Recent northern First Nation land claim agreements have created a new category of First Nation citizenship. Although many embrace the category as an essential aspect of First Nation sovereignty, others reject it as a colonial imposition that constrains the possibilities for indigenous politics. There does indeed appear to be a gap between the legal category of First Nation citizenship and northern indigenous peoples’ ideas about political society. For one thing, the latter includes animals, while the former does not. In their recent book, Zoopolis, Donaldson and Kymlicka develop a model of animal citizenship. Although not primarily concerned with First Nation citizenship, they do assert the universality of their model, including its compatibility with indigenous ideas about proper human-animal relations. In this article, I assess those claims and show that, to the contrary, their model is in many ways antithetical to the knowledge and practices of northern indigenous peoples.

In this work we offer results drawn from a dataset of a post-provincial election survey in eight Canadian provinces to assess the impact of party system congruency on partisanship. We postulate that partisanship will be more likely and stronger in provinces that share a similar political party system to the federal level. We extend this preliminary analysis to test the underlying mechanism by examining the impact holding partisan ties at the provincial level has on the likelihood and strength of federal identification, according to party system similarity. Our results show very limited support for the party system congruency factor, raising further questions of its applicability in the Canadian context.

This study examines the link between new Quebecers’ use of the French language and their relationship with the Quebec and Canadian political communities; more specifically, the study examines the case of first and second generations of visible minorities living in Quebec. As in earlier studies, the findings indicate that new Quebecers who use French more frequently in their daily lives have a more positive relationship with the Quebec political community. Similarly, new Quebecers who attended French schools express a more positive relationship with the Quebec political community. In both cases, the relationships are observed for first and second generations of new Quebecers. However, even when they use French in most spheres of life and attended French schools, new Quebecers still express a weaker preference for the Quebec political community than other French-speaking Quebecers.

This article evaluates the impact of partisanship, globalization and postindustrialism on provincial revenues since 1980. It is often argued that the first of these no longer has an effect, while the second and third erode fiscal capacity. These arguments are assessed with multilevel models, hitherto little used for macro-level estimations in political science. This approach is particularly suited to testing these influences. The study finds that partisanship is, in fact, strongly associated with provincial revenues. Globalization and postindustrialism have a more muted effect, though alternative estimations support somewhat different conclusions regarding the former. The social preconditions of partisanship's impact, moreover, deserve more attention.

In this article I engage with recent scholarly commentary concerning the realm of human sexuality in the work of Thomas Hobbes. This has, perhaps unsurprisingly, been a neglected area of enquiry given the paucity of Hobbes's analysis of this aspect of the human passions. I argue that this new field of enquiry is to be welcomed as it allows us to explore and understand Hobbes as a fully erotic philosopher. Moreover, his erotic philosophy is best understood through the prism of his thorough-going materialism.

Partisanship inspires a degree of ambivalence. There is a widespread tendency—which has a long history in republican political thought—to decry division and partisanship as corrupting, undermining individual judgment, and promoting clientelism, dependencies and loyalties antithetical to the common good. Yet there is an equally widespread intuition that excessive unity is corrupting, undermining the vigour of civic life. Contemporary political theory remains divided on the normative implications of division and unity—witness the battles between agonistic and consensus-oriented schools of democratic theory. In this article I examine the thought of two eighteenth-century writers who, while often treated as contributing to a common intellectual project of reinvigorating classical civic virtue, took opposite positions on the desirability of division. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Ferguson offered competing accounts of what corrupts civic virtue, one decrying party divisions and the other lauding them. The article examines the underlying philosophical presuppositions of Rousseau and Ferguson's competing claims and suggests, ultimately, that both positions suffer from neglecting to attend to an important distinction between salutary and harmful divisions.

In the wake of wide-ranging municipal amalgamations Ontario, the provincial government promoted the use of community councils, citizen-led boards that would have input in local matters. Community councils were touted as a way of preserving local identity and policy control. However, more than a decade removed from Ontario's restructuring process, few municipalities have community councils in place. Those that have implemented community councils established them with purely advisory functions. This paper asks why community councils were so inconsistently implemented and introduced with such limited powers. Overall, it is found that community councils were victims of restructuring politics. Blocked by city councillors fearing decentralization would dilute their authority and foster political rivals, constrained through a restrictive legislative framework and pushed aside by city officials fearing they would effectively recreate a two-tier system, community councils were either abandoned or installed with a limited mandate.

We examine the impact of the current economic crisis on the accuracy of responsibility attribution between levels of government within states. Using individual-level data from Spain, we show that learning about responsibility attribution depends on the saliency of the issue (in our study, unemployment) and economic self-interest. The (unintended) positive consequence of economic crisis is that citizens are now more able to accurately attribute the responsibility for political decisions than some years ago. Learning is particularly significant among those individuals more affected by the economic crisis.