Constitutionalists and political scientists often claim that federal high courts are neutral and impartial arbiters of federalism disputes. However, analysis of the political impact of nine federal high courts on the division of powers clearly indicates that such courts are best characterized as centralist and nationalist. This is largely the result of the strong institutional factors that link the federal high court to the political institutions of the central government, notably the process by which federal judges are appointed. The political theory of federalism must thus be modified to take into account the centralist function of judicial review.

Cultural and racial pluralism have increasingly become a “riveting reality” of contemporary Canadian society. Various dimensions of this reality are explored and critical observations are made about the contribution of Canadian political science to an understanding of the phenomenon and its impact on our political life. The increasing polyethnicity of Canadian society has pressured our decision-makers into articulating both a vision and a policy of multiculturalism. However, since the early 1980s both vision and policy have come under siege. The motives of the critics of multiculturalism are questioned, and an endorsement is made of policies which continue to seek answers in pursuit of the democratic ideals of procedural justice, human equality and mutual respect.

This article tests hypotheses about the electoral support of Canada's first—and perhaps most significant—third party. It demonstrates that two micro-economic concepts, price elasticity of demand and efficiency of production, describe accurately the material base of Progressive party support. It thereby subsumes the study of agrarian parties and voting behaviour within a more general (public choice) framework. It also clarifies and substantiates important elements of the conventional wisdom about Progressive support, and it suggests means which might also shed new light upon the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and Social Credit.

Federalism is commonly described, in Canada and elsewhere, as a political expedient, or a constitutional arrangement, or a sociological characteristic of some societies. Federalism can also be a moral experiment that seeks to realize a way of life. Canada is an instance of such an experiment. Moreover, the moral value that grounds the Canadian experiment is not freedom or diversity, but fraternity. Federalism as fraternity has its beginnings in Cartier's vision of Confederation, and provides a vision of federalism that can sustain Canadians in their times of trouble.

In 1971, Peter Lougheed's Conservatives put an end to the long rule of the Social Credit party in Alberta. Many accounts maintain that large-scale social change that occurred in the province as a result of the postwar oil boom was responsible for this important change of government. Urbanization, in particular the expansion of the urban middle classes, secularization and increasing wealth are often cited as the primary causes of Social Credit's downfall. This article challenges this popular interpretation, arguing instead that short-term factors such as leadership, contemporaneous issues and campaign organization better explain the Conservative triumph. Also challenged is the larger claim that election outcomes may be determined by matters beyond anyone's control.

Over a decade ago, the federal Liberal government announced one of the most controversial policy initiatives in Canadian history, the National Energy Program (NEP). The bargaining that followed the NEP's announcement on October 28, 1980 is easily recalled; intense disagreements focussed on economic, partisan and, ultimately, constitutional issues. While these events have stimulated a wide range of investigations, a prominent gap exists in the scholarship: very few studies adopt a game-theoretic perspective. In seeking to explain strategic interaction over energy policy, such an approach might increase understanding of the difficult political processes surrounding the NEP in a wider context.

These are five stages to the game-theoretic investigation that follows. First, a brief history of the phase of confrontation is provided. Second, the game-theoretic interpretation is presented in general terms, including participants, strategies and potential outcomes. Relevant measurements are derived in the third phase. In the fourth stage, the process of a sequential game is analyzed, in both abstract and operational terms. Fifth, and finally, policy-related implications of the analysis are discussed, along with possible directions for further research.

The Citizens' Constitution Theory, formulated by Alan Cairns, provides a powerful explanation of the changes in Canadian politics during the 1980s. It tackles a research question that has far-reaching implications for the fundamental dynamics of Canadian political life—namely, how does constitutional change affect political participation? Cairns's thesis has gained widespread acceptance in the relevant Canadian literature, but the linkages between attitudes and behaviour at the core of the theory have never been subjected to systematic tests with attitudinal research data. The purpose of this investigation, then, is to make operational the Citizens' Constitution Theory and to evaluate the empirical support for it. The authors outline the central elements of the Citizens' Constitution Theory and discuss how Cairns relates the core concepts to each other. They then suggest that the same concepts and their linkages might also be explained by an alternative theoretical perspective that comes from one variant of New Politics Theory. The empirical section of this analysis uses recently collected survey results to mount three different tests of the two theories. In the first instance, the focus is on the question: how well do both theories predict each set of linkages that can be found in the Citizens' Constitution Theory? The second test treats both theories comprehensively, as causal models, and examines the empirical support for them using path analysis. The final section evaluates the generalizability of both theories. The main finding is that New Politics Theory provides as good an explanation—and by some standards, a better explanation for recent changes in the patterns of Canadian political participation than does the Citizens' Constitution Theory.

The orthodox view that Canada's ideological tradition is more supportive of an active state cannot explain earlier innovations in social and labour policy in the United States. A neo-pluralist and neo-institutionalist synthesis is used to contrast these nations. Organic ideologies of labour, agrarian, business and professional groups reveal no consistent national differences in support for state action. Initial state interventions were similar and limited. But institutional development occurred in different contexts, producing more effective executive leadership in Canada. American policy was constrained by the Congress, with its opportunities for blocking, and by inadequate executive power. Frustration with inaction plus greater social well-being reduced demands in the US for state action. Canada's institutions allowed more creative policy and fostered greater support for state action, especially where the weak economy exacted costs on social groups. But constitutional change could replicate American gridlock, and reduce the capacity for new state action.

Media intrusion theory holds that the advent of electronic media, especially television, has accelerated or even precipitated party decline. This is evidently borne out by the declining membership of, and weakening support for, the two major Australian parties which each enthusiastically embraced new forms of political communication. However, “media intrusion” has arguably strengthened rather than weakened Canada's already frail brokerage parties. This different experience may be explained by the dissimilar legislative, federal and media environments in which Canadian and Australian political parties operate. Curiously, although the new forms of political communication have had different impacts, these have triggered changes in Australian political parties which have increased their resemblance to their Canadian counterparts.

The Trudeau-Lévesque debate has created a political deadlock that threatens not only Confederation but federalism as well. At the core of the political deadlock is a philosophical dispute about language, in which liberty is set against community, and particularism becomes opposed to universalism. Not only does the Trudeau-Lévesque deadlock presuppose an antagonism between basic values that is difficult to justify, but it has also diverted attention from important dimensions of Canadian federalism. An exploration of the Trudeau-Lévesque debate provides insights as to how the deadlock can be dissolved, thereby facilitating the re-imagination of Confederation.

This article investigates whether the entry of a greater number of women into the political arena could transform gender relations. The opinions of female and male New Democratic, Liberal and Parti québécois candidates in the 1989 Quebec general election were polled, in order to clarify three main questions: Do the female candidates polled have opinions favourable to feminist demands? Do female and male candidates have the same opinions with respect to these demands? Do political party and political philosophy influence the opinions of each sex on feminist demands? The results show that, generally speaking, women have higher scores on a feminist index than men. More specifically, this gap between women and men varies in accordance with the thematics of feminism, and with political party and political philosophy.

This article proposes a political culture explanation of the collapse of Communism in the GDR and of the current crisis of democracy in reunited Germany. Based on the qualitative and quantitative analysis of an original survey, it argues that the erosion of values that had stabilized East German society motivated the popular revolution of 1989. The conflict of surviving distinct values with those of the West has poisoned the socio-political climate in Germany and contributed to the rise of xenophobia. A constitutional debate accompanying reunification might have mitigated this conflict and the present crisis.

This article presents tests of effects of social class background on voters' perceptions of most and least favoured federal parties, perceived party differences and subjective class voting. The data were taken from the 1984 Canadian National Election Study. The results show that subjective class voting extended to voters' beliefs about least liked parties. And the greater the perceived differences between voters' preferred parties and their second and third choice parties, the greater the level of class voting. An index which combined respondents' perceptions of the class orientations of most and least liked parties increased the estimate of the level of subjective class voting that takes place. The results suggest that this index provides an improved way of assessing subjective class voting. This index is a useful improvement upon previous measures because it incorporates information on the extent to which voters see Canadian politics as presenting class-based alternatives. This is the conceptual domain of the dependent variable in the literature on subjective class voting, but perceived class-based alternatives are seldom measured directly.

Now that the advent of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has made the fact of judicial power so obvious, it is important to develop the conceptual vocabulary for describing and assessing this power. One such concept that has been applied to the study of United States and British appeal courts is the notion of “party capability theory,” which suggests that different types of litigant will enjoy different levels of success, as both appellant and respondent. Using a data base derived from all reported decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada between 1949 and 1992, this article applies party capability theory to the performance of Canada's highest court, and compares the findings with similar studies of American and British courts.

The literature on Canadian Foreign Policy has often been characterized as overly descriptive and theoretically weak. This type of characterization, advanced most recently by Maureen Molot, is no longer wholly accurate. By reviewing several relatively recent contributions and debates in this literature, it is demonstrated that in pockets, the subfield has advanced substantially in theoretical sophistication. Nevertheless, it continues to manifest important gaps and limited cumulation. The article speculates on why this should be so, and on how the theoretical condition of the subfield can be advanced. Approaches which incorporate the interplay of internal and external influences on policy, which borrow from important developments in the wider fields of International Relations and Comparative Politics, and which engage in comparison across issue-areas, countries and time are advocated. Applications drawing on “historical materialist,” regime, and epistemic community literatures are specifically promoted.

The Constitution Act, 1982 recognized certain rights for aboriginal peoples. These rights were to be identified and defined subsequently. Ten years later, after several rounds of negotiations, the question of the recognition and definition of an aboriginal right to self-government remains unresolved. Many specialists claim that the problems faced during these negotiations result from the incompatibility between the main philosophical traditions guiding the actors. Through an analysis of the relationship between the cosmology underlying the aboriginal demands on the one hand and three of the main trends in contemporary Canadian liberal political philosophy on the other hand, this article tries to shed some light on the philosophical incompatibility thesis. While a strictly individualist liberalism rejects outright the notion of collective rights and Will Kymlicka's revisionist liberal individualism limits considerably the scope of an aboriginal right to self-government, communitarian liberalism, like that of Charles Taylor, seems to provide a favourable framework for the integration of cultural co-existence with the First Nations, without repudiating its attachment to fundamental individual rights and freedoms.