The Canadian Constitution contains several distinctive rights not found in the United States Constitution. Indeed, the collective and community-based rights Canadians take for granted are inimical to American liberal traditions. Negative rights or interpretive provisions, such as the non obstante clause, are unique to Canada among Western democracies. The author argues that these rights derive from the country's historical concerns with religious and linguistic communities—especially in Quebec—and that they in turn condition how politics must be conducted in Canada.

Hegelian scholarship is rent between conservative and liberal interpretations of Hegel's political philosophy. These one-sided interpretations miss his attempts to reconcile freedom and authority. Conservative liberalism, I submit, rightly describes his posture. A dialectical procedure allows Hegel to derive rationally a conservative State from the liberal principles embodied in market society. The key to this dialectical derivation lies in the spontaneous order that springs naturally from the self-seeking behaviour of individuals. Hegel's realization of the negative ethical value generated by that spontaneous order, and the failure of corporations to discipline the business classes, prompts the powerful role he confides to the State and its monarch.

The semi-direct democracy in Switzerland during the period 1879-1987 is a favourable ground for checking some assumptions related to the theory of participatory democracy such as those involving the inherent characteristics of the popular majority. This article presents a comparative description of the specific features of the referenda votes and general elections in representative democracies. Some aspects of the political behaviour in the Swiss cantons and at the federal level are analyzed as are the fluctuations in referenda participation in relation to institutional factors, competition intensity and the number of signatures collected. Different aspects of amicable agreement democracy, the functioning of interest groups and their relationship to the level of participation are subjects of comprehensive discussion.

This article discusses interest representation by Canadian co-operative business associations, as a way of exploring difficulties faced by democratically structured group interests in influencing federal government policy. Several dimensions of co-operatives’ problems in this regard are examined: their internal structures of democratic representation, their reform ideology, their influence by two conflicting logics of collective action and selected aspects of federal policy development. The article concludes by contending that the problem of democratic representation by economic group interests in the policy process should be taken more seriously by Canadian political scientists.

This article argues that the concept of hypothetical consent advanced by Hanna Pitkin has little force as a basis for political obligation. It reformulates the meaning of hypothetical consent by emphasizing the subjectivity of consent, and it points out how this subjective meaning expresses the right of actual citizens to dissent. It suggests how subjective hypothetical consent can be used from the perspective of a sovereign as a standard that requires the sovereign to treat citizens as if they had consented, although they have not consented. It concludes by arguing that although this standard may appear to corrode political authority, instead it enhances political authority. It drives the sovereign to relinquish the claim that citizens are obligated to obey, and to treat them so they will have reason to obey.

Foreign news coverage on Canadian national television was content analyzed in light of Third World criticisms of Western news agencies. Using a sample of CBC and CTV national English-language newscasts in 1980 and 1985, four hypotheses were considered: (1) the geographical distribution of foreign news is highly concentrated, focussing on the West and regions of violence involving Western interests; (2) news from the industrialized West and from the Third World tends to be characterized by different formats and topics; (3) differences between networks are limited; and (4) differences between the two years studied are minor. The results support these hypotheses, with the partial exception of the fourth one, to the detriment of the image of the Third World on Canadian television.

No book, least of all an edited one, speaks with a single voice. A text is disguised counterpoint, punk plus Mozart, a riff that cuts across discordant harmonies. Considered this way, a book can no more be judged as simply good or bad than a symphony can be adequately described by its key signature. Nevertheless, The New Canadian Political Economy is a good book in every conventional sense. It meets, for example, all of the challenges of an edited collection: the essays are thematically coherent, uniformly well-written, rigorous and integrated around roughly similar questions. Together, they aim at nothing less than the “first publication of a comprehensive and systematic review of the new Canadian political economy” (4). Moreover, the editors have helpfully organized this review along two axes.