This article employs national survey data gathered over the past quarter century to analyze the evolution and present state of public attitudes toward Canada's federal political parties. A 1991 survey employing new questions on evaluations of party performance reveals that these evaluations are structured in terms of two dimensions, and that negative judgments on both dimensions are pervasive. The significance of the current negativism is assessed using 1965–1991 data on Canadians' feelings about and identifications with the federal parties. Although for a long time party affect has been lukewarm at best, and partisanship has been weak and unstable, negative trends have magnified the disaffection and dealignment. The discontent has accelerated in recent years, as the percentage of Liberal and Progressive Conservative identifiers has plummeted, and the non-identifier group has swelled to record levels, particularly in Quebec. The article concludes by considering the implications of these findings for the future of the federal party system.

This article explores neo-conservative ideology in the industrialized West through a comparative analysis of the arguments advanced against a strong role for the federal government in regulating child care services in the United States and Canada. Existing analyses of neo-conservatism suggest that it is composed of many different elements which may lead to contradictory policy prescriptions; this literature also downplays the presence of a “pro-family” component in the Canadian context. The article illustrates the presence of an “anti-statist,” a “pro-market” and a “pro-family” strand of neo-conservatism in each country, and shows that they converge in opposing federal regulation of child care services. It also suggests that, while there appears to be a shared neo-conservative vision of the appropriate relationship between families and the state across national contexts, discussions of the state and its relationship to the market take on a distinctive tone in each country.

This study examines the problem of achieving linguistic equivalence in Canada-wide surveys that rely, as they must, on two different questionnaires, one in English and one in French. It is argued that this is a crucial problem which needs to be dealt with squarely. Since language does not coincide neatly with territorial boundaries in Canada, there will always be some francophones outside Quebec and some non-francophones within Quebec who are not interviewed in their first language. A comparison of responses given in both languages by members of the same language group enables the investigator to distinguish true cultural differences from mere artifacts of measurement. That methodology is applied to one specific issue, support for electoral democracy.

The article proposes a simple model to explain election outcomes in Canadian federal elections. The model hypothesizes that the share of the vote obtained by the Liberal party depends on deviations from the average rate of unemployment, inflation and income growth, and on the presence or absence of a party leader from Quebec. The results confirm the hypotheses regarding the impact of unemployment and party leader, but inflation and income growth prove to be nonsignificant. The evidence also suggests that the model may be less satisfactory for elections involving governments that had been in place for less than a year (1958 and 1980).

Max Weber's writings convey a tension between a commitment to Enlightenment rationalism and a romanticism that was largely shaped under the influence of the “Sturm und Drang.” The tension is represented in the claims that modernity unleashes forces that erode the spontaneous, creative elements of human life. This study argues that Weber has correctly identified some of the problematic substance of modernism, but that he failed to explore alternative sets of assumptions by which the modernist paradigm could be critiqued. As a result, Weber was forced to see the world as a place full of bifurcated conflicts between such elements as: reason/emotion, modern/traditional, science/mysticism. This epistemological framework led Weber to the pessimistic conclusions about the fate of humanity in the modern world.

The long-standing centrality of party leaders to Canadian elections and politics, and the use of televised extra-parliamentary conventions to choose leaders, have led parties to believe that a new leader will provide them with an electoral boost at the subsequent election. This article tests this perception using the record of 136 cases of leadership change in Canadian provincial parties over the last three decades. The data allow the authors to consider the impact of divisive contests, the relevance of a party's competitive position, and the regional variance on any leadership convention electoral boost. It concludes the conventional wisdom is wrong.

This study examines corporate contributions through political action committees (PACs) to US Senate incumbents from 1978 to 1988 by those industries which have sustained substantial environmental compliance costs and consequently have an incentive to develop relatively precise targeting strategies. The findings suggest that party, ideology, regulatory costs, and challenger attributes play especially important roles in corporate allocation strategies. These industries pursue relatively precise, sophisticated campaign contribution strategies, which reflect these influences.

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?

This article critically assesses Göran Therborn's approach to comparative politics. It argues that while Therborn's work represents a significant advance over much of the comparative politics literature, it remains limited by a methodology of “universalizing comparisons” involving large numbers of countries. This choice of methodology means that he is unable to achieve his goals of examining the dynamics of social processes and social patterns of determination, and in turn that his analysis does not allow for an adequate understanding of the current conjuncture and political strategies that might result from it.