Cette étude analyse tout d'abord les activités sportives dites périscolaires en France et extraescolares en Espagne à partir de leur cadre législatif de l’éducation au niveau national. Sont après identifiées les différentes dynamiques de décentralisation de chaque pays. Cet article interroge ensuite plus précisément leurs divergences en termes de territorialisation de l'action publique. Ainsi, sont analysés le rôle des États dans les jeux d’échelle politique et la participation des partenaires dans la gestion de ces activités à caractère intersectoriel. Ce travail démontre le désengagement des administrations nationales des deux pays dans le pilotage desdites activités. Cela s'explique par des raisons autres que la seule décentralisation. Paradoxalement, la décentralisation avérée n'a pas toujours comme résultat la territorialisation de l’éducation par projet favorisant une meilleure coordination des partenaires. La décentralisation peut d'ailleurs se révéler étonnamment contraignante.

The article addresses ongoing debates in the study of political knowledge and voting behavior. The article identifies significant divergences in previous work which may explain why such debates persist, including in the measurement of political knowledge and the inclusion of confounding variables. The article remedies these issues in an observational study examining how political knowledge affects the impact of spatial considerations and cognitive shortcuts on the vote. The article also contributes the first randomized experiment on this research question in the literature. Using the framework of conjoint analysis, the experiment evaluates how political knowledge affects the impact of spatial considerations and cognitive shortcuts on the vote. The article hypothesizes that political knowledge will increase the impact of spatial considerations on the vote but will not modify the impact of cognitive shortcuts. This expectation is supported in both the observational and experimental results.

This article brings three decades of broadly consistent survey data on survey respondents’ feelings about the parties as evidence of affective polarization. It also presents evidence about policy differences among the parties and makes an explicit link between elite and mass data with multilevel modelling. The article shows that affective polarization is real and also demonstrates its connection to the ideological landscape. But it also shows that conceptual categories originating in the United States must be adapted to Canada's multiparty system and to the continuing contrasts between Quebec and the rest of Canada. It suggests that accounts of Canada's twentieth-century party system may not apply to the twenty-first century.

Several scholars have noted that many types of news coverage (including political news) are increasingly characterized by an “infotainment” style—defined roughly as the communication of politically relevant information using styles and formats more commonly associated with entertainment-oriented programming. Despite this growing trend and the many findings surrounding its impact on politics and political discourse, very little research has been done on the nature and dynamics of infotainment within the Canadian context. In response, this article seeks to measure and evaluate the scope and nature of infotainment in Canadian political news coverage by (1) outlining a comprehensive conceptual definition of (and rigorous method of studying) infotainment and (2) sharing the results of our mixed-methods discourse analysis of infotainment characteristics within 969 hard news articles published in Canadian English-language newspapers that covered the 2019 Canadian federal election. Our findings demonstrate that there was a substantial presence of infotainment characteristics in this coverage. We discuss the detailed nature of these characteristics and the relationship between the presence of infotainment characteristics and those of the quintessentially “Golden Age” reporting style (often viewed as infotainment's polar opposite), while outlining a variety of broader implications and further research questions raised by these findings.

Cet article aborde les relations sino-africaines dans le cadre de l'analyse comparative des politiques étrangères. Il propose une analyse constructiviste des stratégies diplomatiques du Niger et du Burkina Faso dans leurs relations avec la RPC et Taïwan depuis les années soixante. En s'inspirant d'une démarche éclectique combinant d'une part, agents et structures et de l'autre, facteurs domestiques et facteurs systémiques, il explique les stratégies fluctuantes de reconnaissance diplomatique des deux États à l’égard des deux « Chine » par la construction sociale de l'intérêt national. Les résultats corroborent les postulats du constructivisme sur le poids des idées et des contextes dans la fabrique de l'intérêt national.

Dans cet article, je propose une analyse critique de la réponse des trois principaux théoriciens de l'interculturalisme majoritariste – Gérard Bouchard, Jérôme Gosselin-Tapp et Michel Seymour – à la question des minorités internes. Cette question est de savoir comment protéger le droit des minorités religieuses de pratiquer leur religion (tel que créé ou facilité par le multiculturalisme ou l'interculturalisme) sans violer le droit des femmes en leur sein de mener une vie exempte d'oppression (tel que défendu par le féminisme). Je soutiens que la réponse de ces auteurs est ambiguë, en ce sens qu'elle embrasse simultanément deux postures – la fermeté et la flexibilité – qui, lorsque considérées ensemble, sont contradictoires et, lorsque considérées séparément, présentent des problèmes spécifiques. Si dans le cas particulier du foulard islamique, ces auteurs élargissent momentanément leur perspective, leurs arguments à ce chapitre commandent des nuances importantes pour le moment absentes de leur raisonnement.

L’étude des imaginaires occupe dans l'historiographie dédiée au nationalisme camerounais une place marginale. Cet article traite d'eux à la fois comme modalités d'invention et de transformation de l’État-Nation depuis la fin du XIXe siècle. L’étude soutient qu'au cœur des multiples césures de l'histoire du Cameroun, l'imaginaire est apparu comme une ressource dans laquelle ont puisé les acteurs pour produire des utopies qui, dans des contextes divers ont pris une dimension performative. La réflexion fait trois principales contributions : elle montre tout d'abord que l'idée du Cameroun en tant qu'entité territoriale indivisible tire ses origines de la période coloniale allemande. Elle révèle qu'au-delà de ses causes structurelles, la question anglophone au Cameroun objective l'idée d'un conflit d'imaginaires entre francophones et anglophones. L'analyse de la question diasporique souligne enfin l'influence des médias dans la production des imaginaires dans la crise anglophone.

Since the #MeToo movement, several countries have taken steps to address sexual harassment in politics (for example, the United States, United Kingdom and Canada). While researchers have evaluated the electability of candidates accused of sexual harassment, less is known about what the public thinks should happen when elected officials engage in this behaviour. Utilizing an innovative module from the 2019 Canadian Election Study, we assess the steps voters believe legislatures should take when an MP sexually harasses someone. Our results demonstrate that a vast majority of the public believes that MPs should face consequences when they commit sexual harassment, including potential removal from office. We also find that women are more likely than men to believe MPs should be punished when they are accused of sexual harassment. These findings have relevance for legislatures globally, revealing the importance of transparent, independent processes to address harassment and violence in the political sphere.

In this article, we study how political parties located on the right of the political spectrum adapt to changing electoral and political constraints. Drawing on the concept of policy feedback, we turn to the politics of social policy in the province of Quebec to show that the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ), a right-wing party, embraced a more centrist strategy than the preferences of its electoral base would suggest. The CAQ has rejected the austerity policies associated with the previous government and has favoured social policy expansion rather than tax cuts or a quicker return to balanced budgets. We then explore the reasons for this move toward the centre. Our evidence suggests that self-reinforcing feedback effects from existing policies shape public opinion and electoral strategies, which contribute to moderating the actions of this right-wing governing party.

The COVID-19 pandemic has seen opponents of public health mandates deploy a range of populist and anti-elite arguments. The 2021 Canadian federal election was an exceptional “pandemic election” in which the COVID-19 health crisis took centre stage. But the election campaign also saw the populist People's Party of Canada (PPC) rise to prominence by opposing pandemic-related public health restrictions. While the party failed to win a seat, it did manage to triple its vote share (1.6 per cent to 4.9 per cent). It is unclear, however, what factors led to the rise in support for the PPC. To explore this issue, we draw on an original post-election survey (n = 18,950) and focus on populist attitudes and opposition to COVID-19-related public health restrictions. Results from regression models and structural equation models (SEMs) indicate that opposition to public health restrictions was a much stronger factor than populism in shaping support for the PPC.

This article offers a re-evaluation of Louis Riel's political, philosophical and religious writings by reconstructing these writings along utopian lines. In so doing, it supplements the existing literature on Riel's writings that tends to see Riel as either a prophetic figure or a practical man of action, but rarely, if ever, both. In its reconstruction of Riel's utopian vision, this article focuses on three aspects of his writings. First, it addresses his critical conception of Métis self-government before Confederation. Second, it examines his proposals for the overthrow of what he perceived as Anglo-Canadian tyranny in the North-West. Third, it considers his visions of an ideal—that is, utopian—society in the North-West. The article concludes by examining the implications of this reading of Riel's utopian vision for his legacy in Canadian political science.

Cet article aborde le phénomène des défections dans les partis politiques grâce à une étude du cas des députés québécois. Les entrevues avec les anciens parlementaires et une analyse des discours médiatiques à propos de leur départ documentent les motivations à quitter ou à rejoindre un autre parti. Cette recherche propose deux typologies novatrices : la première identifie les types de défections et la seconde explore les motivations à quitter. Les analyses montrent que les députés québécois partent surtout en raison de conflits liés aux valeurs et aux politiques, mais très peu pour le prestige. En ouvrant un dialogue avec les travaux d'Hirshman, l'article illustre aussi le rôle de la prise de parole et de l’écoute dans la décision pour un député de quitter un parti ou de rester dans celui-ci.

This article examines the state of the English-language peer-reviewed literature published over the 2011–2021 period whose objective is to describe and explain processes of development of Canadian public policies and their consequences. It first presents a profile of the surveyed literature's attention to different policy sectors, elements of public policy, and its chosen methodologies to study them. It then examines the empirical and theoretical contributions of the literature to uncovering the constitutive actors and their interactions in policy processes in policy domains of Canadian jurisdictions; the logics of chosen policy instruments and their distributive effects; and the interactions among Canada's structural, institutional and ideational features and policy actors’ motivations and behaviour with processes of policy innovation, continuity and change. A foremost contribution of Canadian policy studies to comparative policy studies is to demonstrate the causal impacts of the interaction of institutional, structural and ideational/cultural factors on processes of policy development.

Indigenous peoples continue to challenge Canadian colonial policies through nonroutine acts of resistance. Sustained scholarly attention on the frequency and characteristics of Indigenous resistance has dropped precipitously, with the time span of this scholarship typically ending by the early 2000s. Research on more recent acts of resistance is directed to small-n case studies. This research note examines Indigenous resistance in Canada between 2010 and 2020 as reported by news articles from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) to identify key characteristics of salient Indigenous resistance: What issue areas were the subject of resistance movements? Which Indigenous communities or groups contributed to acts of resistance? What strategies were employed? The research note's findings suggest that salient acts of resistance rarely result in immediate policy change from the state; instead, resistance has transformative potential to develop Indigenous governance that departs from settler-colonial state processes.

Much of political science rests on assumptions about how policy makers and citizens behave. However, questions remain about how public policy can improve the government–citizen relationship. In this research note, we present behavioural insights (BI) as one way to address this gap. First, we argue that BI can be strategically used both to alleviate administrative burdens and to enhance citizen experience. Second, we argue that BI interventions can assist in several stages of the policy process, strengthening causal inferences about policy efficacy. Third, we present original data from Canada's ongoing experimentation with BI across multiple jurisdictions and areas of public policy. We conclude by acknowledging the myriad pathways through which BI research can engage with public policy to support the enhancement of citizen-oriented service delivery.

This article examines the effect of racial attitudes on the electoral performance of the New Democratic Party (NDP). Since 2017, the NDP has been led by Jagmeet Singh, the first non-white leader of a nationally competitive Canadian political party. Voters’ racial attitudes and the race of party leaders have a significant effect on vote choice in the United States. Less is known about whether similar effects exist in Canadian elections. I show that NDP vote choice polarized on the basis of racial attitudes following Singh's ascension to party leader. Voters with cold feelings toward racial minorities were less likely to vote for the NDP in 2019 and 2021 than in comparable historical elections. In contrast, there is no significant difference between 2019/2021 and prior elections in support for the Liberals and Conservatives among such voters. These results suggest that racial attitudes are salient in Canadian elections and that national parties may face an electoral penalty when selecting non-white party leaders.

We introduce new data resources to enable spatial and nonspatial research on Canadian elections, electoral history and political geography. These include a comprehensive set of distinct identification codes for every federal electoral district in Canada from 1867 to the present, a complete set of digital boundary files for these electoral districts, historical census data aggregated to federal electoral districts, and tools to connect our district identification codes to federal election results. After describing the construction and content of these new resources, we provide an example of their use in a comparative-historical analysis of district compactness in Canada and the United States. We find that, in contrast to the United States, postwar institutional changes to district boundary-drawing processes had little effect on district compactness in Canada.

The stability of divided societies is an important and recurring concern in political science research. It has been suggested that distinctive socialization processes in the different regions of divided societies will lead to diverging trends in public opinion. Therefore, we investigate trends in public opinion on key political issues and attitudes in three divided societies: Canada (Quebec), the United Kingdom (Scotland) and Spain (Catalonia). Using over two decades of survey data, we show that these distinct communities indeed have a particular ideological profile but also that there is no indication these differences become larger over time. In other words, we do not observe any evidence for an increasing lack of public opinion coherence in these divided societies. We conclude with some observations on why divergence could not be observed at the level of public opinion but might still be present at the level of party elites.

S'intéressant au débat public québécois concernant l'affaire du mot en « n », survenue en 2020 à l'Université d'Ottawa, cet article vise à déterminer comment les discours de déni du racisme produits par les membres des groupes dominants se maintiennent au sein de l'espace public, malgré les critiques anti-racistes produites par les membres des groupes dominés. En combinant la théorie critique de la race, la théorie de l'injustice et l'ignorance épistémiques et la théorie des actes de discours, cet article propose une analyse critique du discours médiatique québécois sur l'affaire du mot en « n ». Il retrace ainsi les positions dénonçant l'utilisation du mot en « n » comme une insulte raciale et une manifestation du racisme systémique et celles justifiant la nécessité de protéger la liberté universitaire et la liberté d'expression face à une culture de l'annulation menaçant de les censurer. L'analyse du cas québécois révèle que le déni public du racisme reproduit des injustices herméneutiques à l’égard des critiques anti-racistes, particulièrement celles formulées par les communautés noires, et cela à travers un nouveau mécanisme linguistique que je nomme les « déviations illocutoires ».

In this research note, we document the extent to which negative beliefs about women's capacity to hold public office are widespread in Canada. Using a list experiment, our results demonstrate that many Canadians believe that men are “naturally better” leaders than are women and that women are “too emotional” and “too nice” for politics. While some groups are willing to explicitly own these views when asked directly about them (for example, older people, men, those who are more conservative and religious), others are unwilling to do so unless social desirability is mitigated (for example, younger people, left-leaning). By overcoming concerns with social desirability, we show that women still face explicit, often sexist, barriers in political work.