Many political scientists are adding the role of expert to their role as university professors. They are consultants for various organizations, committees or commissions, and they express themselves through the media or they participate in meetings or conferences oriented toward problem-solving. There are some disconnected experts and some naive technocrats among them. There are also alleged experts who are openly partisan. Fortunately some political scientists while acting as experts remain true scholars. They limit themselves to highlight the choices to be made rather than trying to impose one of them. Their experiences as experts enrich their teaching, research and writing activities as well as the training of young researchers. Somewhat like the presidents of the Canadian Political Science Association they are not in place for too long. And it is a good thing, too.

In the 1930s, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council was criticized for allegedly perverting the meaning of the British North America Act and the intentions of its framers. This notion persists, partly because its historiographical basis—the idea that the Fathers of Confederation envisaged a dominant federal government—remains substantially intact. To the Ontario Reformers, however, the Confederation agreement had not established federal dominance. On the contrary, it had implemented the broad claims to local autonomy which Reformers had been advancing ever since the 1820s. And while those claims rested on a legally heterodox conception of colonial constitutional status, the BNA Act gave legal effect to that conception as applied to federal-provincial relations. This allowed Oliver Mowat to do what earlier Reform leaders could not have done: enforce the local claims in court.

This article suggests the existence of two rival solutions to the political problem of territorial possession and appropriation among states. If we take territorial control as the analytical starting point, it is possible to examine the evolution, over the last two centuries, of two divergent solutions to this issue. The nineteenth-century European response of supreme sovereignty within the context of a true community of states may be contrasted with that of the comity of republican American states sharing a moral vision and, more recently, US refinements of an aterritorial logic. The US invasion of Panama in 1989 may be understood as marking the resumption of the historical rivalry between these two logics and the widening of the application of US state practices and principles. Tracing the expansion of the American logic in this way helps to explain the greater focus among states on problems of economic production and distribution and the lesser focus on territorial appropriation.

This review essay examines the contribution of the Canadian National Election Studies to understanding vote choice in Canada. Analyses using both the sociological approach and the social-psychological approach are discussed. The essay starts with a review of the debates about the role of class, region and religion in Canadian voting and then goes on to discuss the applicability of the concept of party identification to Canada. An evaluation of both recursive and non-recursive models of vote choice follows. The review calls for social psychological approaches to take the social context of political choice more seriously and points to the need for sociological approaches to conceptualize social categories as live social forces.

The expression “human rights” is used currently to denote two distinct items: one is a guarantee given in positive law; the other is a moral claim purportedly innate to human beings. These two items commonly are conflated, implying that they have a necessary connection. Historically they do not; positive human rights have been defended by those with no concept of innate rights, while believers in extensive innate rights have argued for limited positive rights. The defence of positive rights of the type now found in international treaties would be served by distinguishing it from justifications of the contention that human beings have rights.

The transition from military to civilian rule in Latin America has thrown a searchlight upon the legacy of military repression from the era of the national security states, and the problem of still-powerful and unrepentant armed forces. These intertwined problems have profound implications for the possibility of fundamental change in a region long characterized by extreme social inequality and political instability. As Rouquié notes, civilianization of the military state does not necessarily mean the democratization or demilitarization of power. How to deal with the perpetrators of state terror is a burning and controversial issue throughout the region. During the process of transition, the major demand of the military in virtually all states was for guarantees against accountability for human rights crimes—widely called impunity in the region—a demand that implicitly places the military above the law. This issue strikes at the very heart of the transformation of national security states and the democratization of power. Additionally, despite the transition from military rule, structures of the national security apparatus remain embedded within the civilian regimes. An examination of the question of impunity and those embedded structures exposes the tensions between democratization and persisting military prerogatives and power.

We can read in the literature that women more often than men are candidates in constituencies where defeat is expected. This study examines whether this belief is accurate. The population examined includes male and female candidates for the Québec Liberal party and the Parti Québécois during the 1976, 1981, 1985 and 1989 elections. Three different formulas were applied to the 958 electoral situations, from which one global difficulty index was devised. Using a log-linear model, the relation between the variables “sex of candidate” and “constituency's level of difficulty” (high, average or low) was compared. Results have shown that between 1976 and 1989, women were not more likely than men to run in constituencies where there was no hope that they would win. It must be noted though, that in 1981, fewer women than men ran for the Parti Québécois in constituencies where victory seemed highly probable. However, when only new candidacies are considered, party affiliation becomes the most significant variable. In conclusion, it is noted that political parties will have to collaborate if more women are to become members of the National Assembly.

Since their victory in the dramatic 1988 Canadian federal election, the governing Progressive Conservatives have suffered a rapid and precipitous decline in public support. Observers have attributed the massive erosion in popularity to the failure of the Meech Lake Accord, the government's insistence on implementing the highly unpopular value-added Goods and Services Tax (GST) and increasing public reservations about the wisdom of the free trade agreement. This article contends that, while these arguments have merit, a more important factor is that many Canadians blame the federal government for the poor state of the national economy and adverse personal economic circumstances. Moreover, negative reactions to the two highly salient economic issues, free trade and the GST, are, in part at least, products of public disapproval of the government's economic performance. The analyses are based on data gathered in national cross-sectional and panel surveys conducted over the 1983–1990 period.

During the first decades of this century, British and United States census officials constructed social classifications based upon the opposition between intellectual and manual occupations, the former being ordered according to their more or less professional character and the latter according to skills. Logically, one would have expected Canadian statisticians to follow the same path: but the “professional” model never took root in Canada. When census officials here developed a classification of occupations, they did not attempt to create a unilinear scheme of large homogeneous classes using occupation as privileged criterion; following the definitions of classical political economy, they rather set upon themselves to measure the extent of the division of labour. This article seeks to explain the peculiarity of the Canadian case by relating it to three conjoined factors: first, the highly centralized character of Canada's statistical system; second, the important role played by nascent Canadian political economy as the intellectual milieu of statisticians; finally, the fact that the Canadian economy was characterized at that time by the persistence of an important correlation between industry and occupation.

Political participation is central to liberal democracy, yet there are substantial variations in the levels of participation observable among different social groups. Empirical theories explain these variations by the different socio-economic resources individuals possess and by their resulting levels of trust and efficacy in the political system. By contrast, social learning theories see these differences in participation as stemming from the values that individuals absorb from the political culture. This article uses Australia—an established liberal democracy with a large immigrant population—as a case study to evaluate these two theories. The results show that immigrants socialized in countries lacking continuous democratic traditions have greater political trust, but also display more authoritarian values. Differences emerge not only in the type of participation being analyzed, but among ethnic groups. The findings support the view that the resource and social learning theories are complementary rather than exclusive explanations for political participation.

Robert Nozick argues that inviolable capitalist property rights are a necessary corollary of the free society. This view is grounded in his commitment to the classical liberal principle of equal liberty. This article tests the internal coherence of Nozick's perspective with reference to the demands set by this principle. It is argued that his laissez-faire proposals cannot satisfy these demands. This prompts a consideration of the type of socio-economic arrangements that could respond to the dilemmas posed by the equal liberty principle, the suggestion being that a participatory democratic framework would promote a response superior to Nozick's.

This article examines how Quebec politicians' sex and political party influence the orientation of their opinions through three themes: the evolution of women's social status, actions of the feminist movement in this sense and the idea of female legislators representing women. A questionnaire was sent to the 305 candidates of the New Democratic party of Quebec, the Quebec Liberal party and the Parti québécois in the provincial election of September 25, 1989. The results show that if women and men manifest no differences in their support of the evolution of women's social status and of the feminist movement, women are more inclined than men to support the idea that women politicians should represent the specific interests of women. Of all the above-mentioned parties, the Liberal party resists this idea the most as well as the feminist movement in general.

This article argues that constitutional guarantees for francophones and the laws abridging and expanding those rights have been to date largely irrelevant to the linguistic and political welfare of Franco-Manitobans. Rather than stressing the significance of jurisprudence, the article focusses on demography and behaviour. Franco-Manitobans, as defined by mother tongue, increased in relative numbers after their rights were infringed. Although the pattern might reverse itself in the future, francophones are decreasing now that their rights have been reinstated. Manitoba's behaviour has been influenced by and continues to be consistent with Ontario law and practice, a province not bound by similar constitutional obligations.

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.

Recently, students of public policy making in North America have added the analysis of “political discourse” to the tools of their trade. According to the “political discourse” school, the extent to which policy ideas gain acceptability cannot always be explained rationally in terms of their logical or empirical validity, nor instrumentally in terms of the interests they serve. Often, their careers must be accounted for, at least in part, by a detailed exploration of their ideological assumptions and appeal, and their rhetorical structure and persuasiveness. Despite its many plausible and promising features, this type of analysis has, to date, rarely been performed in specific instances of policy discourse. The author presents a “political-discourse” analysis of the 1985–1988 debate over Canada's Bill C-82, “An Act Respecting the Registration of Lobbyists.” That debate brought together some of Canada's most factually informed and instrumentally motivated policy actors. Nevertheless, the participants uniformly based their arguments on broad assumptions unsubstantiated by empirical analysis, and advanced those arguments in the rhetoric of the public good and democratic theory. The author concludes that underlying the two basic positions taken in debate over C-82—support for a regime of substantial disclosure of lobbying activity on the one hand, and opposition to disclosure on the other—were two competing sets of assumptions concerning the nature and workings of the faculties of reason and perception in politics.

The article argues that in many Arab countries the political economy of regional petroleum wealth has served to inhibit democratization. In the particular case of Jordan, petrodollar foreign aid and workers' remittances long served as a critical aspect of political stability, supporting regime neo-patrimonialism and blunting pressures for greater participation. Equally, the decline of those revenues in the late 1980s spurred the eventual collapse of the foundations upon which the old economic and political order had been built. With this came the need to negotiate a new social contract, resulting in a far-reaching process of political liberalization and partial democratization after April 1989.

Immanuel Kant remains a figure of enduring interest to students of international politics both for the content of his writings and for the place which those writings have come to occupy within contemporary debates in International Relations theory. But most of the secondary literature does not have a sufficient appreciation of Kant's wider philosophy and hence misunderstands or distorts his theory of international relations. Once this background is more fully appreciated, Kant's analysis becomes largely immune from many of the standard criticisms levelled against it. A reinterpretation of Kant's critique of international politics is important not only for the position which Kant has come to occupy in contemporary debates. It also raises anew fundamental questions about the theoretical and practical adequacy of the Realist theory of international relations which continues to dominate the discipline.

This article examines the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the objective of explaining the inclusion of agriculture in the FTA, the negotiation process surrounding the FTA and the outcomes with respect to agricultural commodities. It departs from both the systemic and state-centred models which have dominated Canadian foreign economic policy to argue that, while developments in the international trading system are important factors in explaining Canada's decision to pursue the FTA, the negotiation process and outcomes of the FTA are importantly accounted for in terms of domestic institutions: specifically, state-societal linkages in combination with federal structures. Evidence that the autonomy and capacity of national trade officials was constrained throughout the negotiation process and in terms of the FTA provisions regarding agricultural commodities requires a re-formulation of foreign economic policy-making that links it to the domestic institutional context. Within the latter, the sub-national governments, in combination with durable state-group policy networks, are important factors.

This article has two objectives: one is to distinguish and explicate four concepts of solidarity which are found in the writings of Hannah Arendt; the other is to show how Arendt's respect for facts and suspicion of sentiment publicly displayed are justified. The first concept of solidarity is exclusive solidarity. It is limited to those who are suffering from exploitation or oppression. The second conception of solidarity is inclusive: it includes those who suffer but can also accommodate those who make common cause with them. This is the only kind of solidarity that Arendt specifically analyzes. A third concept of solidarity is universal: its proximate constituent parts are the different “peoples” who collectively make up humankind. Finally, there is natural solidarity. This variety of solidarity, the author argues, is conceptually inadequate and confused. In the development and articulation of each of these four concepts, some attention is given to the relative contributions of emotion and cognition in determining one's understanding of solidarity.

This article explores the constituency dimension of campaign financing in the 1984 and 1988 federal elections in Canada. The analysis uncovers considerable variability in the capacity of constituency parties to attract campaign donations. These variations appear to be related to the past local and regional strengths of parties, to the expected closeness of the current contest, and to whether incumbents are running for re-election. Multivariate analyses suggest that these political variables have a broadly consistent impact on fund-raising after other features of the socio-economic diversity of constituencies have been controlled.