For the last three decades, scholars of Canadian political culture have favoured ideological explanations for state formation with the starting point being the American Revolution and Loyalist resettlement in British North America. This article challenges both the ideological bias and the late eighteenth-century chronology through a reassessment of early modern developments in the British imperial state. It shows that many of the institutional features associated with the state in British North America and later Canada—strong executives and weak assemblies, Crown control of land and natural resources, parliamentary funding of colonial development and accommodation of non-British subjects—were all institutionalized in the imperial state before the American Revolution and before the arrival of significant numbers of ethnically British settlers to Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and Quebec. Ideological discourses in the British North American colonies that became Canada, unlike those that became the United States, traditionally acknowledged the presence of a strong state in its imperial and colonial manifestations. Rather than challenging its legitimacy, as had Americans, British North Americans, whether liberals, republicans or tories, debated the function of the state and the distribution of power within it.

This article seeks to clarify the meaning of conscience and to exhibit its role in the philosophy of Hobbes. The author compares Hobbes's philosophy to Locke's doctrine. Instead of the usual contrast of Hobbes, the enemy to the claims of conscience, and Locke, the defender of the rights of conscience, he shows that Hobbes found a place for conscience within the law—the rights of defendants to a jury of their choice, and the rights of jurors to a verdict according to their conscience—whereas Locke found a place for conscience outside the law, in the judgment of revolutionaries when a revolution is justifiable or successful. In elaborating Hobbes's views of trial by jury, the author suggests that the best forensic metaphor for conscience is a juror (rather than the more usual ones of a witness, a judge or a legislator). Conscience is subjective certainty, dangerous outside an institutional setting, but indispensable for decisions not based on demonstrable knowledge, such as a juror's verdict beyond reasonable doubt.

The article challenges long-established conventions about how Canada's federal government works. It argues that Cabinet has joined Parliament as an institution being bypassed. In the late 1990s, political power is in the hands of the prime minister and a small group of carefully selected courtiers rather than with the prime minister acting in concert with his elected cabinet colleagues. The article reviews the forces that have led to the rise of court government and the policy instruments and administrative tools that enable it to function. National unity concerns, the role of the media and lobbyists, as well as reforms at the centre of government and globalization, have all served to reshape how policy and decisions are made in the government of Canada. The changes hold important implications, not just for cabinet government, but also for the public service and Canadians themselves.

Recent scholarship on Mary Wollstonecraft portrays her as either a liberal who disrupts the boundaries between public and private spheres or as a proto-socialist paving the road for a class-based feminism. Neither of these characterizations adequately captures the radical quality of her work. A close study of her views on class and family place her squarely within the liberal tradition of political economy. While she politicizes these institutions and, in so doing represents a threat to the latenineteenth-century British ruling classes, she neither disrupts the basic tenets of liberalism nor seriously anticipates the class insights of socialist feminism.

Hobbes regarded traditional Christianity as one of the leading threats to the preservation of civil peace. This article argues that he responded to this threat by developing an innovative reinterpretation of Christianity designed to tame it from within. This reinterpretation involved the reshaping of leading Christian doctrines around the same liberal principles that underlie his conception of political authority, the natural law principles of equality of right and inalienable rights. Although this political “liberalization” of Christianity may well have enhanced the prospects of civil peace, it did so by undermining doctrines central to Christianity's biblical roots.

Historically, Canadian Confederation was both a compact of equal provinces and a compact of founding peoples, which established the province of Quebec in order to conserve French-Canadian culture in its historic homeland. This observation suggests a solution to the apparent conflict between the principle of provincial equality and the demand for special status for Quebec. The appearance of conflict arises from the habit of equating constitutional status with legislative power. If one distinguishes between status and power, it becomes possible to preserve the constitutional equality of the provinces while according special powers to the government of Quebec in furtherance of its unique historic purpose.

Recent work in the field of liberal political philosophy has focused on the value of cultural communities for the individual. The claim that liberal theory can give explicit recognition to the fact that individuals are rooted in a social context has produced an important debate about the preservation of minority cultures and a liberal defence of nationalism. This literature should be of interest to scholars of nationalism because liberal theorists have used concepts related to the nation, such as self-determination, in ways that go against conventional usage, and liberal theorists have made claims about the relationship of the right and the good with which some students of nationalism would disagree. This article presents a nationalist response to the liberal conception of community by developing one possible nationalist argument for the priority of the good over the right by claiming that the nation is a communal good. The author illustrates this argument with examples of the political projects of nationalists-in-government in the developed West. Liberals need not be concerned with this reality since democratic institutions will set some limits on nationalist projects by ensuring that they are the outcome of democratic processes. On this view, the importance of self-determination is that it provides the context for the creation of institutions for a debate about the relationship of the right and the good. Self-determination does not, as some liberal nationalists argue, constitute an automatic right to cultural preservation.

A school of thought has emerged within constitutional and political theory that a middle road exists between liberalism and anti-liberal communitarianism. This road, which the author terms “command liberalism” permits societies that follow it to bypass the obvious inequities of liberalism while still enjoying the benefits of liberal democracy. The existence of this middle road would be but a piece of intellectual trivia were it not for the fact that for the past two decades it has formed the normative basis for constitution-making in Canada. It has been a root cause of constitutional conflict, intergroup animosity, constitutional paralysis and, potentially, the break-up of the country. Command liberalism is well represented in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In addition, largely as a consequence of the Charter, it was the raison d'etre of the ill-fated Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords. For the most part, those who seek to travel this road in Canada do so with good intentions; they point to the appalling conditions of Native reserves, blatant examples of gender discrimination and institutionalized racism and homophobia within liberal democratic society as evidence of the need to construct more pluralistic means of collective representation. But good intentions do not square the circle of command liberalism. Indeed, the problem with this middle road is that it is circular, leading us back to where we started.

Despite what would appear to be pressures for policy convergence in Canada due to growing continental integration and market competitiveness, agro-environmental policies in the provinces of Quebec and Ontario have become increasingly divergent over the past decade. Quebec's policies are comprehensive, coercive in approach and intrusive in the production process; those in Ontario, while comprehensive, rely more on industry self-regulation and shy away from intruding significantly into farming practices. Three institutional factors help explain this policy divergence. First, Quebec's main environmental act enabled the Ministry of the Environment to participate in the agro-environmental policy community's “subgovernment,” while the Ministry of the Environment in Ontario remained in the “attentive public.” Second, the agricultural policy network in Ontario took on many attributes of closed bipartite corporatism during the 1990s, thereby enhancing the power potential of Ontario's farmers. Third, path dependence related to policy feedback predisposed Ontario to self-regulatory approaches, but favoured strong statist policies in Quebec. The combination of these institutional differences creates distinct negotiation settings in the two provinces. Consequently, in Ontario, policy discussions tend to focus on wealth generation to the exclusion of distributive justice, while in contrast, Quebec's institutions focus more on distributive issues, perhaps at the expense of aggregate value creation.

With the rise of the new managerialism in the 1980s, public policy makers have increased their use of management consulting knowledge in reforming their bureaucracies. To describe this situation, some have coined the term « consultocracy,» assuming that the emergence of managerialism created a growing demand for business management expertise in government circles that has allowed consultants to penetrate the state and become powerful actors in the process of administrative reform. This article asks how it has been possible for consultants to become (or not) influential players in the process of bureaucratic reform. The analysis shows that because of historical and institutional reasons, Britain has been more likely than France to give rise to a «consultocracy.»

This study addresses three questions: to what extent lobbying efforts undertaken by associations vary across different types of associations; what are the different lobbying instruments used by Canadian associations; what factors explain the intensity of the lobbying efforts deployed by the Canadian associations? These questions are dealt with through a sample of 438 associations operating in 12 different policy domains and at three possible levels of government (Canadian, provincial and municipal). The results show that leisure associations deploy less intense efforts in lobbying than public and private goods associations. Likewise, public and private goods associations do not appear to differ significantly with respect to efforts deployed in lobbying. Furthermore, the results show that the lobbying instruments used by associations differ across the different types of associations. Finally, the results indicate that competition between associations, participation in coalitions of associations and the number of policy domains in which associations have intense interests are significantly related to efforts deployed in lobbying by associations in many different policy domains. However, the variables related to the material resources of the associations have been shown to exert no significant impact on the lobbying efforts of Canadian associations.

This article uses a regression decomposition approach to explore the meaning of the gaps in electoral support for the federal Liberal party between Ontario, the West and Atlantic Canada, as well as the gap in Reform party support between the West and Ontario in the 1997 federal election. The analysis proceeds in two stages. The first stage involves determining whether the regional vote gaps reflect “true” regional differences or whether they can be explained simply in terms of differences in the sociodemographic makeup of the regions. Having ascertained that the gaps are not spurious, the second stage of the analysis probes the beliefs and attitudes that underlie them. The authors conclude that the gaps are driven not just by differences in political orientations and beliefs from one region to another, but also by more fundamental differences in basic political priorities.

This study tests explanations of the growth of Canadian provincial governments that draw from the political budget cycle approach. The approach assumes that governments jointly respond to electoral and partisan goals. When the next election is not expected soon, the government uses its discretionary power to pursue its ideological target. When the next election is near, politicians in government, fearing electoral defeat, deviate from their normal behaviour and engage in a re-election effort by undertaking an expansionary policy. This study suggests that provincial governments behave in the opportunistic fashion described by the model. Moreover, there is no sign that this opportunistic behaviour has been affected by government cutbacks in the 1990s.

When might high ethnic mobilization co-exist with social pluralism? The article addresses this question by comparing four of India's major ethnic movements/parties. “Organizational pluralism” denotes flexibility and autonomy in party-society and intra-party transactions. Pluralism within influential political organizations aids social pluralism. High levels of organizational pluralism led Dravidianism to aid social pluralism; comparatively low levels led Hindu revivalist and Sikh organizations to ignore incentives to adopt more inclusive strategies. States willing and able to foster tolerance will emerge amidst high ethnic mobilization only if activists promote pluralism within major ethnic organizations.

This article examines the popularity of Canadian governments between 1974 and 1998 as revealed by the monthly Gallup poll. Approval of each majority government in the 1974–1993 period underwent a cycle of honeymoon, decay and recovery. Underneath the cycle was a long-term downward trend. A simple politicoeconomic model accounts for a large fraction of long-term decay and helps explain the anti-government landslides of 1984 and 1993. But the model leaves inter-election popularity cycles largely unexplained. After 1993, the economy ceased to account for popularity and a wholly new, but apparently stable, electoral cycle emerged. The article concludes with speculation on causes of and contingency in electoral cycles.

This article examines resolutions passed by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights from 1982 to 1997, which targeted specific states, governments and other political actors for violations of human rights. The types of actors that were named, their regional distribution and the actions taken by the Commission are each analyzed. Among the findings presented are that the Commission's effectiveness has been limited by its inability to address most systematic government violations of human rights, by a lack of universality in its application of international standards and by a recent trend toward consensus decision making.

Two of the new states of interwar Europe were Estonia and Finland. Both arose out of the Russian Empire and both were literate, Protestant nations. Yet democracy broke down in Estonia but survived in Finland. These outcomes would seem ironic, given that Finnish independence involved a brutal civil war and Finland was linguistically divided—factors not present in Estonia. This study, however, examines not just the nature of independence but also the constitutional structures, party politics and regime crises of these two neighbouring cases. In terms of the factors commonly cited as favouring stable democracy, the Estonian-Finnish contrast shows the particular explanatory importance of political culture, the speed of democratization, the views of elites and the nature of the party system. What happened in Finland also implies that a presidential, or at least a balanced semipresidential, system cannot be considered as inherently dangerous for democratic stability.

The political impact of difficult economic conditions in the democracies of the developing world depends in part on how people at the grass roots evaluate their political interests. This article argues that understanding the political interests of lower-income persons requires two separate analyses: how people think about their material conditions, which is affected by the type of material hardships and the objective capacity to cope with those conditions; and how people think about politics, given party and class identities and economic, historic and political contexts. Using in-depth interviews in Argentina, the research develops an analytical framework through which to evaluate the conditions under which people would, and would not, support a government that does not alleviate their economic difficulties. The analysis is used to examine recent events in Argentina and is applied to other cases.

Discussions over the debate on the electoral system in Canada typically contrast the actual distribution of legislative seats held by the parties resulting from the first-past-the-post system with what the outcome would have been with proportional representation. But the debate could consider another option, namely, the alternative vote. What would electoral outcomes have been in the 1997 Canadian election with the alternative vote? According to a simulation, 10 per cent of the members of parliament in Ottawa would have been different. The Liberals and the Conservatives would have benefited from the new distribution of votes while the Bloc Québécois and the Reform party would have fewer seats.

The rise and electoral success of the Confederation of Regions Party (CoR) in New Brunswick was seen as a major surprise in the context of provincial politics. The first reaction was to analyze the new party as mainly a party opposed to official bilingualism. In this article the author looks at another aspect of importance that is the populist dimension behind the CoR party. Four aspects are studied: the period of emergence (1989–1991), party organization and structures, ideology, attitudes of the membership.