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The conventional wisdom regarding the relationship between public and private benefits in the United States (especially work by Jacob Hacker) is that pre-existing private social benefits are argued to constrain the subsequent development of public benefits. The development of health insurance and pensions in Canada stands in marked contrast. In Canada, public benefits came to dominate in health insurance where private benefits were already well established before the state entered the field. In this instance, the existence of established private benefits is argued to have spurred rather than retarded the development of public benefits with private benefit programs contributing to a number of prerequisites for the development of public programs at critical junctures. At the same time, in pensions, where private benefits were not well-developed prior to the advent of public programs, the public benefit programs which did emerge were relatively limited and left ample space into which private benefits eventually grew as a relatively equal pillar of the retirement income system. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, the American and Canadian governments have taken different environmental policy pathsâ€"Canada has ratified the agreement while the United States has not. But while officially approving the emissions plan, the Canadian government has not acted on its aims and objectives. Meanwhile, the United States has supported other environmental agreements, such as the APEC Sydney Declaration for Climate Change, also signed by Canada. These redirections and evasions serve to rhetorically undermine and defocus the Kyoto initiatives. In both countries, approaches to climate change have been politically and rhetorically opportunistic. In light of the ambiguous defeat of Kyoto in Canada and the United States a political discourse has emerged that has adopted the term “Kyoto” as a rhetorical tool to describe poor environmental policy. Using the debate transcripts from the American House of Representatives and the Canadian House of Commons this interdisciplinary and international panel will investigate the rhetoric of Kyoto from three unique perspectives: that of a rhetorician, that of a political scientist, and that of a biologist. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the aftermath of September 11, Canada and the US have begun to revamp border security initiatives. Bolstering the screening of visitors, permanent immigrants and refugees has become a priority. Shared agreements have been updated and new accords are being addressed. New technologies to help border security are being tested at border crossings. However, the task is daunting. There are 135 land crossings, 203 airports, 187 commercial vessel points and 313 marine points between the two. Since September 11 perceived flaws in the system have been emphasized. From an American standpoint, Canada’s refugee policy is a “sore spot” and those policies are seen as compromising US security. From the Canadian viewpoint, the challenge is to address those fears while maintaining sovereignty over its borders and immigration policies. Technology has not lived up to expectations, and what we do have is not sufficient. As trade between the two grows concerns about the future security grows.This study will examine existing national and cross-border accords and agreements in general, and it will look at Shared Border Accord (SBA) and newer initiatives and the technology needed for to achieve the full benefits offered by the SBA. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Canada, Aboriginal rights are protected by an open-ended clause in the Constitution. The courts have held that the clause protects only those practices, customs, and traditions integral to the distinctive culture of an Aboriginal community as it existed prior to European contact..x000d.I argue that this approach is difficult to apply in practice, and hence leads to an indeterminate definition of constitutional protection for Aboriginal self-government rights. Using insights from analytical jurisprudence, I argue the courts' approach is particularly indeterminate when applied to self-government rights. The power-conferring rules that were customary in historic Aboriginal communities likely came with no evidence of limits to jurisdiction. The recognition of customary rules might also mean that any government infringement of the right of Aboriginal communities to set their own boundaries would be unconstitutional..x000d.The insights from my analysis are useful for considering how to constitutionally recognize self-government rights for a minority community, especially in showing a way in which such recognition might be conceptually incoherent. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I argue that citizens are prone to vote in an election if they clearly prefer a given party/candidate and/or if they adhere to the view that voting is not only a right but also a civic duty. I use an Internet survey conducted by YouGov Polimetrix in the last week of the 2008 Canadian federal election among a sample of electors in the provinces of British Columbia and Quebec. The findings are consistent with the proposed model. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By examining the decisions made by government officials to continuously commit to Afghanistan, one will be able to argue that Canada’s involvement reflects the liberal-internationalist perspective and that Canada is continuing to follow a path of middlepowermanship. Canadian foreign policy is currently in a state of reflection as a result of the changing security environment that was brought forth after 9/11. Canada’s role in the world is also in a state of flux due to the changing international order that sees the United States as a declining hegemon and the rise of new superpowers. In this environment, one could expect Canadian foreign policy to change direction which would enable Canada to become more of a principal power. However, the Afghanistan case shows that current Canadian foreign policy is simply a continuation from previous generations. The direction of Canadian foreign policy has not changed; however, Afghanistan has proved to be the spark that was needed to ignite the Canadian government to take action against the decline in influence Canada has experienced in the past decade. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A transnational team of researchers surveyed students at a Canadian and a U.S. university as they watched the presidential or prime ministerial debates or listened without video. Inspired by the legend that Nixon bested Kennedy in the 1960 debates among radio listeners but not television viewers, the current study builds on a study of the 2004 debates. It now includes Canadians surveyed as they watched or listened to the English-language debate among the five candidates to be Canada's prime minister and Canadians surveyed as they watched the second presidential debate -- along with U.S. students surveyed while watching or listening to the first two presidential debates and the vice presidential debate. A second expansion of the study is that Canadian and U.S. students who failed to watch or listen to a debate live were given parallel surveys to see how their impressions of the debates gained from the mass media and interpersonal discussions compared with those in the live debate watching or listening experiment. In all cases, the surveys were designed to develop and test a scale on how "presidential" (or "prime ministerial") the candidates were, because that was the most robust variable in the 2004 debates study. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore how the trajectories of Canadian immigrants' partisanship differ depending on their countries of origin. British Canadians show greater variety in their partisanship relative to other immigrants who typically identify with the Liberals. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

U.S. public opinion literature applied to Canadian public opinion study. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a comparative study of Canadian and U.S. autism policymaking. It utilizes narrative policy analysis to compare the 2006 Federal Autism Initiatives in Canada and the U.S. Combating Autism Act of 2006. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a world of limited information, political party cues can serve as an important heuristic aid for citizens in the development of opinions, in the placement of candidates on issues, and in the voting booth (Kam 2005; Lau and Redlawsk 2001; Popkin 1994; Schaffner and Streb 2002). While in many cases reliance on party cues is a useful shortcut, there are some conditions under which it can lead citizens to make decisions that are not in line with their interests (e.g., Lau and Redlawsk 2001; Rahn 1993). Previous research has focused on the U.S. context, in which the two major parties have a strong reputation and in which citizens develop attachments to one of these parties. How might party cues operate in a different party context? We explore this question using data generated from an experiment on an internet survey conducted in Canada in 2007. We use a design similar to Rahn (1993) in which we presented subjects with a hypothetical election and varied the presentation of information about the candidates. We find that, like voters in the United States, Canadians do use party cues for decision-making, even when policy information is available. However, we also observe variance in the reliance on party cues across parties. That is, individuals rely more on party cues for ideological parties than on party cues for the traditional brokerage party, the Liberals. We conclude that understanding how the use of party labels as cues varies across parties, and across country contexts, contributes to our knowledge of the limits of heuristic-based decision-making. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do attitudes towards public servants by Americans compare to similar attitudes in other nations? 2004 ISSP data are used to examine attitudes held by citizens in the U.S., Canada, and several European nations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By using the principle of coherence in a federal context, this proposal will show that Aboriginal health condition improvements in Canada are slowed down by a fragmentation of the Aboriginal health policy domain. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate and compare the impact of the autism narrative construction on federal autism policy in the United States and Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore the role of issue ownership in individual vote choice in the 1997 & 2000 Canadian federal elections. As a correction to the original model, we find that issue ownership's effect on vote is conditional upon the salience of the issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We argue that the value of party labels as heuristic devices depends on individual perceptions of party reputation, including cognition and affect. We test our theory using data collected from university students in the U.S., Mexico and Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prime Ministers use counter-cyclical reshuffles of ministers and bureaucrats to undercut a variety of agency losses. This argument is tested against data on the Canadian cabinet and civil service from 1950-2000. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart have recently theorized that post-industrial societies are experiencing a gender realignment: where women were once to the right of men, they are now to their left. Canada is a prime example of the emergence of this “modern gender gap”. In the two most recent federal elections, women were more likely than men to vote for the party of the left, whereas men were more likely than women to vote for the party of the new right. As such, Canada provides a particularly suitable site for examining the impact of social networks on the gender gap in vote choice. There are at least two reasons to anticipate that the composition of women’s social networks will affect their choice of party. First, Susan Carroll has pointed to the importance of women’s autonomy for the expression of their political difference from men. Women who enjoy psychological independence from traditional sex-role socialization are more likely to vote for parties of the left. Psychological independence tends to go hand in hand with economic independence, but even women who are economically dependent may enjoy enhanced autonomy if they have access to networks that include a range of women who do enjoy such independence. Second, the composition of social networks may influence political preferences. Those with ties to a relatively wide range of women are more likely to get messages reinforcing the sorts of views that women tend to favour. Conversely, men with diverse ties to other members of their own sex are more likely to take positions that tend to be typical of men. Accordingly, we should expect to find the widest gender gaps among women and men who have the largest number of same-sex social ties. These hypotheses will be tested using data from the 2000 Canadian Election Study. The study includes measures of network diversity, as well as a wide range of attitudinal and social background variables. It will thus be possible to determine whether the composition of social networks has an influence on the gender gap in vote choice, net of other structural and situational variables that have been associated with the emergence of the modern gender gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1994, the Canadian government was one of the most responsive in the world in terms of responding to the problem of violence against women. Over two decades, the government adopted many innovative and proactive policies that have become models for other nations looking for ways to address such violence. This distinctive pattern of response to violence against women was a product of a dynamic relationship between strong, autonomous, women’s movements and well-positioned and funded women’s policy agencies (Weldon, 2002) After 1994, however, a key women’s policy agency was dismantled, an agency that had worked as a critical link between women’s movements and government. This move signaled a symbolic and substantive movement away from a government policy focused on equality and citizenship rights for women as defined by women themselves, to a more top-down, gender-neutral model of service provision and maintenance of law and order. This shift has been largely driven by a neo-liberal economic agenda that has motivated governments to cutback on spending for social programs, privatize government programs, and translate entitlements into services for needy clients. In the last ten years, this shift has undermined many of the important improvements that the federal and provincial governments made in the area of combating violence against women. Although this policy shift can be detected in the language and focus of the policies themselves, it is most evident in the way these policies are implemented. All women, but especially poor women and women of colour, are having an increasingly hard time obtaining fair treatment from the criminal justice system and social service agencies. Indeed, many women increasingly experience such agencies as punitive, controlling bodies, who are likely to re-victimize them with insensitive questions and insulting attitudes, take their children, arrest them, and invade their privacy The emerging evidence suggests that women are increasingly less likely to leave abusive situations and that this policy shift may actually be resulting in increasing violence against women. International agencies have gone from citing Canadian programs as models to expressing concern about recent trends. This trend can be reversed by moving towards a model that places government action on violence against women at the center of a comprehensive, participatory program for working towards women’s substantive equality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the effect of judicial selection systems on the quality of judging. In 1988 Canada introduced screening committees to the federal judicial selection process in response to criticisms of pervasive patronage. We found committees had not greatly reduced partisan connections between judges and appointing parties. However, the presence of politics in selection systems is not necessarily a problem unless it produces candidates with weaker skills and qualities. We examine evaluations of judge quality against the types of judges chosen (e.g. by professional background), and the relationship between judges’ quality and the strength of their ties to the appointing party, with comparisons to findings for judges selected before 1988. We assess judicial appointees using the approach of a number of US states (such as New Hampshire). Surveys are sent to individuals within groups familiar with the performance of judges (lawyers, Crown counsel, legal academics and journalists) asking them to evaluate judges and their professional competence. The paper adopts a comparative perspective (with particular attention to the US) and considers the competing demands for accountability, independence, representativeness and merit. ..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 â€" 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 certain sub-aggregates in some domains, but overall very high levels of over-time homogeneity in trends across groups. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the importance of firearms related focusing events in two states: the United States and Canada. It is my contention that focusing events can lead to items being placed on the agenda; however, interest group activity can either impede or promote the policy outcomes. In the United States firearms related focusing events often lead to new policy being placed on the agenda when there is a Democratic government; however, due to the nature of the political system and the presence of the NRA policy rarely goes to the formulation stage. When there is a Republican government in power, focusing events do not lead to new policy alternatives being placed on the agenda..x000d.In Canada when there is a liberal government, firearms related focusing events will lead to an item being placed on the agenda. Policy makers will react quickly and decisively in creating new firearm legislation. There are two reasons for this: centralized power, and the minimization of interest group influence. When there is a conservative government, firearms related focusing events will lead to the policy being placed on the agenda, but rather than having major overhauls to the subsystem, changes will be incremental in nature. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes our understanding of an important relationship between the theory and practice of deliberative democracy. The Canadian Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO), Nova Scotia Power Incorporated (NSP), and Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC) recently launched consultative initiatives appearing to seek the deliberative democratic empowerment of citizens. In each case, we see key institutional features and orientations representing the values of deliberative democracy. However, only the TCHC’s participatory budgeting process begins to fulfill the promise of empowerment, realizing informed and equal public participation at the policy formulation, implementation, and evaluation stages and tying public deliberation directly to policy decision. Why is the TCHC a case of deliberative empowerment while NSP and the NWMO are not? Examining a range of context-based explanations, I find that actor motivation is key in achieving deliberative empowerment. I then identify and explore four factors (i.e., public pressure, political pressure, economic interest, and moral principle) that might account for the presence or absence of this motivation in a given case. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The welfare state literature has an increasing focus on the gender-neutrality of family policies that relieve dependence on the market. Yet as Orloff (1993) argues, if wives face hurdles to the market that their husbands do not, a gender neutrality focus is premature, because policies that seem to help women actually hinder full market access. For example, Morgan and Zippel (2003) argue that increasingly generous leave policies in Europe mask a desire to keep women out of the workforce. Bambra (2004) creates a gender-neutral de-familiasation index, but this and other analyses of family policy focus on parental leave and childcare. These help mothers and fathers, but none relieves women of the dependence on marriage. A complete analysis of family policy requires a focus on policies outside the traditional welfare state sphere. The paper incorporates dependence on marriage into the analysis of family policies in Canada and the United States through an examination of abortion and domestic violence. These policies either remove or create dependence on marriage and thus allow for a complete picture of equality in modern welfare states. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent turbulence in financial markets and government responses have re-politicized and drawn attention to finance and banking in dramatic fashion. This paper sketches some of the changes in the Canadian financial system over the last decades with special attention to the transformation of banking. It is argued that the mainstream political economy theory of financial intermediation fails to account for the trajectory of change. The relationship of these changes to the current financial crisis are considered, as are certain implications for public policy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on federalism has arrived at paradoxical conclusions. In some instances, federalism seems to calm secessionism; in others, it fans the flames. Attempts have been made to identify the conditions under which federalism does one or the other. Not surprisingly, then, this research focuses on cases in which federalism works or federalism fails. This focus has developed an overly simplistic view of the impact of federalism in select environments. Federalism is indeed a paradox, but the paradox goes much deeper than has been noted: even in the same county, federalism fans the flames of secessionism for some groups and reduces such calls in others. Canada is often explored as a case of federalism failing to stem the tide of secessionism. In Quebec, for example, secessionists have adeptly used federal institutions to bring Quebec to the brink of independence. This fails to note two obvious points: first, federalists continue to win the day in Quebec; second, independence movements have developed in other parts of Canada. This paper explores the impact of federalism on territorial politics in Canada and its implications for studies of the paradox of federalism. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship has highlighted a disconnect between “mainstream” political science and the study of urban politics in the United States. This paper suggests that Canadian urban political science suffers â€" doubly â€" from similar pathologies. This situation might be characterized, tongue-in-cheek, as one “black hole” orbiting another. As part of a larger project reviewing the state of Canadian urban political science, we evaluate the Canadian discipline in comparison to its American counterpart, positing and appraising various hypotheses that may explain the relative marginality of the (sub)field. Three explanations are advanced:.x000d.(1) Institutional: Canadian urban political science is marginalized not because there are too few interested scholars â€" as could be argued in the American case â€" but rather because interested faculty are so thinly dispersed across university departments. .x000d.(2) Epistemological: Unlike the US experience, students of Canadian politics, and especially federalism scholars, have been predisposed to ignore local government and urban politics. .x000d.(3) Ontological: Canadian cities are fundamentally different from American cities in important respects â€" though this may be changing. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Global Periphery, major sectors of societies caught in the middle of an intense globalization process seem to be losing out in the discussions on new technologies adoption. The periphery has relied on alien governance models for genomic technologies without addressing local political realities and launching a high degree of citizen and stakeholder dissatisfaction. Mexico, Brazil and Canada situated at distant development levels, are net importers of genomic technologies, adopting measures for the use of GM crops. Heated and politically charged debates have taken place around numerous but elusive potential benefits wielded by the experts; scientists, government and the business community. In this paper we compare their current governance models, underlining democratic and legitimacy deficits in policy design and actor behavior. We argue that the benefits of genomics and other new technologies can only be realized through the development of locally grounded governance in which legitimacy takes precedence over authority. Our research points to the need to stimulate equity in Center-Periphery and rural-urban exchanges to correct larger social and power imbalances and points to some interesting models in public consultation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Federal electoral districts in Canada are typically drawn with much greater compactness than Congressional districts in the United States. However, in recent decades, redistricting commissions in some parts of Canada have engaged in aggressive U.S.-style redistricting. Is a decrease in compactness correlated with an increase in electoral volatility? Trends in recent elections across redistricting cycles in Canada are examined, with comparisons made to the United States. The paper also includes a discussion of the ramifications of redistricting that pays less attention to traditional political boundaries. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do courts affect the way in which federalism works? And, do different courts (or systems of constitutional review) affect the functioning of federalism differently? I argue that politicians anticipate the likelihood of a judicial veto in order to determine whether compliance or defection from the federal arrangement is more beneficial. To the extent that one system of constitutional review may make it more difficult for politicians to anticipate court rulings than another, it is reasonable to expect that politicians will strategize differently in one and another system. The paper compares the case of Spain, Belgium and Canada. I argue that the European system of concentrated constitutional adjudication makes the predictability of the Court’s behavior more difficult than in the Canadian decentralized model of judicial review. This accounts for the higher degree of litigation on federalism in Spain compared to Canada, where federal conflict tends to be resolved in the political arena. Low levels of litigation in Belgium are explained in terms of the balance between the incentives provided by courts and the party system. My arguments are tested with author’s own data set on the pattern of litigation in the three countries. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite limited electoral and governmental reward, third parties commonly contest elections under single-member-district plurality (SMD-p) electoral rules. Even under the strong party duopoly of the United States, third parties continually contest local, state, and national elections. In this paper, we relax the assumption that third party candidates are motivated solely by the rewards of office and examine the incentives for them to contest elections under variations in electoral volatility and competition. We propose a curvilinear (U-shaped) relationship between electoral competition and third party participation. When electoral competition is either very low or very high we expect the number of third party candidates to be high, due to increased opportunity to draw attention to policy issues or affect the election outcome. We expect a positive relationship between electoral volatility and third party candidacies, since high volatility signals a de-aligned electorate. We test our claims using district-level data in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States from 1980-2000. The results of negative binomial regressions indicate that third parties are more likely to contest elections when electoral uncertainty is high. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data on Canadian elections from 1980 to 2004, this paper explores voters’ responsiveness to changes in the amount of federal transfer payments received by their home provinces and whether this responsiveness exhibits a ‘negativity bias’. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using constituency level data from Canadian provincial legislative elections, the paper tests the relationship between party competition and voter turnout. Controlling for other factors, multiparty measures of competition are related to turnout. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper surveys George Grant's deep sympathies with the Heideggerian critique of technology. It develops Grant's late theological position, formed as a riposte to Heidegger's historicism. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role the media plays in influencing the level of aid given by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) to other countries in response to natural disasters. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that a lack of resources and strong party discipline prevents Canadian legislative committees from being effective in their scrutiny and legislative roles and instead further cements authority in the hands of party leaders. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proposed paper will evaluate the central claims of deliberative democratic theory with direct reference to timely cases of deliberative democratic decision-making in Canada. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Canadian military is benefiting from a major increase in spending. However, it is unclear how long this program will last. This paper will contend that despite the need for the increase, it is unlikely to continue beyond the current government. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I am currently working on a project where I look at how the S.C.C. understands Canadian federalism and how this understanding is used as a variable in arriving at its decision. This paper focuses on the Quebec Veto Reference. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Lost Canadians' are people who have recently discovered that, despite assumptions, they are not Canadian citizens. The paper explores the tension between the idea of consent and criteria of birth as conditions of political membership. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Strategic Social Plan (SSP) of the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador lasted from 1998 to 2004, when a new government terminated it. The SSP was to bring the voluntary, community-based sector (VCBS) - i.e. local voluntary organizations with deep community roots - into the policy process to deliver services and plan policy but failed to do so. In part, this owed to poor structures, bureaucratic opposition, limited financing, and misreading the VCBS's capacity as a policy actor. However, two contextual factors figured prominently: a clientelistic political culture and a highly centralized government. Together they discouraged both citizen engagement and devolving authority. The paper examines the SSP's history, giving equal weight to institutional, conjunctural, and contextual factors. It reaches two conclusions. The first and most important is that experiments in governance are unlikely to succeed where government has little experience with or intere! st in collaborative enterprises. Second, the research indicates that any attempts to include the VCBS in the social policy process, even as service providers, must be carefully planned. The work is based on research done with the Values Added Community-University Research Alliance, which links Memorial University and the Community Services Council of St. John's, NL. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The tendency of Catholics to vote for the Liberal Party of Canada has puzzled Canadian political scientists for decades. This paper evaluates the tendency for Catholics to vote for the Liberal Party from the viewpoint of assessing whether a "Catholic ethos," a concept that has long been entertained by scholars but has yet to be clearly demonstrated, does in fact exist. I define the Catholic ethos as containing two elements - preferences for support for the disadvantaged, and recognition of the role of government in providing this support. I argue that those who hold a Catholic ethos prefer the Liberal Party because it comes closest to representing their views - in other words, it is an ideological choice rather than one based in specific issues or long-standing cleavages. I use data from the 1999-2004 wave of the World Values Survey and the 2000 Canadian Election Survey to evaluate the ideological preferences of Canadians outside Quebec by religious grouping, and then test whether those preferences account for some of the power of Catholic identity in a Liberal vote model. The data show that Catholics do differ from non-Catholics on these two dimensions of a Catholic ethos, but the results for influencing Liberal vote choice are mixed. There is some evidence that the role of government preferences are part of the attraction of the Liberal Party for Catholics, and much stronger evidence that Catholics believe the Liberal Party is best able to deliver on its social policy preferences. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparative study of the impact of party leaders and their personality traits on election outcomes is diverse and non-cumulative-it has followed a number of directions, and the literature is conflicted in almost all of these areas. One of the main branches within the leaders literature focuses on the evaluation of personality traits, and scholars are unable to agree about which traits voters take note of; whether traits actually affect election outcomes; if they do which are more important; and why or how traits are evaluated in the first place. When one looks more closely at the literature, it becomes clear that what is needed is a larger comparative analysis that incorporates election studies across time and space, in order to be able to make more definitive conclusions about the role of leader evaluations. However, one of the challenges to this endeavor stems from the nature of the data available. Different traits are included in different election studies over time, and often even where trait continuity does exist, the question format changes, making comparability over time and across space very difficult. This paper examines the impact of question format, using pooled data from election studies conducted in two countries, Canada and the United States. The analysis suggests that question format does indeed have an effect on respondents' evaluations of party leaders, but more research is needed before we can make conclusions about the implications of these effects for the comparative study of the role of leaders. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can we explain that citizens stay tuned to politically informative TV programs with new media growing and offering more entertainment alternatives? Furthermore, are programs which blend information and entertainment the best way to target citizens? Baum (2002, 2003) and Zaller (1999, 2003) claim that most people, acting rationally, watch television to be entertained. Consequently, they watch more entertaining and less informative programs as the alternatives offered by the new media increase. Following this, some of them argue that the media should present political information in a more entertaining way to capture the attention of viewers. However, these authors offer little empirical evidence about viewers' actual behavior. This paper attempts to provide a better understanding of the infotainment concept and viewers' exposure to TV programs. First, rather than opposing information to entertainment as many scholars do, we define infotainment by drawing a clear distinction between the information on one dimension and the entertainment on the other dimension. Second, we locate more than 100 programs broadcast in Canada along these two dimensions. To achieve this, we conducted a survey of experts familiar with TV programming in Canada, using methods similar to those developed by scholars who have spatially located political parties (for example, Castles and Mair 1984). Third, using micro-level data collected by BBM Canada with portable peoplemeters, we demonstrate that citizens are less resistant to informative programs than is usually believed. The more time people spend watching television, the more they are exposed to political information. Moreover, exposure to an informative program is more likely to occur when people have watched the program before (inheritance effect) and when it is scheduled on a channel that viewers usually watch (loyalty effect). Despite technological innovations, viewers remain passive in front of their TV. Transforming information into infotainment is not the only means to increase exposure to political information: broadcasters' schedule strategies also matter. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I demonstrate that higher levels of union membership and NDPprovincial governments are associated with lower post-tax-and-transfer inequality inCanadian provinces. These results are consistent with the power resources theory ofinequality and the welfare state first advanced by Korpi (1983) and Stephens (1979),which claims that differences in organizational resources such as unions and left po-litical parties are responsible for differences in distributional outcomes. While manystudies have found this association using cross-national data from rich democracies,the repeated use of data from the same set of countries raises the possibility thatthe relationship is due to unobserved country-specific characteristics. Using a pooledcross-sectional time series dataset from 1980 to 2003 and focusing on within-provincevariation in Canada, I find evidence consistent with the power resources model. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author attempted exit polling during advance poll voting and the general election in January 2006 to understand how and if party and candidate mobilization occurs. The polling was generally scuttled by Elections Canada and by other problems involved in trying to conduct exit polling remotely. The paper shares the problems that occurred and a few results reached by a very small N and offers suggestions to scholars who desire to exit poll in Canada in the future. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Direct mail is a pervasive feature of modern political campaigns. But does it work? This paper presents evidence from a field experiment into the effects of direct mail. Working with a front-running campaign during the race for the leadership for the Liberal Party of Canada, we randomly assigned a subset of convention delegates to receive a direct mail treatment. We then measured the effects of this treatment on delegates' ratings and preference ordering of leadership candidates using a survey instrument. Our results indicate that despite its ubiquity, the direct mail had minimal persuasive power. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is the first Canadian analysis to consider ethnic differences in voluntary association activity using national sample survey data and applying multivariate controls. Findings from the Economy, Security, and Community Survey of 2000 indicate that most of Canada's major ethnic or racial minority groups differ little in their average number of voluntary association involvements. The main exceptions are relatively low levels of association membership for Latin/Central/South Americans and East Asians, especially before controls, and quite high levels for the Jewish minority. Further analyses reveal that minorities are more likely than other groups to join associations related to their own particular ethnic group and that this partly accounts for the relatively small differences in overall voluntary activity between ethnic minorities, on the one hand, and non-minorities, such as North/West European and British respondents, on the other hand. The implications of these results for understanding the "bridging" and "bonding" roles of voluntary associations in Canadian society are briefly discussed. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By examining youth employment policy, this paper explores how the current strategy of integrating social welfare policy with education policy in accordance with a neo-liberal framework has contributed to theelusive social union in Canada. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares how the legal academies in Canada, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand shaped the roles that their respective courts assumed under the Canadian Charter, the British Human Rights Act, and New Zealand?s new bill of rights. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]