniques used in the discipline. Second, the findings of this paper constitute a reference for future work interested in commenting the methods and techniques used in CJPS and provide scholars with data they can use to better situate their work within the broader literature. Finally, the paper answers three questions that permeate discussions of the Canadian political science literature. It investigates whether the proportion of qualitative works has declined over time, whether Canadian scholarship is more qualitative than quantitative today and whether there are important differences in the methodologies and techniques used in Canada and in the United States. The article concludes with a discussion of the future of political science methodology based on the findings.

The travelling and appropriation of queer theory by francophone feminists in Quebec have been particularly long and arduous, prompting an inquiry into not only the reasons for this delay, but also into the elements that ultimately allowed for an integration of queer theory among francophone feminists. Combining tools from social movement literature on diffusion (brokerage, frames, repertoire of contention, etc.) and a political theory approach, this article divides the integration of queer theory among francophone feminists into two moments. In the first instance, activists and academic feminists have generally received queer theory with considerable criticism, which we have regrouped into 3 axes: 1) the deconstruction of women and lesbians as political subjects; 2) the investment in the symbolic aspects of politics, to the detriment of material relations and structures of power, and 3) the erasure of lesbian specificity and the absence of male privilege examination. In the second moment, the work of the Pink Panthers–a radical queer group–allows for frame bridging and the use of a recognisable repertoire of collective action to address two out of the three axes of criticism. This article suggests that the process of brokerage creates a crack in the wall of resistance that will quickly become a space for the insertion and integration, even if still conflictual, of queer theory into francophone feminism.

We know how sex (rather than gender) structures political preferences, but researchers rarely take into account the salience or importance of gender identity at the individual level. The only similar variable for which salience is commonly taken seriously is partisanship, for which direction and importance or strength are both considered imperative for measurement and analysis. While some scholars have begun to look at factors that may influence intragroup differences, such as feminism (Conover, 1988), most existing research implicitly assumes gender salience is homogenous in the population. We argue that both the content of gender identity (that is, what specifically is gender identity, as opposed to sex) as well its salience should be incorporated into analyses of how gender structures political behaviour. For some, gender simply does not motivate behaviour, and the fact that salience moderates the impact of gender on behaviour requires researchers to model accordingly. Using original data from six provincial election studies, we examine a measure of gender identity salience and find that it clarifies our understanding of gender's impact on political attitudes.

The annual conference of the Canadian Political Science Association (CPSA) is a disciplinary bellwether that helps us trace the evolution of political science scholarship. This article analyzes research presented at the conference between 1965 and 2015. It shows growth in the gender and politics sub-field and in the presence of women in leadership positions in the CPSA. At the same time, gender-related research is often presented in gender-focused panels and not incorporated across the discipline's sub-fields. This means that gender scholars typically present their work to like-minded researchers, and scholars in other sub-fields have little exposure to gender perspectives. That such siloing occurs at the earliest stages of research dissemination is an important contextual factor in understanding gendered citation patterns, departmental hiring and rates of tenure and promotion. For Canadian political science to remain relevant, more needs to be done to incorporate gender perspectives across the discipline's sub-fields.