Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka have recently argued in Zoopolis (2011) that domesticated animals ought to become our democratic co-citizens. In this paper I claim that the acceptance of animals into our democratic negotiations—championed in Zoopolis as a broadening of justice and inclusion—also has the potential to render our political institutions dangerously unjust. Through an engagement with the work of Plato and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, I argue that we must be wary of a democracy's susceptibility to the emergence of unbridled or tyrannical liberty when expanding the criteria of freedom and agency to accommodate animals, or the animalistic, in the political sphere.

Extending recent social science work using the concept of “scene” into politics, this paper investigates connections between cultural variation and political variation across Canadian localities. First, we introduce the notion of “scene.” Then, using a national database of local amenities (with some 1800 categories and 1.6 million data points), we show that key dimensions of cultural meaning account for significant differences in voting patterns in recent Canadian elections. In particular, electoral districts with scenes that suggest themes of self-expression are associated with support for left-leaning parties, while scenes that support locality and corporateness are associated with the right. We conclude with suggestions for pursuing hypotheses about potential mechanisms driving these associations.

In the tradition of democratic theory, elections are recognized as important mechanisms of accountability. However, the migration of public decision-making responsibility away from elected representatives and the emergence of new governance actors necessitate a fuller conceptualization of accountability relationships. As governments pursue partnerships with societal actors and disperse authority across multiple levels, questions of public input and accountability within the democratic governance process arise. In this paper, cases of authority migration in the provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and Nova Scotia between the years of 1946 and 2005 are used to examine the accountability relationships between new governance actors and both government and society. The existence and relative strength of accountability relationships are evaluated using the rules stipulated in the provincial legislation. Political ideology of governing parties, geographic scale of new jurisdictions and period in time are evaluated as predictors of the strength of the accountability relationship overall.

Political science is both a generalizing and an anchored, nationally defined, discipline. Too often, the first perspective tends to crowd out the latter, because it appears more prestigious, objective, or scientific. Behind the international/national dichotomy, there are indeed rival conceptions of social science and important ontological, epistemological and methodological assumptions. This article discusses these assumptions and stresses the critical contribution of idiographic, single-outcome studies, the importance of producing relevant, usable knowledge and the distinctive implications of studying one's own country, where a scholar is also a citizen, involved in more encompassing national conversations. The aim is not to reject the generalizing, international perspective, or even the comparative approach, but rather to reaffirm the importance of maintaining as well, and in fact celebrating, the production of social scientific knowledge directly relevant for our own times and places.

Many commentators—including some animal rights theorists—have argued that non-human animals cannot be seen as members of the demos because they lack the critical capacities for self-rule and moral agency which are required for citizenship. We argue that this worry is based on mistaken ideas about both citizenship, on the one hand, and animals, on the other. Citizenship requires self-restraint and responsiveness to shared norms, but these capacities should not be understood in an unduly intellectualized or idealized way. Recent studies of moral behaviour show that civil relations between citizens are largely grounded, not in rational reflection and assent to moral propositions but in intuitive, unreflective and habituated behaviours which are themselves rooted in a range of pro-social emotions (empathy, love) and dispositions (co-operation, altruism, reciprocity, conflict resolution). Fifty years of ethological research have demonstrated that many social animals—particularly domesticated animals—share the sorts of dispositions and capacities underlying everyday civility. Once we broaden our conception of citizenship to include a richer account of the bases of civic relations, it becomes clear that domesticated animals and humans can be co-creators of a shared moral and political world. We have nothing to fear, and much to gain, by welcoming their membership in the demos.

This paper reconsiders whether federal and provincial parties are as independent and separate as the literature would suggest. Examining five different types of party personnel (party members, activists, riding presidents, candidates and legislators) this paper explores how federal parties and their counterparts in Ontario have responded to multi-level governance. Rather than embracing “two political worlds,” party personnel have responded to the federal nature of Canadian politics by engaging with parties at multiple levels. Additionally, the paper examines two competing explanations of party integration and seeks to uncover whether differences organizational design or ideological consistency best explain divergent levels of party integration. The experience of the Conservatives demonstrates that vertical integration is not a result of a party's organizational design alone and that a coherent ideology can help to offset a truncated organizational structure.

Canada's political class is embracing ethnocultural news media with increasing zeal, highlighting the need to understand the role of these news organizations in the political process. This study investigated coverage of Canada's 2011 federal election in five Toronto-area ethnocultural newspapers. The publications, which carried campaign news to varying degrees, provided coverage that was distinct in many ways from mainstream media. Content such as the focus on ingroup candidates had the potential to strengthen community bonds while more general election news equipped readers with information that would facilitate participation in society through informed voting. Analysis of reporting about the Conservative Party of Canada, which pursued an aggressive ethnic media strategy, identified no clear pattern of stories with explicitly biased content. In most newspapers, however, the CPC did enjoy an advantage in that it received more coverage than the competition.

We study strategic voting behaviour in winner-take-all elections by means of an original study in which participants vote to collectively decide how much money should be given to an environmental NGO. We find that supporters of the most NGO-friendly party are reluctant to abandon it, despite its poor electoral viability. The poor electoral viability generates significant anxiety among its supporters and the level of anxiety at the time of voting influences their choice. Moderate levels of anxiety increase the probability of defection, but at high levels, anxiety has a paralyzing effect, making voters less likely to abandon their preferred choice.

Sixty years ago, in late 1953, Quebec launched the hearings of the Royal Commission on Constitutional Problems—or Tremblay commission. Commenting the publication of its report, political scientist Alexander Brady boldly argued in this journal that Quebec had been, until the late 1950s, the “guarantor” of Canada's fiscal system's flexibility (1959: 270). Emphasizing the system's evolution since the 1950s “constitutional problems,” some specialists now contend, as the economist Robin Boadway does, that Canada became the “textbook best-practice of fiscal federalism” (2007: 99). The Tremblay commission's sixtieth anniversary and the termination, in 2014, of the current agreement on federal transfers, provide an opportunity to reassess this evolution and question the validity of this kind of statement.

Using the case of the 2012 student conflict in Québec, we show how social movements can temporarily transform politics. We define politics as the set of rules and individual and collective practices that regulate relations between actors regarding a community's government. We show three ways in which the 2012 student conflict transformed politics. Firstly, the six-month conflict created a new division around which politics reorganized itself. Secondly, political parties and student unions modified their daily practices, redefining their relationships and policies of alliance. Finally, the prolonged experience of mobilization transformed activists' relationship to politics by rearticulating the distinction between institutional and protest politics.

The use of active sampling methods for online surveys is generally considered superior to passive sampling methods, both for recruiting new participants and in terms of sample representativity. In active sampling, specialized firms contact respondents directly, whereas in passive sampling participants are required to visit a Web platform and complete the survey on their own, without being directly recruited to do so. In this article, we evaluate the relative efficiency of passive sampling in the context of the Web experiment Votes Quebec, which was conducted during the 2012 Quebec provincial election. This project had a media outreach dimension whose goal was to increase the number of participants and to increase the representativity of the sample. Our results suggest that the media outreach had a significant but limited impact on these two dimensions. The results also show that passive sampling was less efficient than active sampling at generating a truly representative sample. However, our analyses show that a better and more intensive use of traditional medias may lessen the digital divide often observed in these contexts and improve the representativity of the final sample.

This article examines the interaction of different modes and levels of legitimacy within network governance institutions over time. Drawing on new theoretical directions in European governance studies and empirical findings from Canada, we contend that whereas input legitimacy can be exchanged, or traded-off, with output legitimacy to reinforce the overall legitimacy of a network governance institution, “throughput legitimacy” functions as a necessary condition that sustains legitimacy over time. Through a comparison of homelessness governance networks in Toronto and Calgary, we find that throughput legitimacy carries an amplification effect that results in either virtuous or vicious cycles. That is, we argue and demonstrate that low throughput legitimacy in network governance institutions can effectively bring down the whole house of cards.

This article seeks to measure and explain interprovincial differences in inequality and poverty reduction since the 1980s for non-elderly Canadian families. These variations are compared with dissimilarities among the advanced capitalist welfare states, where they are large. Interprovincial discrepancies are shown to be ample by this international standard. The article also finds that power resources theory, which draws attention to the role of union strength and partisan incumbency in explaining welfare state variations, accounts for an important part of these interprovincial differences. These findings suggest that sub-national jurisdictions can be more consequential for welfare state outcomes than comparative research has acknowledged, and that power resources accounts deserve more attention in Canadian social policy scholarship.

For the past decade, debates over the issue of immigration have been a central feature of political life in Quebec. They have underscored the cultural insecurity of Quebecers and the sense that, for many Quebec citizens, immigration is a threat to Quebec culture. These debates have also left the impression that there are regional disparities in the way immigration is perceived. But what is the actual situation? Is cultural insecurity really stronger outside the main urban centers? Are there really significant regional variations in perceptions about immigration, and if so, what accounts for them? This article addresses these questions with the help of a public opinion survey conducted with close to 30 000 Francophone Quebecers during the spring of 2011. Our findings show that there are indeed important regional variations but that, contrary to common assumptions, Francophones living outside major urban centers are not the ones most inclined to perceive immigration as a threat to Quebec culture. In fact, Francophones living in the immediate periphery of the city of Montreal are more likely to view immigration negatively, suggesting a kind of “halo” effect. Our findings also indicate that regional differences are strongest among the younger generations.

Despite more than a decade of heightened defence spending and active fighting in the War in Afghanistan, the longest combat operation in the history of the Canadian Forces, scholars know precious little about how the socio-demographic characteristics and attitudes of Canadians may influence their views about taking part in overseas combat operations and funding the institution charged with carrying out these dangerous activities. By testing a range of hypotheses, which purport to explain the influence of multiple socio-demographic and attitudinal factors on Canadians' attitudes toward defence spending and the participation of the Canadian Forces in overseas combat operations, against data from the 2004 and 2011 Canadian Election Study, this article ascertains the most important determinants of Canadians' preferences about defence spending and the use of military force by the Government of Canada.

This article discusses the evolution of the role and the nature of the work that elected representatives in Westminster-type parliamentary systems accomplish in their riding. Drawing on recent data documenting the riding activities of Quebec's Members of the National Assembly and Members of Parliament, we re-evaluate the conclusions of surveys conducted more than 40 years ago. The new data points to gender-based differences in the way elected representatives understand their role and the expectations of their constituents. Today's elected parliamentarians are still primarily concerned with their function as representatives of the people, while they are less driven by personal ideas. We also find that the nature of riding activities varies according to each individual's profile. Finally, we note a strong degree of collaboration between elected representatives and observe changes in the types of issues with which they now concern themselves.

This paper presents a comparative analysis of the quality of democratic accountability mechanisms in Latin America. It begins by reviewing the concept of democratic accountability quality and its operationalization by means of factor analysis. As a result, three quality indicators are identified corresponding to the types of accountability that prevail in the literature: horizontal, electoral and social. The study reveals considerable differences among the Latin American democracies. Set out below is an exploratory analysis of the factors explaining these differences. The analysis yields three main conclusions. First, it confirms the usefulness of the model. Second, the quality of each type of accountability is explained by specific factors: no one factor explains all three cases. Third, a different logic behind social accountability mechanisms is detected as compared with the other two types of accountability mechanisms.

In a 1985 publication David Cameron reported that historically leftist governments had governed with smaller deficits than rightist governments. The party ideology variable was incorporated into a large body of subsequent research, mainly by economists, to study the growth of public spending and indebtedness. Most agreed with Cameron; some did not. Virtually all studies focused on western European nations (but not subnational governments). This study analyzes provincial deficits or surpluses over the period 1966 to 2009 and determines that rightist parties, despite controls for economic and other political variables, have lower budgetary deficits, a finding which contradicts Cameron but is consistent with five previous studies of provincial spending in Canada.

Between 1990 and 2010, a gradual process of institutional change has affected Canada's immigration and integration governance regime. The central characteristic of this process is the emergence of a new legitimate institutional group of actors: Canadian provinces. This change corresponds to a federalization of Canada's immigration and integration governance regime. It is a break from the previous pattern of federal dominance and provincial avoidance. It is not the result of diminished federal intervention in immigration and cannot be explained by exogenous shocks. Current explanations of this evolution focus on federal decisions and have trouble explaining provincial mobilization. Using a mechanistic approach to the analysis of social processes and insights on gradual institutional changes, this article demonstrates that provinces have been the central agents bringing about the federalization of Canada's immigration and integration governance regime between 1990 and 2010. Via a mechanism of province building centred on immigration, provinces have triggered and maintained in movement a decentralizing mechanism. The interactions of these two mechanisms, over time, gave rise to the federalization of immigration and integration in Canada.

As part of a multi-year, $816 million initiative to assess the risks posed by thousands of commonly used chemicals and compounds, Canada became the first country in the world to declare that bisphenol A (BPA) was toxic and justified regulation in April 2008. The process set up to conduct this risk assessment differed from the previous Canadian experience with the regulation of hazardous substances in that it was more formal, systematic and more pluralistic with much greater participation from interest groups. This case study explores the politics and process behind this decision and argues that the government's decision went beyond what scientific evidence could justify. The decision resulted from long-term institutional factors such as the incentive structure of Canadian federalism and values embedded in legislation as well as short-term factors such as media coverage, public opinion and interest group pressure.