Canada is regarded as an early adopter of democratic innovations, including the high-profile BC Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform. To what extent has Canada maintained this trajectory? We examine this in the context of breadth and depth by examining trends in adoption over time across Canada and case-level adoption according to the dimensions of influence and temporality. While case studies of Canadian democratic innovations exist, these do not provide analytical capacity to understand trends in the breadth of adoption; we thus contribute a novel dataset of democratic innovations in Canada from 2000 to 2020. To analyze the depth of adoption, we present a two-by-three framework, which we apply to interpret our dataset of Canadian democratic innovations. We find that while there is an increase in the total number of democratic innovations, a low quantity is observed that exhibits high influence and permanence.

Why did the Liberal Party of Canada (LPC) and the New Democratic Party (NDP) enter into a supply-and-confidence agreement in March 2022? Interparty cooperation among federal parties is rare during minority governments, and yet the agreement created a formal alliance in the House of Commons. In this article, we argue that ideational factors led to the 2022 agreement. We examine the role of programmatic beliefs and strategic learning during the COVID-19 crisis and the 2019-2021 election sequence to shed light on changes in federal parliamentary strategies in Canada. From ad-hoc voting coalitions to extended cooperation on social policymaking, the LPC and the NDP learned how to work together in the House of Commons while using the agreement as a tool to compete with each other in anticipation of the next federal election.

While previous studies have examined the factors contributing to the appointment of women in government cabinets, few have investigated the role of political leaders in promoting women's cabinet representation. Drawing on political socialization theory, we argue that political leaders from economically disadvantaged backgrounds are more inclined to appoint female members to ministerial positions than their wealthier counterparts. This propensity stems from leaders’ personal experiences of economic hardship, which foster their interest in improving political equality among social groups and reducing gender disparities by appointing more female ministers. Analyzing an original dataset encompassing leaders’ family backgrounds across 155 countries between 1966 and 2015, we find that leaders who have experienced economic hardship significantly increase the proportion of female ministers in executive cabinets. This finding holds across various model specifications and effectively addresses endogeneity concerns. Our research highlights the crucial role of political leaders in shaping gender politics based on their economic backgrounds.

While much of the scholarship on gender and corruption suggests that women in political office are, or are perceived to be, less corrupt than men, in just the past few years corruption accusations against Brazil's Dilma Rousseff and South Korea's Park Geun-hye have made headlines and led to their impeachment. In this article, we argue women heads of government are actually more likely to be charged with corruption due to pervasive beliefs that women, by their very presence, corrupt public office. Using cross-national data, we first demonstrate that women executives are significantly more likely to be formally accused of corruption than their male counterparts. We then present case studies of Brazilian President Rousseff and Turkish Prime Minister Çiller to demonstrate the powerful role of gendered discourse in motivating suspicion and inflaming elite and public sentiment and thereby driving corruption charges. These findings make a substantial contribution to the literature on gender, leadership and the politics of corruption.

Le fardeau administratif renvoie au phénomène selon lequel la mise en œuvre des politiques publiques et, plus généralement, les interactions avec l’État, sont coûteuses et difficiles. Chaque personne est en effet confrontée à des coûts d'apprentissage lorsqu'elle acquiert de l'information sur les programmes et services publics, à des coûts de conformité lorsqu'elle tente de satisfaire à leurs règles, et à des coûts psychologiques (stress, etc.) lorsqu'elle interagit avec ceux-ci. Cette littérature, presque exclusivement anglophone, s'est développée à un rythme effréné. Cette synthèse critique fait le bilan de ces récents développements et propose une discussion articulée autour de trois thèmes : 1) Que sont les fardeaux administratifs et quels enjeux soulèvent-ils? ; 2) Quelles sont les sources des fardeaux? ; et 3) Quelles en sont les conséquences distributives et politiques? Des pistes de recherche future sont proposées pour chacun de ces thèmes.

By appealing to public concern over environmental issues, Green parties have emerged to gain secure positions in several party systems. However, in Canada, we know very little about why people support the Green Party. This research note draws upon the Canadian Election Study (CES) to explore the ways in which demographic factors, personality traits and individual environmentalism impact vote choice. Theorizing Green Party support as a form of pro-environmental behaviour, we build a model that tests the impact of demographic factors and personality traits as mediated through environmental attitudes. It finds that, while pro-environmental policy attitudes are the strongest predictor of Green Party support, several demographic factors and personality traits—specifically conscientiousness, openness to experience, agreeableness and extraversion—have an effect.

While the study of soft power has gained significant scholarly attention, an understanding of soft power politics in diverse state models, and multinational federations specifically, is lacking. This study remedies this gap by exploring the connection between soft power and multinational federalism in the Canadian context, highlighting the tensions between the Canadian federal “majority” nation and Quebec's “minority” nation. Relying on the international education policy sphere and its soft power potential, the study extends the discussion of soft power beyond the typical unitary nation-state lens, elucidating the interaction of multiple (and contrasting) soft power rationales within one country. The study reveals that soft power politics can be exerted as much domestically as externally and can be pursued in a discorded fashion within a nation-state. Clearly, there is a need for a more nuanced understanding of soft power, which considers its contested manifestation, and the context-specific ways it is utilized.

The United States has long represented one of Canada's primary international allies. This partnership has remained strong despite turbulent times in the relationship, such as the one brought forth by the Trump presidency. Our article seeks to understand the sources of such continuity through the lens of continentalism. While historical accounts of continentalism have portrayed it as a passive force stemming from Canada's material self-interest, scholars have recently identified the emergence of an evolved form of continentalism that represents a dominant idea and a coherent analytical framework in Canadian foreign policy. Has this new form of continentalism indeed gained widespread acceptance among Canadians? We answer this question by considering continentalism in the ideational realm. Using novel public opinion data, our analysis investigates whether continentalist attitudes have become embedded in Canadians’ national identity and foster closer alignment preferences vis-à-vis the United States. We find significant and robust evidence of such effects.

The ideological and issue positions of parties are known to shape citizens’ political attitudes and voting behaviour. One important way to obtain estimates of parties’ positions is to ask experts to place parties on salient ideological dimensions. The Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) has been collecting such estimates for democracies in Europe and elsewhere. CHES Canada adds to this project by providing estimates of party positions and characteristics of Canadian federal parties and provincial parties in Ontario and Quebec. This note introduces this new data source, clarifies how the data were collected and illustrates how the data can be used to (comparatively) study party politics in Canada.

This study evaluates the visibility of French-speaking scholars in Canadian political science by analyzing the reading materials assigned in Canadian politics courses. Extending Daoust et al.'s (2022) research, we establish a baseline for their calculations and build an original dataset gathered from all political science departments’ websites and Google Scholar. Our analysis based on three assumptions about the expected academic representation of francophones—Canada's linguistic composition, the makeup of political science departments and faculty members’ productivity—reveals a discrepancy favouring anglophone scholars by up to four percentage points. Our findings extend Daoust et al.'s (2022) contribution by highlighting a similar language-based bias in overall citation practices among Canadian scholars, with French-speaking authors being significantly under-cited compared to their English-speaking counterparts despite demonstrating higher levels of overall productivity. Implications for the future of the discipline are also discussed.

In 2021, Alberta held Senate nominee elections for the fifth time in the province's history. Conducted concurrently with municipal elections and multiple referenda/plebiscites, the Senate race had a much lower participation rate than any of the other votes held that day. The purpose of this research note is to identify patterns of ballot roll-off—the phenomenon whereby electors cast a ballot for one race but not another—in the Senate election. Using data from a three-wave survey of Calgarians, the note describes the attitudes of electors toward the Senate election, revealing that electors viewed it as less important than any of the other votes contested that day. It also considers the role of partisan and geographic identities in shaping participation rates. Survey data reveal that both types of identities are associated with roll-off in the Senate election but not any of the other votes with which it was held concurrently.

Cet article propose une analyse du contexte québécois, actuellement marqué par une prolifération des titres miniers visant des minéraux critiques. Nous examinons la thèse selon laquelle nous aurions une obligation morale d'exploiter le territoire en vue de la transition énergétique. Selon cette idée mise de l'avant notamment par l'industrie minière et le gouvernement provincial québécois, l'opposition des communautés locales à l’égard des projets miniers serait un cas de « NIMBY ». Pour répondre à cette accusation, cet article propose une réflexion sur le rapport qu'entretiennent les communautés politiques avec le territoire à partir des travaux de Margaret Moore, de Cara Nine, et d'intuitions provenant de la Green Legal Theory. Cet article conclut en un droit prima facie des communautés locales de ne pas exploiter les minéraux critiques sur leur territoire.