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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]

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 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]

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]

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 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 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]

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]

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.

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 examines homogeneity and heterogeneity in preferences for public policy, across income and education levels and party identification, and across policy domains in the US, UK and Canada. Do preferences differ across segments of the public at particular points in time? What about over time - do we observe a uniform swing across different groups (parallel publics), or does the flow of opinion differ across party, income, and education? Our data on public preferences for government spending show cross-sectional heterogeneity across sub-aggregates, but very high levels of over-time homogeneity in trends across subgroups. The structure of preference change across subgroups is fairly similar; most notably, thermostatic responsiveness to policy holds generally across the subgroups. This is especially true for broad domestic aggregates of opinion and policy. There still are some differences in feedback, particularly across education levels, as the highly educated are significantly more responsive to spending change over time. People with low and middling levels of education still do change their preferences for spending in response to what policymakers do, just to a lesser extent, at least in certain policy domains. This fits with the large and growing literature that demonstrates real differences owing to information levels. There also are significant differences across partisan subgroupings in various domains. The implications of these findings are considered in the concluding section. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the globalizing economy, knowledge generation can catalyze local, regional, and national economic development. Governments everywhere face pressures to adapt to this new environment, and universities are recognized as strategic resources. This paper assesses changes in the ideas and actions of stakeholders concerning the role of universities in the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Canada, and Australia, focusing on universities operating in a dynamic sub-region in each country. Attention is given to how different levels of government promote or inhibit innovative actions by universities and the organizations they partner with to commercialize research. Efforts to create regional knowledge economies effectively linked to the global marketplace are shown to have generated a range of tensions and dilemmas. The findings presented here highlight themes likely to feature in future debates over policy design and governance arrangements for universities and other strategic public and quasi-public organizations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bolstering the North-Atlantic alliance structure to respond to post-9/11 security challenges is a central US foreign policy concern. This has become especially important since the invasion of Iraq appeared to open cracks in this long-standing defense regime. However, the Iraq War is not the first instance where US-initiated military actions resulted in a frosty response from some of America's closest allies. This paper examines instructive cases of US-Canada relations since World War II. Using the operational code construct and the Verbs in Context system for content analysis, the relative compatibility of the respective leader's approaches to international affairs is tracked though their political statement across four major conflicts: the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the invasion of Afghanistan and the War in Iraq. The results suggest that the periodically chilly relations between nations and the variation in their support and participation for their allies' military endeavors are reflected the distance between their leaders' orientations toward conflict. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper approaches the issue of the role of urbanization in American political development from a comparative-historical perspective. By comparing the role of urbanization in Canadian political development with that of the United States, we gain valuable new insight into the different roles cities can and do play in the erection of jurisdictional power between national and sub-national political domains. As centers of economic and political activity, cities play a crucial - but variable - role in national networks of prominence and power. Historically, this resulted in a disproportionate role for urban elites in Canadian and American national development. Given the incremental, local nature of 19th century American state formation, the current provincial-federal relationship in Canada might at first appear surprising, for example. The origins, and ultimate failure of, the American "states' rights" movement is equally surprising. The United States is both a less "urban" and more politically centralized society than Canada. Its origins, too, lie in the past. When Congress "nationalized" the near-west (trans-Appalachia), federal government took jurisdictional reign over what would be the majority of the nation's new state governments. American municipal governments were similarly subjugated to state jurisdiction, often via the Army and state guards. In Canada, city dwellers were both more powerful and their city governments were more autonomous in the scope and size of programs under their purview. In America, in sum, rural constituents exert inordinate power at the federal level via Congress, and particularly the Senate; Canadian federal government is more beholden to the provincial governments, which serve largely at the behest of their urban constituents. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on agenda setting often requires long time frames to illustrate and explain the rise and fall of issues on agendas and the punctuated nature of policy change. But less common are studies which treat time itself as a variable that helps to explain the particular trajectory of a policy issue or set of issues. To appreciate the importance of timing, we must examine agenda setting and policy change processes around similar issues in two settings, where the timing and sequence of key events and strategies differ. This paper examines differences in agenda-setting and policy change around the issue of lawn care pesticides in the United States and Canada. I argue that the timing and sequencing of events, actor mobilization, and venue shifts significantly shaped the divergent paths of the conflicts. The relative mobilization of competing advocacy groups at the start of the campaigns, and successful venue shifts at key moments in the conflicts led to different policy outcomes in the two cases. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines homogeneity and heterogeneity in preferences for public policy, across income and education levels, and party identification, and across policy domains in the US, UK and Canada. Do preferences differ across segments of the public at particular points in time? What about over time - do we observe a uniform swing across different groups (parallel publics), or does the flow of opinion differ across party, income, and education? Our data on public preferences for government spending show systematic cross-sectional differences across sub-aggregates, but a fair degree of homogeneity in trends over time. Some longitudinal heterogeneity does exist, however, and we exploit these differences in dynamic models of the effects of public preferences - across income levels - on government spending in the US and Canada. Results point to some interesting, seemingly important differences in the representation of income groups across policy domains and countries. Perhaps most importantly, in contrast with the existing literature, we find that policymakers do not consistently follow the preferences of wealthiest citizens. If anything, the preferences of the middle class matter most, though there are differences across policy domains. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I compare women's 'presence' in state institutions in Canada and the U.S. to explore how federalism affects the project of creating more 'women-friendly' democracies. Using a modified version of Connell's Gender Regimes, I undertake an inventory of the "state of play" in gender power relations in the central and state/provincial governments in both countries. I show how both campaigns to 'gender' the state are affected by structural features of the federal state organization: especially the bifurcation of policy agendas resulting from state division; the greater number of elected legislators required by multiple legislative bodies; the greater power of the courts resulting from written constitutions; and the weakness of polity-wide parties. I conclude that projects to 'gender government' in federal states are significantly different than those in unitary states. In particular, federal states involve a different balance between indigenous activism and international influences, especially in the more powerful United States. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the evolution of the Canada-U.S, continental security relationship since September 2001. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the evolution of Canada-U.S. continental security relations since September 2001. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the richness of extant studies on the use of party cues as information short-cuts, there is a significant limitation: since most studies focus predominantly on the two main parties in the United States, we do not know whether and to what extent other party labels are used as heuristic devices. This paper seeks to address this limitation by expanding the geographical span of our understanding of the effect of party cues. Our principal focus is the degree to which different party labels, across different institutional contexts, influence how individuals form and express opinions on a range of political issues. We also investigate the moderating influence of partisanship and issue complexity. We present a set of results from an experimental study conducted in three countries: the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Our findings show that the influence of party cues on the expression of opinions varies greatly when one moves beyond the two major parties in the United States. The results vary by party and country, there is some evidence that partisanship influences whether or not cues are used, and there is mixed evidence about the role of issue complexity in the usefulness of party cues. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neighboring states with high levels of interaction but disparate public policies encounter new challenges with regard to marriage recognition, provision of spousal benefits and proper resolution of child custody and intimate partner abuse issues. Canadian progress toward legalizing same-sex marriage begs the question of whether the U.S. government will stand against same-sex marriage when its nearest neighbor appears close to declaring it an important means of eliminating institutionalized inequality and systemic shortfalls confronting lesbian, bisexual, gay and transgender (LBGT) families. The U.S. Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, allowing states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages performed outside of their jurisdiction. Some see this as a move to ban same-sex marriage as well as a disregard of the equal rights afforded all U.S. citizens by the U.S. Constitution. Their opponents support the law as a marriage preservation effort, protecting a time-honored social institution and so-called traditional American family structure. International media fanfare and public protests have since elevated the issue, and a smattering of U.S. state courts have been called to rule on the validity of same-sex marriages taking place within their territory. In June 2003, Ontario, Canada became the first North American jurisdiction to fully legalize same-sex marriage. One month later, Canadian Parliament considered legislation to legalize same-sex marriage federally. The proposed law extends marriage rights and subsequent spousal benefits to same-sex couples. The law?s proponents argue that such recognition is in accordance with the rights and protections mandated within the Canadian Charter of Rights which must be allotted every Canadian citizen. The bill was referred to the Canadian Supreme Court for opinion where it has been deliberated for nearly a year. A final decision is expected in fall 2004. This paper highlights Canada?s progress toward legalizing same-sex marriage and implementing anti-discrimination laws that protect LBGT individuals and their families. I summarize relevant Canadian legislation and systematically examine the characteristics of the Canadian Parliament members that voted on identical same-sex marriage legislation in 1999 and 2003. I analyze their general demographic characteristics and those of their constituencies to determine if same-sex marriage support and opposition can be linked to individual factors other than political party allegiance in different time periods. The long-term goal of this research is to determine if the political will to legalize same-sex marriage can be predicted by factors other than one?s declared political party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Nature and Extent of Attitudinal Decision Making in the Supreme Court of Canada According to the most prominent proponents of the Attitudinal Model, justices on the United States Supreme Court decide cases based solely on their political preferences and ideology. Justices are free to vote their personal preferences because of a set of institutional features that are not found on other courts in the United States. The implication of their argument is that justices on other courts that share these same institutional features should also be free to vote their attitudinal preferences in all cases. The focus of the paper is whether the Attitudinal Model, as explicated by Schubert (1965), and Segal and Spaeth (1993) provides a sufficient explanation of the voting behavior of judges on the Supreme Court of Canada; a court that shares all of the institutional features argued to support attitudinal voting. To test this theory, we focus on the decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada between 1984 and 2002, the period since the docket of that court reflected the emergence of the new issues stimulated by the Charter of Rights. We investigate the impact of judicial attitudes using three methods: factor analysis of votes in criminal and economic cases during the most extended natural court during the Charter period, an investigation of the relationship between newspaper assessments of ideology and judicial voting in three issue areas during the entire Charter period, and an analysis of the relationship between judicial attributes used as surrogates for judicial attitudes and the career voting patterns of justices serving since the adoption of the Charter. All three methods provide independent confirmation of the view that the political preferences of the justices have a substantial impact on their voting choices [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large and growing body of research demonstrates a correspondence between public opinion and policy behavior. Almost all of this research has focused on the US, however. Do similar patterns obtain in other countries? Or is the US unique? This paper represents one step towards answering these questions. We extend previous research on the dynamics of spending preferences and budgetary policy in the US, using comparable longitudinal measures of public preferences and government spending in the US, UK, and Canada. The nature and magnitude of opinion-policy connections vary across both policy functions and countries. We explore this variance here, and suggest several possible explanations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent release of US and Canadian census data has sparked interest among politicians, journalists, and researchers in imigrant dispersal outside major urban centers. This paper analyzes how collective meaning is constructed in media accounts of census information. We argue that the 2001 Canadian census has been used to construct an understanding of immigration that assumes federal intervention in immigrants’ settlement patterns; peresentationsof the 2000 US census construct immigration settlement as the outcome of choices made by individual immigrants and as local policy problems. In each country the construction of immigration dispersal omits alternative interpretations of its causes and effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deciding how to finance multiple levels of government is a challenging task for all political systems. Federal states, in addition, have a constitutional contract to divide financial accountability across national and subnational governments. In comparison with unitary states, federal states are arguably more committed to fiscal decentralization precisely because of this constitutional contract. Nevertheless, a wide variation in the extent of fiscal centralization is observed even among developed federal states. This paper explores the political economy of fiscal centralization in six developed federal states, Australia, Canada, Austria, Germany, the United States, and Belgium, from 1961 through 1995. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalization’s onset inspired predictions about convergence of diverse capitalist economies to American-style liberalism (Kurzer 1994; Frieden & Rogowski 1996). Even dissenters (Garrett 1998; Boix 1998; Hall & Soskice 2001; Kitschelt, Lange, Marks & Stephens 1999), who insisted on the persistence of different capitalist models, agreed on liberalism’s comparative advantages: fewer regulations, less particularistic policy-making, and swift asset redeployment. Rather than inspiring hands-off government, however, increased international competition has often been accompanied by industry-specific tax cuts and credits, subsidies, and import relief. Neither the convergence school nor its critics, can explain when and why the liberal market economies (LMEs) in the UK, US, and Canada stray from laissez-faire. This paper argues that political institutions explain divergence among LMEs. My argument is that the key variable distinguishing between the UK and US is the weakness of party discipline in the United States and its strong presence in the UK. The most important distinction in scholarly work, by contrast, has been between majoritarianism and proportional representation electoral systems (Rogowski 1987). Political party discipline influences politicians? incentives to adopt universalistic versus particularistic policies toward business in the aggregate, as well as policies regarding specific sectors. The policy result of weak party discipline is different from the result of federalism. In systems with weak party discipline, businesses can invest in particular favors from individual legislators. In federal systems, by contrast, the only industrial particularism is inter-state bids for mobile industries capable of making credible exit threats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electoral competition has long been held as a required and essential component of a smoothly functioning democracy. This common wisdom suggests that representative responsiveness is likely to decrease as the level of general election competitiveness falls off. The closer the election the more uncertain the incumbent member of the legislature is about her ability to get reelected, which motivates her to work harder to win votes (i.e. campaign harder, spend more time in the district, secure more pork projects, modify voting behavior in the legislature, etc.). In turn, these activities should increase voter satisfaction and efficacy. This final linkage is what we take up here. Namely, do voters in districts that have competitive elections demonstrate higher levels of efficacy and higher levels of satisfaction with the representative and with the legislature itself? Using survey data from the most recent elections in three western democracies with single member district systems (UK, Canada, and the U.S.) we find no such connection. Rather, the winner/loser dichotomy is primal. Electoral competitiveness has no measurable effect on voters either in terms of satisfaction with their representative or with more abstract variables like efficacy. This finding has important implications for democratic theory and for redistricting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Past research suggests that citizens' attitudes toward immigration are driven, in part, by attitudes toward racial diversity. In this study, we draw on a unique online survey experiment conducted with representative samples of both Americans and Canadians to directly test this assertion. The analysis is based on a 2X2 experimental design embedded in a series of immigrant vignettes that vary the racial background and social status of an individual applying for immigration to the US/Canada. We examine the extent to which both racial and economic-status cues affect support for immigration. Results offer new and unique information on the structure of attitudes on diversity and immigration in the US and Canada [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The active recruitment of health workers from developing countries to developed countries has become a major threat to global health and an obstacle to achieving the human right to health. In an effort to manage this migration, the 63rd World Health Assembly adopted the World Health Organization (WHO) Global Code of Practice on the International Recruitment of Health Personnel in May 2010. While the Code has been lauded as the first globally-applicable regulatory framework for health worker recruitment, its impact as a non-binding declaration has yet to be evaluated. We offer the first empirical evaluation of the Code's impact on national and sub-national actors in Australia, Canada, United Kingdom and United States of America, which are the English-speaking developed countries with the greatest number of migrant health workers. Forty-two key informants from across government, civil society and private sectors were surveyed to measure their awareness of the Code, knowledge of specific changes resulting from it, overall opinion on the effectiveness of non-binding codes, and suggestions to improve this Code's implementation. Sixty percent of respondents believed their colleagues were not aware of the Code, and 93% reported that no specific changes had been observed in their work as a result of the Code. Eighty-six percent reported that the Code has not had any meaningful impact on policies, practices or regulations in their countries. This highlights a gap between awareness for the Code among stakeholders at global forums and the awareness and behaviour of national and sub-national actors. Advocacy and technical guidance for implementing the Code are needed to improve its impact on national decision-makers. At least in the context of health worker migration, this study suggests that soft law by itself may not be effective in protecting the human right to health unless it is complemented by other efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the theory and practice of federalism in Canada and compares it with American federalism. It states that Canada's decision to adopt the Charter of Rights influenced federalism in the same fashion as the U.S.' incorporation of the Bill of Rights into the 14th amendment. It examines the functions of the Canadian Charter and how it transformed unpopular policies to the minority claims.

The media serves as an important institutional support for political accountability. This research essay will explore potential gate-keeper effects caused by issue ownership that may compromise the ability of the media to accurately convey policy performance to voters. The media may be more responsive to actual policy performance if a political party owns an issue (salient goal hypothesis), or, conversely, gives them a pass (immunity hypothesis). These hypotheses were tested using time-series cross-sectional regression analysis. Media coverage on federal government finances and unemployment was analyzed by constructing average tone scores using the Lexicoder Sentiment Dictionary from a variety of high-circulation newspapers in Canada and the United States. The results support the salient goal hypothesis in Canadian media coverage, and the immunity hypothesis in American coverage in the long-run. Short-run findings were mixed in the American context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's perspectives on the countermajoritarian criticism of judiciary in the U.S. and Canada. He believes that the history of constitutional interpretation and judicial review in Canada and the U.S. shows that the judiciary have no power to truncate constitutional or political debate. He states that the history and realities of the political process in Canada and the U.S. show that the courts cannot and do not foreclose political debate.

An essay is presented about the politics associated with colonialism, time and white settler countries. It offers information on the correlations between discourses of unstructures and structures, practices and institutions of politics. Moreover, it examines the political conflicts and discourses on territorial indigenous sovereignty and claims in Canada and the U.S.

Due to universal health care coverage, it is hypothesized that Canada will have less of a rural/urban disparity in health outcomes compared to the United States. It is also hypothesized that Canada's decentralized, executive federalism offers more opportunity for public action to address rural health if the political will is present. The evidence reveals that the rural/urban disparity on many health outcomes is just as significant in Canada as in the United States. Regarding public action, Canada has not had a significant federal presence in rural health issues due to the lack of executive will at the federal level. The United States has more public action at the federal level but the policy is fragmented. Subnational governments play an important role in shaping rural health, but more so in the Canadian provinces. It is concluded that the similarities in rural health outcomes and public reaction between the two countries is largely a function of the rural social and economic environment in which the respective federal systems operate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author focuses on indigenous peoples and mutilevel governance in Canada and the U.S. The author states that Canada and the U.S. are highly resistant to indigenous claims. The author further discusses compact-based governance in the U.S., status of indigenous governments in the Canadian federation and development of new governance regimes.

The article offers information on the health care policy in Canada and the U.S. It explores the role of political institutions in shaping policies and policymaking in health care and pensions. It is said that Canada and the U.S. have relatively lower levels of welfare state fiscal effort and coverage. Both the countries, however, have not had a largely parallel welfare state development.

One of the unintended but inevitable consequences of federal constitutions is the creation of transboundary waters, river basins that are shared among multiple states/provinces, and, in some cases, other countries, as well. The existence of transboundary waters creates difficulties for the riparian governments sharing them because they are locked in a common pool situation in which each government faces simultaneous and contradictory incentives: in their own interests, they are motivated to secure access to resource flows, but, in the collective interest, they must also conserve the resource stock. Managing such a situation requires collective action, and much has been written about the factors that are important in facilitating such collective action, such as the importance of shared interests, mutual trust, and the enforceability of intergovernmental commitments. However, in many basins there is a long history of intergovernmental cooperation in water management, and this history, in itself, has become an important factor shaping more recent water management efforts. Early efforts at transboundary water management focused mostly on either water apportionment or dispute resolution, and these early water management regimes have proven strongly path dependent, shaping more recent management efforts that have focused on water conservation. In other words, early institutional choices in transboundary water management, when water conservation was not a priority, have shaped transboundary conservation regimes now that water conservation is a priority, pointing to the importance of institutional path dependency as a factor in shaping intergovernmental cooperation. This argument is explored through a comparison of four distinct transboundary river basins in Australia, the United States and Canada. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a proposal of a simple and direct test of the Receive-Accept-Sample (RAS) model. It deals with the 1988 Canadian election, which was fought over one central issue, which is the Free Trade Accord with the U.S. It focuses on the influential theory of opinion formation, formulated by John Zaller in 1992.

The article discusses the developments in pesticides policies concerning children's environmental health in Canada and the U.S. It explores the implications of framing or social construction of policy problems, neo-institutionalism and national styles of regulation for children's environmental health policy in the U.S. and Canada. It considers the emergence of children's environmental health policy in the U.S. It addresses the lack of attention to children's environmental health in Canada.

We analyze the occurrence and frequency of election night corruption by examining the victory margins of races in Japan, Canada, and the United States. If election night corruption (the adjusting of vote totals late on election night when it is known how many votes are enought to secure a victory) occurs, we expect to see anomalous numbers of ultra close races. Our hypothesis is that election night corruption will be less likely in Canada and Japan because of the lesser levels of overall political corruption in Canada and the centralization and independence of the election bureaucracy in Japan. However, we find statistically significant evidence of election night corrution in both the United States and Canada. We also find that the net effect of the corruption benefits the Liberal Party in Canada and the Democratic Party in the United States. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article suggests that a confluence has occurred between the American and Canadian Supreme Courts, at least with regard to voting rights and campaign spending and looks at the extent to which the campaign spending restrictions protect incumbent legislators. In pursuing to encourage political equality and democratic vitality, the courts of both nations failed to see the greater threat posed by incumbent entrenchment to political accountability.

The article explores the origins of the distinct approaches of the U.S. and Canada in tailoring immigration policy to meet changing economic needs. It argues that the roots of both state's policies are the same and that in the post-World War II era, changing norms pertaining to race, ethnicity and human rights cast longstanding discriminatory policies in both countries in a highly critical light. It outlines arguments regarding the interplay of shifting normative context to better understand postwar immigration policy making in Canada and the U.S.

This article seeks to explain how states choose among overlapping institutions in deciding where to file for dispute settlement. It develops a spatial model of forum shopping which has broader implications for the study of regionalism and the design of international institutions, and illustrates the key insights with cases of dispute settlement in Canada-U.S. trade.

The article considers the role of civil society in the future of governance in North America. Opposition to the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico brings to fore the need to recognize civil society. Currently, civil society actors from these three countries demand for the inclusion of equity, sustainable development, and democracy in any schemes that seek to deepen governance in North America. Civil society can be valuable contributors to governance-building in North America.

The article discusses the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on U.S. and Canadian food safety regulation, with particular focus on how each nation dealt with the emergence of indigenous cases of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), the so-called mad-cow disease. The article also looks at how BSE affected cross-border trade and the conflicts between free trade and national concerns about protecting domestic beef and cattle industries.

How national governments interface with the IT industry can have an important influence upon the delivery of government IT projects, which in most advanced industrial countries will account for at least 1 per cent of GDP. Looking across seven countries (the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Netherlands and Japan) we characterize the power of the IT industry in terms of three variables: patterns of contractual relations, the largest firms? market and technical dominance, and the extent to which government retains IT expertise or ?intelligent customer? capabilities. We assess the performance of government IT in terms of three factors: the extent of catastrophic project failures or cancellations, indications of the price competitiveness of government IT contracts, and the relative modernization of government IT compared with the private sector nationally. Using a ?fuzzy-set social science? approach we argue that an overall index of corporate power viz a viz central governments shows a clear negative association with government IT performance. Where governments are weakly placed in relation to powerful IT corporations, long-run performance outcomes are less satisfactory. Our cases also illuminate the different ways in which governments can ensure and maintain more balanced relationships with the IT industry, which in turn will foster better long-run results in the design and operations of government IT systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]