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Although indigenous peoples constitute one of the most socially, economically, and politically marginalized groups in the world, few quantitative social scientists have studied public attitudes toward this ethnicity in Canada or the world. We are not sure, for example, whether mass-level views toward First Nations are caused by the same factors that determine Canadians' opinions toward immigrants or Visible Minorities in general. To help answer this question, the paper investigates why ordinary British Columbians decided 1. to vote in; and 2. to vote "yes" on the controversial 2002 Aboriginal Treaty Negotiations Referendum. I first set the Referendum in the electoral and negotiation dynamics of the time by relying on archival research and personal interviews with such key figures as Premier Gordon Campbell, Attorney General Geoff Plant, and leading First Nations Treaty Negotiators. The essay next examines the theoretical literature on attitudes toward ethnic minorities in the abstract, which suggests that support for the measure might have been rooted in economic self-interest (e.g., income, occupation, employment status, and region), identity politics (e.g., ethnic, religious, or gender identification), education, partisanship, or age. To evaluate these hypotheses, the paper examines data from the April 2002 BC Reid Express Poll as well as official census and voting results. Cross-tabulations of the Reid Poll and Gary King-method, R x C ecological analysis of the election statistics indicate that identity politics, regional selfinterest, and education primarily motivated British Columbians' responses to the 2002 Aboriginal Treaty Negotiations Referendum. Purely individual economic circumstances, on the other hand, do not seem to have played a role. More broadly, these findings suggest that the roots of non-indigenous Canadians' views on First Nations are similar to the determinants of attitudes toward minorities in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with consistency of opinions of youth in Belgium, Canada and Romania. The arguments of the paper are that youth display consistency of their preferences on issues like diversity, role of state on the market and homosexual marriages and these are affected by political interest and time spent on television, internet or watching, listening or reading news. The study employs three levels of complexity of consistency: consistency of issues within the same issue dimension, ideological consistency, and ideological consistency that resists the test of time in order to discover instances in which youth is consistent with their preferences. The conclusions of this study is that youth display a higher than expected consistency of issues in all three countries. Ideological consistency tests reveal that Canadian and Romanian youth have consistent preferences with what left and right means in their respective polity. Longitudinal survey of preferences of youth in Romania does not reveal changes in consistency. The issues on which Romanian youth express preferences in a panel study are not linked with their left-right self placement. The study did find a minuscule effect of internet and television on consistency. However the effects dissipated for ideological consistency. Hypotheses were tested using a comparative survey of Romanian, Canadian and Belgian youth ages 15 to 16 from 2006, a panel survey of Romanian youth from 2006 and 2009. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and promote economic development, many jurisdictions are reforming their electricity sectors with new policies designed to promote clean energy In Canada, the two most active jurisdictions in this regard are Ontario and British Columbia. Both provinces embarked on aggressive sustainable energy (especially electricity) policy initiatives in the 2000s that have become intensely politicized. This paper will compare these two provincial policies to develop insights into Canadian provincial politics on significant environmental and nature resource issues and energy policy dynamics more generally. For each province, we briefly describe the electricity system and how it is governed in terms of relations between public and private operators, the role of regulatory commissions and their relationship to the parliamentary system in place. We then describe and compare the policy shifts during the 2000s and early 2010s, focusing on efforts to promote renewable electricity and the policy instruments used to do so. We also address the dynamics of the political backlash that occurred in both provinces, and how the party in power responded to those criticisms. The main purpose of this paper is to reveal the similarities and differences in the two provinces' energy policies, but we will also offer some explanations for those patterns. The institutional structure of energy governance in Canada gives cabinet governments a significant amount of latitude to enact and implement ambitious policies. The particular manifestation of governance structures, policy objectives and policy instruments will vary depending on factors specific to the provincial context. The increased costs of low-carbon energy policies are proving to be a significant political issue, but the extent to which they will frustrate the achievement of larger policy objectives is not yet clear. In both provinces, highly ambitious clean energy policies have experienced considerable implementation challenges and political resistance. Despite the adjustments that have been made to address these difficulties, the fundamentals of the policy shifts are still in place. These cases reveal that when motivated, leader-centered parliamentary governments can create meaningful policy change to promote energy sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This year's theme of representation poses an interesting set of challenges for health researchers. For example, it is very difficult to find any organized participants in health politics and policy-making who do not claim to speak for and represent the best interests of patients. Perversely, those who likely have the best normative claim and the greatest resources available to represent patients (elected officials) do not seem all that interested in the job, in spite of their regular claims that they do in fact fulfill this role. While there are many ways in which the term patient representation can be understood, this paper will look at the question in the following terms. First patients are defined as those members of the population who use and anticipate having to using health services in a given jurisdiction. Second, patient representation is understood to mean speaking on behalf of patients to ensure that their concerns (as a collective population) over how, where and in what quantities services are provided are represented within health decision-making structures. The paper will argue that this unwillingness to represent patients that is demonstrated by elected officials is a by-product of efforts to design organizational structures for financing and managing care that allow them to avoid blame for the inability of health systems to satisfy all demands for care. Evidence to support this argument is found by looking at the path that health reform has taken in the three countries Tuohy identified as ideal cases for her typology for health systems: Canada (collegial governance), The UK (hierarchical governance) and the US (market governance). In Canada and the UK politicians deliberately adopted organizational and financial reforms that reduced their ability to represent the interests of patients in debates regarding how, where and in what quantity services would be delivered. Meanwhile in the US, lawmakers chose reform options that will undoubtedly expand the population able to afford care but which simultaneously did little to replace the control exercised by market based organizations over how and where service will be provided to most Americans. Where new regulation is required federal and state elected officials have put many of the most important decisions in the hands of arms-length agencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper about dominant party regimes in Canada and Australia is presented which is prepared for presentation at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, in Seattle, Washington, from September 1-4, 2011. The paper discusses topics including the claim that single-party dominance is less frequent in the Anglo-Saxon world and the rise and fall of dominant party regimes.

What is our understanding of the relationship between democracy and income inequality in the Western Hemisphere? This paper specifies a nonlinear relationship between democracy and income inequality in multivariate non-linear models across different regions and time points of the Western Hemisphere as well as the hemisphere based on a common literature (Acemoglu and Robinson 2006, Barro 1999, Boix 2003, Burkhart 1997, Houle 2009). While the literature has rigorously tested these relationships within Latin America (Huber et al. 2006), there has not been a similar test of all of the Western Hemispheric countries, including the industrialized economies of Canada and the United States. This paper will utilize the best extant income inequality measure, the Solt (2009) corrections to the UNU-WIDER project. This comparative exercise should be instructive in both a modeling sense and a better understanding of consequences of using income inequality measures across hemispheric subregions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how public policy is shaped by and shapes constructed notions of childhood and childhood sexuality in the regulation of young people's sexuality in Canada. I use the framework developed by Helen Ingram and Anne Schneider (Ingram and Schneider 1993; 2005; Schneider and Ingram 1997; 2005.; 2008) who argue that the state, through public policy, may solidify, perpetuate or change socially constructed groups, the identities of which have become so entrenched that they are thought of as 'natural'. Often, they argue, state actors through public policy not only reinforce the limits of political participation of target groups but also engage in a degenerative form of policy-making in which the manipulation of identities is used for political gain. In the case of dependents, while the rhetoric may express great concern for their welfare, they are not granted the freedom of responsibility and decision-making. The paper explores the chldren as a target population in the regulation of sexuality in several historic periods of the twentieth century including the recent debates and political process that resulted in the raising of the age of sexual consent to sixteen in Canada in 2008 and demonstrates that the constructed notion of childhood and childhood sexuality results in a targeted population of young people as dependents. As is often the case and demonstrated in this paper, there is no direct causal link between the proposed regulation of the targeted group and the ostensible purpose of the legislation which is to protect young people from sexual predators. Nevertheless, this constructed identity becomes of prime importance to political actors in persuading, influencing and bringing about concrete policy outcomes. At the same time the policy perpetuates 'natural' notions of childhood and childhood sexuality reinforcing dependent status on young people that enhances vulnerability, curtails responsibility and leaves them politically undermined. In the most recent period the manipulation of symbolic identities of children and youth for political purposes may fit the definition of a degenerative form of policy-making by the Conservative government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Never waste a good crisis! This has become the mantra of politicians and civic leaders facing fallout of the recent financial crisis. It declares that crisis can prove fertile ground for positive change, opportunity can spring from ruin, and that infrastructure, processes and institutions can be rebuilt. Financial downturns affect municipalities and regional economies especially acutely. This paper investigates the responses of metropolitan regions to crisis and its effect on collective action to the "opportunities" of crisis. To what degree does a common challenge provoke or strengthen collective action and cooperation between governments in metropolitan regions? To what extent, and under what conditions, does it exacerbate tensions and increase fragmentation? To answer these questions this paper explores the experiences of three city regions - Toronto, Canada; Frankfurt, Germany; and Detroit, USA - in previous recessions as well as the current downturn. These cases exhibit different patterns of regional and local responses and an analysis of these experiences will inform a hypothesis about the effects of crisis on cooperation and metropolitan governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares the impact of court decisions on policy-making for three different, ethically contentious policy issues: abortion, assisted reproduction and euthanasia. Past research on abortion emphasised how, in Canada, court decisions contributed to medicalise the issue by framing it as a question of equal access to health care (explain effect). This paper investigates to what extent courts have impacted policy-making on other life and death issues in similar or different ways as has been the case for abortion. Have courts in the case of assisted reproduction and euthanasia also sustained a medicalized frame, or to the contrary, have courts validated other competing policy frames? As the comparison reveals court decisions have contributed to define all three policy issues as a matter of health, health care and medical autonomy; a problem definition promoted by different actors, in particular physicians, patient organizations, and state actors. Defining abortion, euthanasia and assisted reproduction as a health issue reflects the influential position of the medical profession, but - more importantly - opens the possibility to initiate policy change, as the comparative analysis argues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper about contemporary Canadian feminists is presented which is prepared for presentation at the annual meetings of the American Political Science Association from September 3-6, 2009 in Toronto, Ontario. The paper discusses topics including the role of feminist movement in Canadian society, the findings of the 2008 Young Feminist in Canada Survey, and feminist identification in the post-feminist era.

This paper examines the electoral presence of women at the federal, provincial and municipal levels of government. Contrary to "the higher, the fewer" thesis - a dominant strain in the women and politics literature - this paper suggests that female legislators are present in roughly equivalent proportions across all three levels of government in Canada. The data presented here cast doubt on the notion of a municipal advantage for women and, unlike prior analyses which have tended to focus on a limited number of provinces, a distinct time period, or a select group of larger urban centres, this paper includes all provinces and territories, rural, urban and metropolitan municipalities, as well as a longitudinal dataset. The findings suggest considerable variation in women's electoral presence with female legislators sometimes finding greater electoral success at the federal and provincial levels than at the municipal level, but the proportion of women at any level of government rarely ever exceeding 25% of all elected officials. The paper thus challenges a persuasive theme in the literature on women in politics. It suggests that the notion of a municipal advantage serves to conceal the extent of women's electoral under-representation and the persistent barriers that women continue to face in the electoral arena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship abounds on the importance of the city-region in the global economy, national and regional prosperity, the socio-economic implications of territorial rescaling and state restructuring, different forms of collaborative arrangements. But little is known about the implications of their emergence in a multilevel governance context, or their capacity to function as effective, legitimate, and robust policy actors. This paper begins to address the large question of what determines the governance capacity of city-regions. It focuses on sources of horizontal capacity as a function of the strength of intermunicipal partnerships. Intermunicipal cooperation is a form of regional governance that unites the participatory concept of regional governance with functional flexibility of cooperative networks. Research suggests a variety of determinants of the strength of intermunicipal partnerships from rational choice to institutional perspectives. This paper acknowledges the contribution of these approaches to understanding intermunicipal dynamics, but argues that none of the sets of variables presented to date can alone explain observed variations in the strength and capacity of city-regional partnerships. Instead the paper presents an alternative theoretical framework that reimagines and combines existing approaches, and introduces the concept of civic capital as a critical determinant of governance capacity. This theoretical framework is applied across three issues areas related to regional economic development in the Toronto (Canada) and Frankfurt Rhein Main (Germany) city-regions. These cases demonstrate that in the absence of an overarching formal regional level of government the capacity to function as a regional actor - to formulate, articulate, and act on shared interests - rather than simply exist as a functional space will vary significantly across cases and issue areas. The cases also suggest a link between civic capital and the strength of intermunicipal partnerships, and therefore horizontal governance capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper about national identity and welfare state is presented which is prepared for presentation at the American Political Science Association Conference, in Toronto, Ontario, on September 2-6, 2009. The paper discusses topics including increase in inequality found in a recent OECD study, the role of national identity in sustaining support for the welfare state in Canada, and nationalism.

This paper presents a comparative policy analysis of lesbian and gay rights in Canada and the U.S., seeking to explain why public policies in this area have diverged so significantly in recent years. Drawing on the historical institutionalist approach, the paper argues that political institutional differences between Canada and the U.S. provide a more powerful explanation of cross-national policy divergence than political cultural or societally-based explanations. In particular, legacies of previous policies combined with differences in the core institutions of the state as well as differences in constitutional rules and norms help explain policy divergence in this area. The paper pays particular attention to the role of courts in relation to other political institutions. Courts have played a critically important role in lesbian and gay rights struggles in Canada and the U.S.; however, in Canada, the courts have been less constrained by other political institutions and this difference helps explain their greater policy impact in Canada compared to the U.S. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) Project is the largest, most extensive data-collection effort to date on the field of international relations. It systematically and empirically analyzes relationships among pedagogy, scholarship, and international policy. In this paper we draw from two of the three major TRIP data sources to describe trends in the discipline of international relations over the past 27 years (1980-2006). First, we employ a new journal article database that covers every article published in the 12 leading journals in the field. The article is the unit of analysis and we categorize each article in terms of 26 distinct variables,including methodology, epistemology, issue area, substantive focus, author's gender, paradigm advanced, region under study, and many others. We include the codebook for the TRIP journal article database in the Appendix to this paper. Second, we analyze results from two surveys of international relations faculty. The first survey was conducted in 2004 and covered all faculty at U.S. colleges and universities who teach or do research in the field of international relations. The second survey was conducted in 2006 and covered both U.S. and Canadian IR faculty members, although we report only U.S. responses in this paper. The journal article database allows us to track changes in the type of research published in the field,2 while the surveys are primarily useful as contemporary snapshots that document the opinions and practices of IR scholars in terms of their views of the discipline, their research, their teaching practices, and their opinions on contemporary policy issues. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most analyses of electoral support of third parties consider the correlates of this support at election time. Existing explanations of support for smaller third parties focus on voter distrust of/alienation from major parties, lack of/declining identification with a major party and the strategic calculations voters who fail to vote sincerely. The focus on election time support of third parties can mask theoretically interesting and important dynamics that may characterize trends in support for such parties between elections. This paper develops a dynamic model of electoral support for the New Democratic Party (NDP): a small, ideological third party in Canada. Espousing a social democratic ethos, the NDP serves as a classic example of a small, ideologically-committed third party.The analysis considers the extent to which two types of factors explain trends in electoral support for the NDP: economic conditions and strategic calculations. The economic voting literature finds that incumbent support is influenced by economic conditions in a reward-punishment fashion. While deteriorating economic conditions may undermine incumbent support, it may also be the case that these same conditions strengthen support for small, non-governing parties such as the NDP. In particular, because the NDP is a left-wing party, it is expected that support will be prominently influenced by changes in the unemployment rate. Secondly, a variation of the strategic vote theorem is considered. Specifically, the hypothesis is that NDP support is a function of time elapsed from the previous federal election and expected time to the next federal election. As a result, it is expected that NDP support will be greatest at the projected midpoint between federal elections because the costs of expressing a sincere electoral preference are lowest at this point.The proposed paper develops a time series analysis using quarterly economic and vote intention data from 1977-2001. Results indicate support for both of the central propositions of the paper. Findings will be discussed in light of contributions to comparatively understanding electoral support for third parties. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early studies of Canadian partisanship argued that the concept of partisan identification, as understood in the U.S., does not apply to the study of Canada. This began a debate about whether partisan identification in Canada was similar to the type of attachment held by Americans. Throughout this debate, the role of political parties in influencing the nature of their partisans has been only modestly studied. Other than arguing that weak partisanship is the result of institutional arrangements or the brokerage style of the parties, studies of partisanship have not considered whether the nature of the identification varies between the parties. In other words, do some parties encourage American-style partisanship and others something else? The connection between parties and partisans is of particular interest given the changes that occurred in the Canadian party system since 1993. Not only do the current parties vary in age, reputation and focus, but they also differ in terms of their ideological intensity. This paper addresses the characteristics of partisanship in the various parties of the Canadian party system since 1993. Is Canadian partisanship uniform, or does it vary by party? Are certain partisans more loyal, more intense, and more stable? Do these characteristics vary systematically by party? This paper tackles these questions using data from the Canadian Election Studies of 1988-2006. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attitudes about sovereignty among Quebec youth are well known, particularly in light of the movement's appeal to idealistic values and as an affirmation of the Québécois identity. It is assumed that those who support sovereignty must hold some negative opinion about the federalist structure; after all, they do aspire to break away from Canada. But that has not been adequately validated. The paper explores attitudes about federalism by reporting results from a survey of Quebec youth (18 to 34 years old) conducted in early 2006. The paper shows that when asked to indicate federalism's main disadvantage, respondents provided a wide range of answers with no structured or coherent pattern. The main reason for this attitudinal dispersion is a lack of need to consider attributes of federalism. This explains why the highest level of dispersion is found among: those least attached to Canada, who may regard the Canadian federalism system as remote to their personal lives; francophones, for whom sovereignty is a semi-default position that requires little justification and little thought; and those least exposed to news media, who are least susceptible to any mainstreaming effects. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Admiration and resentment of America are deeply rooted in the political traditions of the United States' nearest neighbors. As in other parts of the world, resentment has been on the rise in recent years. This paper distinguishes in its first part between critical opinion, skepticism, and prejudice on the one hand, and different types of anti-Americanism on the other. In the paper's next two parts, these general categories are confronted with data from Canada and Mexico and the dramatically different historical trajectories in the evolution of anti-Americanism in these two countries. In the fourth and final section, the paper seeks to identify commonalities, if any, in these radically different political settings. The expected finding is that even in close proximity to the United States, we find a plurality of different types of anti-Americanisms, a condition that characterizes world politics more generally. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes policies to raise the age of retirement in the period from 1995 to 2005 in three industrialized countries: Canada, Germany and South Korea. Over the next five decades, the populations of advanced industrialized countries are expected to age. As a result, governments are confronted with important policy challenges: how to provide income security, and how to cover large increases in pension spending. Retirement age increases are one of the key policy responses to these challenges, since raising the average pension age by only 2 or 3 years would enable governments to finance most of the costs of population aging. In this paper, we will analyze cross-national differences in governmental policies designed to raise the age of retirement, such as increases in statutory retirement ages, reductions of the generosity of benefits or closure of the pathways to early retirement. In order to explain differences among Canada, Germany and South Korea, we focus on the roles of the state, market and the family in pension provision and on the role of pension policy legacies. The three countries differ significantly along these dimensions: in Canada, the market plays a key role, in Germany, the state, and in South Korea, the family. In addition, they differ with regards to eligibility conditions, benefit levels and the existence of pathways to early retirement. We argue that these differences significantly conditioned the policy choices that governments made. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the world today there is a large gap between the number of states that could easily obtain the military power of nuclear weapons and the number of states that actually choose that power. Curiously, a number of states that sought that power at one time or another have abandoned it. Yet, in other states, the quest for nuclear weapons continues. What causes this variance in behavior?Scholars generally rely on one of three explanatory models to address this question. The security model argues that states develop nuclear weapons when they find them useful to bolster their own security and deter external threats. The domestic model finds that states develop nuclear weapons if it strengthens the regime internally to do so. Finally, the normative model suggests that a desire to reinforce positive aspects of a states identity will lead it to pursue nuclear develop or adhere to a prohibition against nuclear weapons. This paper evaluates the relative weight of these three explanatory models in the decision-making process of three very early nuclear-capable states. This paper codes the justifications made by political leaders in Great Britain, Canada, and Australia in the 1950s and 1960s. The purpose of this analysis is to determine the relative weight of three distinct and competing explanations for nuclear acquisition, and to suggest a means of evaluating additional cases nuclear and potential nuclear states. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inglehart and Norris (2003) have argued that a process of gender realignment is pushing men to the right and women to the left. This paper uses data from the 2006 Canadian election study to assess their argument that the "modern gender gap" is rooted in cultural differences between women and men rather than in structural and situational differences. While there is some evidence that public sector employment and higher education help to explain why women are more likely than men to vote for the NDP, their impact is offset by religiosity. Women tend to be more religious than men and this helps to explain why many women remain attracted to the Conservatives. The most important factors in explaining why men are more likely than women to vote for the right-wing party and women are more likely than men to vote for the left-wing party are clearly cultural. Women are more skeptical than men of market-based arguments, less ready to embrace closer ties with the US, and more liberal when it comes to social mores and alternative lifestyles. The paper ends with a discussion of the implications of gendered patterns of voting for electoral politics in Canada. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the game-theoretical dominant player concept and power indices, this paper introduces a re-conceptualization of single-party dominance that we consider to be more intuitive and less dependent on ad hoc criteria than standard operationalizations of the phenomenon. This operational definition is then used in the presentation of a few descriptive inferences on the incidence and nature of single-party dominance in the subnational jurisdictions of four federally organized parliamentary democracies, namely, Canada, Australia, Germany and Austria. The paper also reviews extant hypotheses on the rise and fall of dominant party regimes and discusses their plausability against the backdrop of our cases. We conclude that there are few, if any, individually necessary or sufficient causes of single-party dominance. Instead, nationally and perhaps even regionally specific configurations of factors seem to account for the rise and fall of dominant party regimes - a finding that underlines the necessity of further multi-method research on the topic. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the predominant mode of interpretation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as a species of civil religion. The Charter is simultaneously a document for human rights and for national unity, and this paper examines ways that the former have been used to construct the latter. Specifically, the Charter has come to be seen as expressing a society that realizes itself progressively in historical time, toward increased respect for human rights and individuality. In order to do this, the Supreme Court has articulated what it deems a specific Canadian "way of life" summarized by what is often referred to as the "expressive" or "autonomous" self. This self conceives itself as pure potential and freely creates its identity and obligations; it is ahistorical and unencumbered by traditions or demands by community. It is the expression of postmodernism. This paper focuses on court cases where identity claims by traditional religious communities conflict with this new "autonomous" self, and shows how, even when the Supreme Court decides in favor of traditional religious communities, its justifications are based on the language of the "autonomous" self, which undermines theunique contributions such groups provide to a pluralistic civil society. Canadian unity, therefore, is bought by a construction of an "autonomous" self that paradoxically recognizes no claims of community and makes its own claim for self-divinization in a postmodern mode. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently introduced bills of rights in parliamentary jurisdictions such as Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Australia differ from the more court-centred approach associated with the American Bill of Rights in the following two respects. First, with the exception of Canada, judicial review is distinguished from judicial supremacy. While these parliamentary jurisdictions now recognize judicial rights review as a legitimate component of constitutionalism, they also formally acknowledge the legitimacy of political dissent from judicial rulings. Second, these bills of rights promote non-judicial rights-review, which is manifested in new procedures and incentives for the systematic review of proposed legislation prior to, and potentially independent of, judicial review. This paper focuses on this second point of difference: non-judicial rights review. This concept embraces the following ideas: i) rights protection does not rest primarily on judicial remedies to redress infringements that have already occurred, but is heavily dependent upon incentives and procedures to reduce the incident of rights abuses from actually occurring; and ii) political decisions to proceed with legislation are made only after having confronted their implications for protected rights. The above ideas represent a significantly different understanding of the function of a bill of rights than in more conventional approaches. They also have the potential to broaden the perspectives undertaken when making judgments about how rights appropriately guide and constrain state actions. This paper asks the following questions. How is political behaviour affected by the institutionalisation of new incentives and obligations for rights-based evaluations of legislative proposals? Do cabinet and parliament consciously reflect on the rights-dimension of proposed legislation and, if so, how does this affect political deliberation? Does political rights review contribute to the legalization of legislative decision-making? The jurisdictional focus will be on the United Kingdom, although the constraints and challenges arising there are relevant for other parliamentary jurisdictions with variations on this model. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last years have witnessed the development of a great body of literature about judicial independence. One of the most interesting and provocative theoretical arguments has been put forward by Helmke in the 'Strategic Defection' Theory. In a series of papers and conferences, and particularly in her influential book Courts under Constraints, Helmke develops a rational choice approach to the problem of judicial independence in unstable regimes. She theorized that Justices of the Argentinean Supreme Court shaped their decisions in cases involving the government, depending on the underlying political environment. She claimed that, under some specific conditions, justices decided against the incumbents because of constraints faced vis-à-vis the incoming government. In our paper, we seek to develop the foundations of a cross-country study of the Strategic Defection theory. After outlining the basics of Helmke's theory we examine a series of problems confronting the development of a thorough cross national test, including how to define "regime change", defection from authoritarian versus democratic regimes, problems of information and measurement, the 'inter-temporal conflict of interest', identifying the key issues for the incoming government, the problem of determining whether judges' votes express their sincere preferences rather than strategic concerns, and whether the assumption of a strong executive may be generalized to all relevant cases. We seek to test Justices' votes in National High Courts with judicial review jurisdiction in countries with a documented history of political instability. After developing an approach for a broad cross national study, we provide a preliminary analysis of decision making in the Philippines, Venezuela, South Africa, and Canada. All of these countries (except Canada) experienced some kind of regime change that has been previously documented and analyzed. Canada is included as a control to examine the level of support for the government in a stable democracy. The preliminary results provide some support for strategic defection theory in South Africa, but the case of the Philippines does not appear to be consistent with strategic defection theory. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existence of economic effects on the vote is a commonplace, but the stability of the effect across space and time is not. Particularly intriguing is the possibility that a major effect of campaigns is to prime the economy, and so increase its salience as election day approaches. The body of evidence for this claim is small, only weakly specified, and is already controverted. The paper approaches this question by examing the ten rolling cross-sectional election surveys conducted in Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand and the United States since 1988. The basic approach centres on an examination of over-time changes in the impact of economic retrospections on vote choice over the course of each election, The theoretical stakes in the analysis are considerable. Economic priming is presented as a case in point for elections as mainly enlightening events, so the paper will assess the generality of the enlightenment claim. Microfoundations for economic voting remain understudied in general, a shortfall that this paper addresses by introducing real time. This attention to over-time dynamics combined with the variety in electoral settings should also help elucidate the institutional conditions for economic voting. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper represents an initial effort to model the evolution of party systems, to account for stability and change in party systems actors and policy space. It employs both a simple simulation and a game theoretic heuristic to generate a series of hypotheses about party systems stability. The paper focuses on the distribution of voter preferences, the level of strategic voting, and the degree of party competition as important determinants of party systems change in established parliamentary systems, while controlling for variation in electoral institutions. Evidence from a longitudinal case study on Canada and a time series, cross-national (TSCS) data set support some of the hypotheses derived from the game theoretic heuristic. Rules for a more complicated simulation are presented, which, when programmed, will help evaluate the validity of the hypotheses in more complex party systems. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines public opinion towards the restriction or expansion of immigration in Canada, using data from the 2000 Canadian Election Study (CES). The paper is largely modeled on Citrin, et al (1997)’s "Public Opinion Towards Immigration Reform: The Role of Economic Motivations," although we make a methodological improvement that increases both the confidence of our results and our understanding of what drives not only opposition to immigration, but also for more immigration. In addition, we find that the variables explaining restrictionist opinions in the United States do not hold cross-nationally. Our methodological improvement is simple. Rather than using an ordered probit, we choose to use a multinomial logit. Because our three choices are exhaustive, we do not have to consider the irrelevance of independent alternatives. Thus, we can harness the principal advantage of the multinomial logit; namely, the independent measurement of the effect of each variable on each outcome. The model we use includes approximately 1200 respondents. Our initial results find that both personal and national economic evaluations are the principal factors causing opposition to immigration. This last significant result contradicts the American findings of Citrin et al. according to which personal economic circumstances play little role in opinion formation. In addition to challenging their main finding in regards to restriction, we generate a number of new findings on the factors influencing support for increased immigration. Most importantly, we demonstrate that these factors are not entirely symmetrical with the factors influencing support for decrease in immigration levels. Indeed, we find that national economic evaluations have much effect on support for decreased immigration, whereas it does not bear on support for increased immigration. Therefore our results demonstrate the value of employing a multinomial logit instead of an ordered probit in understanding public opinion towards immigration expansion or restriction. Moreover, the differences in significance of predictor variables between support for increase and decrease demonstrates that there can be various simultaneous processes at work in opinion formation on a single issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines attitudes toward policies intended to enhance the political rights and representation of indigenous populations. The analysis is based on a parallel set of questions about the under-representation and the expansion of rights for minority groups that were asked of populations in three countries. Election studies administered in Australia, Canada and New Zealand asked respondents a series of questions regarding support for government assistance for aborigines, self-government, and guaranteed representation. We examine several explanations for variations in the support of majority populations for these policies. Specifically, we examine how perceptions of threat, values such as post-materialism and personal identity structure preferences for the expansion of rights. The paper ends with a discussion of the implications of the results for building support for expansion of political rights for indigenes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the differences between freshmen members of the United States House of Representatives and the Canadian House of Commons elected between 1968 and 1996. The analysis focuses on the demographic and political differences between the two groups in an effort to better understand the members elected to both institutions. Do American and Canadian voters look for the same characteristics in representatives? Are women more likely to serve in one legislative body over another? In addressing these questions the paper builds on the ideas of Moncrief, Squire and Jewell on who runs for the legislature, John Hibbing’s theory of congressional careers, Malcolmson and Myers characteristics of members of the House of Commons and Clarke, Kornberg, and Stewart’s survey analysis of Canadian opinions of the legislature. A simple statistical model is employed to demonstrate the differences and similarities between freshmen members in both legislatures. This analysis shows that while there are fundamental differences between the behavior and expectations of members of Congress and members of the House of Commons, there are also striking similarities between the types of members that are selected to serve in the lower houses of the legislature. This analysis then concludes by examining the number of terms served by freshmen members in relation to their experience and demographic characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My study examines the conditions under which middle power states, such as Canada, the Netherlands, and Norway, may exercise effective leadership in the realm of human security. I hypothesize that a middle power-led human security initiative is more likely to be successful if the initiative does not threaten the fundamental principles of the superpower. My paper demonstrates that although it is possible for a human security initiative to overcome American opposition that is based on political or military interests, an initiative will be less likely to succeed if it challenges the core principles of the United States. I test the hypothesis by conducting a qualitative analysis of four cases of human security initiatives where the middle powers have played leadership roles. The cases include the endeavor to create a United Nations rapid deployment peacekeeping force, which led to the formation of the Standby High Readiness Brigade for United Nations Operations (SHIRBRIG) in 1996; the campaign to ban anti-personnel landmines, which resulted in the 1997 Ottawa Convention; the struggle to establish the International Criminal Court, which came into existence in 2002; and the unsuccessful attempt to regulate the legal trade in small arms and light weapons. The United States has taken different positions on these issues. The U.S. approved of the idea of a standby UN rapid response force, but did not participate in the establishment of SHIRBRIG. Washington objected to the Ottawa Convention on the basis of a conflict with U.S. military interests, and opposed the International Criminal Court due to the influence of certain groups in the American foreign policy establishment. Finally, the U.S. rejected the adoption of restrictions on the licit small arms trade due to a clash with an American principle protected by the U.S. Constitution: the right to bear arms. By illustrating that smaller states can assume leadership on global security, my paper counters the trend in international security studies of focusing almost exclusively on great power leadership, a tendency which has been reinforced by the decades-long predominance of the realist approach to international relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public policy scholars are increasingly incorporating the notion of ?venue shopping? into their analyses of policy change. Venue shopping refers to the activities of advocacy groups and policymakers who seek out a decision setting where they can air their grievances with current policy and present alternative policy proposals. Studies of venue shopping recognize that advocacy coalitions who are intent on changing policy will ‘shop? around for a favorable venue, whether it is a court or a congressional committee, that is receptive to their claims about the nature of a policy problem and its solution. Such activities can lead to dramatic changes in policy if a new policy image is adopted and a new set of institutions achieves some control over an issue. Venue shopping is an integral part of the policy process, and at the heart of many political strategies. But the practice of venue shopping is often more complex than some studies suggest, and an oversimplified portrayal of venue shopping runs the risk of overstating the opportunities for and frequency of policy change. This paper supports the general theory of venue shopping but presents a more complicated analysis of its practice than most empirical studies to date. I focus in particular on the motivations of advocacy groups who may, or may not, search for alternative policy venues. The paper begins with a general discussion of venue shopping and its relationship to policy change. I then review several assumptions implicit in theories of venue shopping, and raise questions about some aspects of them. The final part of the paper presents evidence from a case study of forest policy advocacy in Canada to illustrate the complexity of venue shopping strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I draw the link between three developments in advanced Western democracies: the decline in voter turnout, the decline in political knowledge and attention to politics, and the depoliticization of youth. After summarizing what we know of these phenomena, I then, using both comparative and Canadian data in particular, investigate the extent to which the first two can be understood as outcomes of third. If, as I try to show, this is significantly the case, it places challenges on policy makers and political scientists alike, challenges I address in the conclusion of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, energy policy has become increasingly controversial in Canada and the United States, with Canada's oil sands emerging as a major flashpoint of controversy. This paper will compare energy-environment policy and governance in Canada and the United States through a case study of two controversial oil sands pipelines: Keystone XL to the US Gulf Coast, and Northern Gateway to British Columbia's West Coast. The cross-jurisdictional comparisons will provide enhanced leverage of institutions as a potential explanatory variable. Of particular interest are the procedural requirements for the review process and their relation to the larger legal and political structures of each country. The analysis yields some surprises. Courts, which are generally thought to play a more important role in the US, are shown to be a powerful force in the Canadian case. Subnational governments, generally thought to play a more important role in Canada's more decentralized federation, are shown to be a more influential force in the US case. Timing turns out to also be very important, but not in the way typically conceptualized in the comparative literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Efforts to operationalize democracy at the national level have occupied a central place in the discipline since the 1960s, and have resulted in a cumulative body of literature and in a variety of datasets of increasing rigor and geographic and temporal coverage. Attempts to measure democracy at the subnational level are much more recent and inchoate, cover only a few countries and periods, and, critically, are not comparable across nations. After reviewing the state of the subject at the national level and the existing (objective) national subnational indices, this paper proposes six versions of an objective Subnational Democracy Index that can be calculated on the basis of (typically available) electoral and institutional data. Because of their modest data demands, the proposed indices can easily be applied to very different national and temporal contexts, thus permitting comparisons of subnational regimes across countries. The measures are pilot-tested on the first-level subnational units of five federations (Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, and the United States) and of one unitary country (Uruguay). The ultimate goal of this line of research is to produce cross-sectional--time-series datasets of subnational democracy with broad geographic and temporal coverage similar to those existing for national regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a research paper which focuses on repertoires like intersectionality used by feminist organizations to talk about complex oppression, and to consider the specificity of the social experience of those women who are likely to face complex oppression. It focuses on several feminist organizations in republican France and multicultural Canada. It discusses different meaning of intersectionality including one structural and one political meaning.

This paper approaches debates over gender, culture and religion and multiculturalism by focusing on a force of social transformation that underpins these debates: migration. First, I discuss recent scholarship documenting the ways in which gender equality issues have been instrumentalised within debates that focus overwhelmingly on attitudes, beliefs and practices ascribed to Muslims and women's rights. Second I focus on democratic alternatives. I propose untangling two forms of border drawing - 'internal' and 'external' - that are elided in debates opposing culture to women's rights. When the terms 'Muslim' and 'immigrant' are used interchangeably, legal status and different effects of 'internal' and 'external' border practices are often ignored. When untangled, third, we can consider the ways in which their intersections, in the experiences of women who are both Muslims and migrants can provide a site for an alternative democratic politics that unsettles debates framed as 'internal' questions of accommodation. To this end I draw on research conducted with Somali refugee women in France and Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a research paper which focuses on the development and implementation of official languages policy in Canada. It discusses a conceptual framework aimed at implementation of the policy, which should help in further comparative study of language rights policy, along with human rights policy. It focuses on the impacts of the policy on administrative structure and decisions.

In this paper, I provide an initial descriptive account of the characteristics and policy attitudes of the supporters and swing voters of the major federal political parties and the position taking of the parties with respect to these groups. In particular, I ask: (1) who are these core supporters and swing voters? (2) what kinds of policies do they want? and (3) what policy positions do the parties take relative to these groups? Drawing on a pooled dataset of the 2004, 2006, and 2008 Canadian Election Studies and the voting records of the party leaders in House of Commons roll calls over the same period, I find that while swing voters in general (as well as the swing voters associated with each party) tend to largely reflect the characteristics of the broader adult population, the core supports of each party often differ substantially from the mass public. I also find that, on several selected salient policy debates during this period, the Conservative Party, the Liberal Party, and the Bloc Québécois often faced tension between the policy preferences of their respective core supporters and swing voters, although these differences - with the partial exception of the Conservative Party - were typically modest in scope. In virtually all situations in which a party's core supporters and its swing voters noticeably differed, I find that party's leader favored the aggregate position of its core supports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Conservative majority government produced by the 2011 federal election came as something of a surprise, although the potential for such as outcome was always present. Achieved with just 39.6% of the total vote (the second smallest in Canadian history), the Conservative victory was nevertheless a convincing one. Adding a net gain of 21 seats in Ontario to its strong base in the West, the Harper Conservatives benefitted both from the collapse of the Liberals and the splitting of votes between opposition parties as the NDP surged. Only in Quebec, where they lost four seats (including three Cabinet ministers) and saw their total vote reduced to 16.5% did the Conservatives experience any decline from the vote share that the party had obtained in the two previous elections (Table 1). The question therefore to be addressed in this paper is whether the 2011 outcome represents merely another election victory for the Harper Conservatives or the establishment of a "Harper Dynasty." We will argue that the conditions for the latter interpretation have already been met. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing literature on the ideal traits of political officeholders demonstrates that voters tend to prefer leaders with classic masculine traits (e.g., confident, assertive, tough). However, much of this literature is over 10 years old and focused only on the United States; very little comparative work exists on this subject, and what does exist is over 20 years old (i.e., Williams & Best 1990). This paper reinvigorates and updates this debate on voter prejudice through an examination of whether the increased presence of women at all levels of the state has decreased the use of the masculine leader as the ideal in the minds of the voter. In other words, are women in government changing the voters' expectations about the traits and behavior of the ideal leader? Using the results from an original experiment with over 600 participants performed in both the US and Canada, I demonstrate that the average voter has indeed changed some of their views on what the personality of a leader should be. However, contrary to the literature on the consequences of increased descriptive representation, I also find that there is little evidence that voters are changing their perceptions of women in general; the benefits of increased representation seem to be isolated to women leaders. Therefore, it appears that while the increased proportion of women in office has done wonders for the voters' perceptions of female leaders, it may be doing little for the perception of women at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a research paper which focuses on the challenges to the laws regulating pornography and prostitution in Canada, Sweden, and the U.S., which raise questions about violating women's human or democratic rights to equality. It refers to a ruling by the Canadian Supreme Court which says that legally prohibiting violent or dehumanizing pornography is important for promoting equality.

In 2006, Stephen Harper boldly pronounced Canada as an "emerging energy superpower" to a variety of international audiences, including the G8 meeting. While this label is likely more representative of a marketing campaign than reality (Hester, 2007), it is important to understand the degree that the Canadian media have embraced it. This paper determines the extent to which Canada's national newspapers, The Globe and Mail and the National Post, adopted the "energy superpower" frame in their reporting about Alberta's oil sands over a two-year time period. The oil sands were selected as a case study because proponents of Canada as an "energy superpower" cite the development of Alberta's oil sands as a key component of the country's new-found status. To discover how this new label was intertwined into the broader discourse on Canada/U.S. energy relations, I use content and discourse analysis to examine newspaper stories over 300 words in length that contain "oil sands or tar sands" in the lead paragraph and/or headline. While my study found few instances of the national newspapers using the term in relation to oil sands development, it did find the national newspapers more closely adopted Harper's underlying ideas about what an energy superpower was than the more activist state advanced by Hester. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United States and Canada have shared interests as they relate to ensuring effective regional and global environmental governance. At the same time, U.S.- Canadian ecopolitics has exhibited instances of policy divergence. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to examine U.S.-Canadian binational efforts to confront environmental challenges that affect both countries. In short, to what extent have the U.S. and Canada been able to resolve transboundary environmental problems that affect the quality of the North American ecosystem? In an effort to learn more about environmental relations involving two countries that share a lengthy North American border, we examined four major issues - - acid rain, NAFTA and the environmental provisions, stratospheric ozone depletion, global warming- - and assess the actions taken by the U.S. and Canada to resolve these shared environmental concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers recent Canadian parliamentary proceedings in 2007 on the age of consent, Bill C22, later encapsulated in Bill C25 amending the criminal code, in comparative perspective with similar legislation and debate in the US and the UK in order to understand to what extent the state is involved in moral regulation and by what means, as well as the impact it has on gender identity and equality. In Canada, evidence from parliamentary debates and briefs as well as media coverage, reveals a particularly conservative and gendered discourse. Unable to reverse the feminist gains already made, this evidence makes clear that the Conservative government in Canada has chosen an indirect route through which to regulate morality and reinforce gender norms in the regulation of minors. This tactic is evident in raising the general age of consent, recast as age of protection, to sixteen while leaving consent to anal sex at eighteen. Although the ostensible purpose is the protection of victims, evidence reveals the means by which moral regulation is accomplished: selective partnering in the policy community; politicizing of youth sexuality through the juxtaposition of sexuality and criminality; and, characterizing the child as in need of protection, including the reinforcing of sexual, gender and generational stereotypes that also privileges an idealized child and adult relationship. While the Canadian preoccupation with moral danger and youth, particularly in the characterization of the role of internet and child pornography, is found in all three cases, the comparison reveals differences in the framing of the issue of sexuality and youth and in particular the difference between Canada and the UK on the debate of equality of homosexuality and heterosexuality in setting the age of consent. One of the most important conclusions in all three cases of this comparative study is the reinforcement of gender, sexual and generational stereotypes through the politicized identity of the child and youth. In all three cases the reluctance to approach the subject of minors and sexuality gives the advantage to this conservative discourse and points to the need to open up the debate on minors and sexuality even though there is a political risk in doing so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a research paper which focuses on the impact of individual candidates on the results of the general elections and the formation of government in Canada. It focuses on the impact of constituency campaigns on the outcome of elections, and how a candidate affects the campaign and his party's fundraising abilities in his constituency.

Recent years have seen increasing excursions of judicial power into the political sphere worldwide. One obvious effect of this increasing judicialization of politics is to highlight legitimacy concerns associated with the exercise of judicial power. Indeed, how do courts attain and retain institutional legitimacy particularly in the context of their increasing political relevance? This paper provides an answer to this question by presenting a new, strategic theory of how courts establish and promote institutional legitimacy and by applying it to the 1999 Marshall case of the Supreme Court of Canada. The theory shows that courts cultivate legitimacy by exhibiting strategic sensitivity to factors operating in the external, political environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a framework for analyzing the political-administrative capacity of public authorities to respond to transboundary crises (such as pandemics, cyberattacks and prolonged critical infrastructure failure). To complement our traditional notion of capacity as a fixed set of skills, resources, and infrastructures (e.g., "assets"), it is important to think more about institutional and processual response features that allow rapid sharing, staging, and recombination of resources during an emerging crisis. The crisis governance literature is filled with examples of both successes and failures in the mobilization and sharing of assets during crisis events. However, there has been little attention to the general factors that allow responders to effectively mobilize and deploy the collective assets of a society under threat. We analyze the 2001 anthrax outbreak in the US, the 2002-3 SARS outbreak in China and Canada, and the response to Hurricane Gustav (2008) to explore where and how response systems demonstrated dynamic capacity and crisis leadership. We conclude by suggesting principles/guidelines for fostering capacity to deal with transboundary crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we analyze voting coalitions under the minority governments in the 38th and 39th Canadian Parliaments. We demonstrate that minority government support is driven by electoral incentives and policy issues. The main contention of this project is that voting coalitions are more likely to form along ideological lines-the Axelrod (1970)'s thesis. However, the analysis also demonstrates that voting coalitions form along a second dimension in the Canadian Parliament; mainly on issues related to federalism and the province of Quebec. We also provide some evidence to show that expected electoral gains can help explain why certain parties choose to support the government more. This study ultimately validates different theories of coalition voting under minority governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]