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

While the causes of declining political trust have been investigated extensively in the literature, much less empirical effort has been devoted to the study of its political consequences. This paper focuses on the decline of trust in Canada during the period 1984-1993, and on its effect on Canadian voting behavior. We build upon Hetherington’s (1999) work to explore the impact of political trust on the vote and on abstention in a multiparty electoral context. Multinominal logit estimations are performed using individual-level survey data from three Canadian federal elections. While distrust is shown to significantly affect electoral participation, thus acting as an alienating factor, the results indicate that decreasing trust acts more as a motivation to support third-party alternatives. The study further demonstrates that in a multiple party setting, "old-line" major parties electorally suffer from declining political trust, but some third parties benefit more from this phenomenon than others. In particular, the transition from a three- to a five-party system in the 1993 Canadian election and the Reform Party’s efforts to attract support from distrustful voters seem to have eroded the New Democrats? role as a vehicle of distrust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes up the challenge of studying representational dynamics with reference to feminist and anti-feminist movements outside the United States, and of examining participation in contexts other than legislatures. It considers claims-making by women party elites in Canada, where the political landscape has featured both organized feminism and anti-feminism since the early 1970s and mid-1980s, respectively. In particular, the study examines the public campaign statements of candidates for the leadership of major federal parties in the period 1975 through 2006, paying close attention to relations between these positions, on one side, and the changing fortunes of feminist and anti-feminist movements, on the other. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines relationships between constituency characteristics and individual legislators' behavior in a parliamentary system, drawing on an exhaustive dataset of over 43,000 oral questions in the Canadian House of Commons (from 1983 to 2004), combined with data on constituency-level demographics and electoral outcomes. In doing so, it applies some of the theories developed in the US roll call voting literature to another country, and another policy venue (Question Period). Analyses use both demographics and voting as proxies for constituency policy preferences. Both approaches yield evidence of dyadic representation, an important finding given the party-focused tone of the existing Canadian literature. Models using electoral results also provide evidence that 'electoral pressure' increases MPs' representation of constituency preferences. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Direct mail is a pervasive feature of modern political campaigns. But a question remains: does it effectively persuade voters? 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. Using a survey instrument, we then measured the effects of this treatment on delegates' ratings and preference ordering of leadership candidates. Our results suggest that the effects of the direct mail were principally negative. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article deals with the way in which Canadian politician Louis Riel's political actions, articulations and identity were and are constructed by others, not Riel himself. It is the created political image of Riel in distinction from the actual views and claims of Riel himself that stand as the threshold figure of Canadian political life as the author sees it. He assesses the value of philosopher Giorgio Agamben's work for understanding Riel's role in Canadian political life. Riel's exile and execution are also discussed.

We examine voters' perceptions and evaluations of the Prime Minister's role in a major scandal, the "sponsorship scandal" that erupted in Canada in February 2004. We use the campaign waves of the 2004 and 2006 Canadian Election Studies (CES) and we focus on panel respondents who were interviewed in both waves. We analyze their perceptions of the Prime Minister's knowledge of the affair and their assessments of his handling of the issue and we ascertain how predispositions and level of information affected voters' reactions. We show that party identification strongly shaped voters' evaluations, and that the effect endured over two elections and was mostly direct, that is, largely unmediated by perceptions. There was little difference between the better and the less informed in 2004 but by 2006 the better informed were more prone to revisit their initial harsh judgments and to believe that the PM might have been unaware of the wrongdoing and had done a good job of dealing with the issue. Evaluations of the PM's performance were strongly influenced by perceptions of his awareness of the affair. Finally the verdict of the Commission of inquiry (that the PM should be exonerated from any blame) had only a marginal impact on voters' perceptions and judgments. ..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 emphasizes that Canadian political parties are based on familiar social cleavages, that is, religion, region, nationality and national origin, language, ethnicity, class, and economic sector. It also records the persistence of the linkage of the social differences to the parties even as the party system has changed. The theoretical significance is in the demonstration that parties promote the interests of some social groups while excluding others even in political systems that attempt to lessen the legitimacy of intergroup conflict.