The cohesion of interest associations has been seen to depend, among other factors, on the character of the political regime. Federal regimes are said to have negative consequences for group cohesion because of their tendency to force extensive regional differentiation in associations. These conclusions are examined here and shown to be in need of elaboration. To explain differentiation in business associations, factors other than regime structure must be considered, specifically the structure of the sector being represented and the nature of the collective bargaining arrangements. When this is done, the wide variety of internal regional arrangements found in associations is better accounted for. Furthermore, some of these arrangements are shown to be more likely to weaken cohesion than others. The argument is based on a study of business associations in Canada and the United Kingdom that are active in three economic sectors—food processing, chemicals, and construction.

Several phenomena which have been separately observed in Canada are linked: namely the diffusion of power within the executive-administrative branch, the proliferation and expanded role of pressure groups, and the increased attention parliament has been receiving from interest organizations. Suggesting that this last may reflect fundamental changes in the policy system as a whole, it is argued that a tendency toward bureaucratic pluralism has led agencies to develop extra-governmental support at the interest group level; and that both interest groups and agencies have found it useful to exploit the legitimating and publicizing capacities of parliament. In so doing they have contributed to the enhancement of parliament's role in the policy process.

Two contemporary streams of thought in international relations offer significant theoretical challenges to the field and to the way it has been organized since the time of Rousseau. New power cycle theories propose that the etiology of war resides in different growth rates among the major powers. Hegemonic wars are a recurrent consequence of the states system. The literature suggests that the patterns of the past are likely to be repeated in future; hence, the only solution to the problem of war is the transcendence of the states system. The second body of literature proposes that growing interdependence is bringing profound structural changes that are already leading to the demise of the nation state and to the transformation of the states system. The essay critically examines these theories and outlines reasons why both are empirically and logically deficient. These bodies of literature also illustrate how even among rigorous quantitative analysts, normative concerns animate research. Finally, the author suggests why the search for a theory or model of international politics is doomed to failure, and why a healthy field will be characterized by intellectual pluralism.

Do we need a code of conduct for politicians, or are the existing unwritten rules a sufficient safeguard against acts of political malfeasance? Based on interviews with 84 backbench MPs, this article examines politicians' informal codes of conduct. The study reveals considerable disagreement in assessments of particular acts, notably those involving conflicts of interest and constituency service. Differences among MPs are related to a number of factors including partisanship, political experience and spatial cleavages. Such divisions of opinion belie the presence of a single elite political culture of corruption and underline the need for a code of conduct to clarify and augment such unwritten rules as presently exist.

Three contrary theories of great power war are examined. The first is the common balance of power argument that parity preserves peace. The second is Organski's oft-cited alternative, “the power transition.” The third is a conflation of the first and second. Like the first, the inherent inability to measure power precisely is the basis of the conflated balance of power theory. Like the second, the conclusion is that parity encourages war. Unlike either the first or second theory, the third provides an explanation of the incidence and extent of warfare between great powers. The basic proposition tested is that nonseparated great powers fight as they approach parity in power capabilities. The evidence is from the relations between the European great powers during 1815–1939.

Drawing from the organizational behaviour that is described in Michel Crozier's Bureaucratic Phenomenon, two similar public service organizations, one (anglophone) in Ontario, one (francophone) in Quebec are compared. Even if the type of behaviour found in The Bureaucratic Phenomenon is quite sensitive to noncultural factors (sex, organizational level, type of work), francophones correspond more closely than their anglophone counterparts to certain types of behaviour found in Crozier's descriptions. Data collected are compared to those in other studies, both empirical and historical, and different hypotheses are examined to explain certain similarities that exist between organizational behaviour in French Canada and in continental France.

How can we explain the differences and the similarities between the different political parties in Canada? This question is addressed by comparing the positions taken by the three dominant political parties on five topics: abortion, capital punishment, unemployment, the deficit and a nuclear freeze. The relations between the political parties themselves, their relationship with their target constituencies and the demands of social life all force political opinions to become more alike. This increasing uniformity does not prevent the emergence of original political philosophies and strategies.

The rise of the provincial rights movement in the generation after Confederation forms an important chapter in Canadian constitutionalism. In their attempts to understand the provincial rights movement, however, historians and political scientists have paid insufficient attention to the precise constitutional doctrine that was developed to thwart the centralizing designs of Sir John A. Macdonald. This article shows that the sources of this provincialist constitutional doctrine can be found in the Confederation settlement itself. It further shows how the provincial rights movement subsequently was able to use this doctrine to discredit one of the key centralizing devices of the Macdonald constitution—the veto power of disallowance. And it concludes that the legacy of the provincial rights movement continues to inform the way Canadians think about federalism.

This article attempts to illuminate a contradiction at the heart of the notion of natural rights. Natural rights are commonly thought to be both inalienable and the property of individuals. As the right or the law is privatized as my rights, her rights, our rights or their rights, rights come to be viewed as personal properties. A distinction is made between personal possession and private property (which entails the title to alienate what is owned) in order to speak significantly of our possession of inalienable rights. For Locke, we possess an inalienable right to life and liberty precisely because we do not own our lives and liberties. Moreover, we can alienate our person, or our ability to labour, precisely because it is our private property. For Nozick, rights are individual properties. Thus, for Nozick as distinct from Marx, one has the right to sell anything (one's life, liberty, labour or soul) at the market price.

The authors aim to reveal both the potentialities and limitations of recent attempts by Dworkin and Rawls (especially in the latter's work since the publication of A Theory of Justice) to work out a constructivist conception of right to serve as the groundwork of a rights-based theory of justice. The constructivist conception of right is promising, the authors argue, because it points beyond both teleological naturalism and instrumentalism as conceptions of right. The authors, however, find Dworkin and Rawls's constructivism to be ultimately inadequate, and argue that their project would be furthered through consideration of the constructivist aspects of Rousseau's conception of right as articulated in The Social Contract.

This article shows how Athens in the late fifth and early fourth centuries mitigated Robert Michels' famous “iron law of oligarchy.” It is argued that Athens' success es related to its practice of universal male citizen participation in the administration of the city. At several points a comparison is drawn between how the International Typographical Union (ITU), studied in Lipset, Trow, and Coleman's Union Democracy, mitigated the “iron law,” and how Athens did so. The purpose of this article, however, is not to draw as many comparisons as possible. It is rather to suggest that the very possibility of comparison implies that the lessons of Athens are still relevant, if properly interpreted. This last clause is important, for it is argued that the way in which mass participation mitigated the iron law at Athens was subtle, and easily misinterpreted, perhaps especially by those who are eager to see greater participation in contemporary Western democracies.

Insurance classifications that rely on demographic information are often accused of being discriminatory. There is a strong movement, based on human rights legislation as well as the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, to abolish them. However, analysis shows that the common criticisms of these classifications are self-contradictory and also apply in large measure to the behavioural criteria most commonly proposed as substitutes. Whether current practices are “reasonable” in the sense of the Charter will be an important question for determining the scope of the “equality rights” of section 15 of the Charter.

Proposals to strengthen regional representation in national institutions are premised on the assumption that representation of (regional) interests and accommodation of conflicts between competing interests are compatible roles, and most likely when national decision makers represent all contending interests. The article argues that the two roles are not necessarily compatible. The behaviour of MPs on the agriculture and transport committees in debating three bills during the 32nd Parliament shows considerable efforts at representation but much less at conflict management. The emergence of specialist interest groups promotes representational efforts by MPs but often at the expense of conflict management. Other factors affecting the joint occurrence of interest representation and interest accommodation include the individual and collective characteristics of members, their partisan incentives, and the diversity of the goals of their client groups.

This article aims to illustrate the relevance of Michel Foucault's thought for contemporary political reflection. Once beyond the archaeological dead-end, Foucault's project has taken the shape of genealogical analyses of a number of elements of modernity: the tendency towards homogenization, the emergence of a complex of bio-power and the constitution of human beings as subjects and objects. This enterprise makes it possible to conceive of the actual existence of a strategy of normalization. Foucault's last two books can be interpreted in the sense of this possibility. Finally, the examination of criticisms addressed to Foucault leads to the clarification of his vision of the role of the intellectual.

Michael Oakeshott's contribution to political philosophy has been overshadowed by the widespread belief that the proper context for his writings is modern conservatism. The legend of Oakeshott's conservatism is shown to rest on a misunderstanding of the way in which his view of politics as a specific and limited activity is derived from a more general, sceptical account of the relation between belief and conduct. His scepticism here is not a Burkean rejection of the relevance of general beliefs, but a Humean call for “speculative moderation” appropriate to the occasion. This is not to say that Oakeshott's writings are without political significance. In fact, their significance lies in their powerful critique of modern conservatism in Europe and America.

The principle of guaranteed parliamentary representation for the Maori remains a contentious feature of New Zealand's political structure. This concession originated in 1867 to solve the “Maori problem” by means consistent with the competing interests of government and Maori. But despite intrinsic drawbacks within the present system, neither Maoris nor the major political parties have initiated fundamental reforms in the design of Maori seats for fear of tampering with the status quo. Recently, with the resurgence of Maori assertiveness, developments have transpired aimed at redefining the status of separate representation. Whether or not this strategy for the political accommodation of minority groups can be transferred to other contexts—such as Canada—is open to debate.

This article cautions against facilely casting Oakeshott's thought in the mold of either Kantian liberalism for its account of civil association as purely formal association to which rational individuals could consent, or Burkean liberalism for its emphasis on the continuity of general practices and traditions in diurnal politics. Oakeshott's work is then thematically summarized with an eye to showing its artfulness and originality as a synthesis of modern European individualism, providing a theoretical account of civil association which combines, without logical contradiction, the Aristotelian idea of politics as the activity of attending to the arrangements of the whole, and the liberal (and Christian) idea of the individuality of value, mediated (and made logically possible) by the Roman idea of civil obligation to the form of authority.

The sharp difference in Canadian party choice between Catholics and Protestants is perplexing as it finds no obvious parallel in policy and it cannot be explained away by reference to other social characteristics, such as class or language. A family socialization explanation for the cleavage which has gained wide currency proves defective on logical grounds. This article argues instead that any voting cleavage, however archaic, must be sustained by active partisan influence whose direction differs between the groups that define the cleavage.

This article explores contemporary political ideologies in English Canada, francophone Quebec and the United States using cross-national attitudinal survey data. Drawing central hypotheses from the qualitative Canadian-American political culture literature, the analysis focusses on three dimensions of political ideology—ideological polarization, the issue content of the respective lefts and rights, and ideological coherence. Evidence of distinctive national “lefts,” together with fundamental similarities in the English-Canadian and American ideological “rights” and important differences in the ideological structures of the three political cultures, call into question some conventional generalizations found in the nonquantitative literature.

In contrast to recent commentators on Quentin Skinner's Foundations of Modern Political Thought, this work argues that Skinner's approach to the development of the modern theory of the state is strictly consistent with his earlier methodological proposals. But it is also established that Skinner's consistency ultimately leaves him without a “genuinely historical” basis for a unified state-tradition within late medieval and early modern Europe. The article proposes an alternative historical methodology which allows for the explanation of persisting traditions of discourse (such as that of the state) within a coherent historical framework.