This article addresses the proper role of political science in Canadian universities. The thesis is twofold: first, the main tasks of political scientists are first-rate teaching and reflective inquiry about citizenship: second, in the past few years we have been moving away from this understanding, and remedial action is required. Our delinquency stems mainly from our obsession with “frontier research,” the main result of which is the widespread decline of attentive teaching, which we rationalize with a number of implausible myths. We are primarily responsible for the current state of political science, and only we can remedy it.

A little less than two months before the referendum on sovereignty on October 31, 1995, the Quebec government made public a “Preamble” to an eventual “Declaration of Sovereignty.” This document is analyzed in this article as a “foundational narrative,” that is to say as a narrative attempting to make of this event, which represents the accession of Quebec to sovereignty, a “beginning.” The author demonstrates that the document remains caught in a rhetoric which associates itself to what can be called, following the work of Claude Lefort and Marcel Gauchet, the “theologico-political matrix,” which could explain its chilled reception even by sovereigntists. The author asks in conclusion if it is possible to envisage a foundational narrative which would be compatible with the profound logic which governs modernity.

In Canada as elsewhere, representative democracy is under attack by both populists and rights advocates. The populist challenge comes mainly from Preston Manning's wing of the Reform party. The rights-based challenge is grounded on the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. These two challenges are different in obvious ways, but from the point of view of representative government—and ultimately of liberal democratic constitutionalism—what they have in common outweighs their differences. What they have in common is the appeal to a mystical being or icon beyond ordinary politics. In effect, the People or Rights become what God was to pre-liberal theocratic politics: a transpolitical trump on ordinary political division, a way of placing opponents “beyond the pale,” a demand for unattainable purity in public life and policy. While bills of rights and populism appear to flow, respectively, from the liberalism and the democracy of liberal democracy, they are, in fact, vehicles for precisely the kind of politics liberal democracy was designed to overcome. Representative government, not populism or entrenched rights, was at the heart of the “new science of politics” designed to make liberal democracy possible. Representative institutions, properly arranged in a system of checks and balances, were a way of blending liberalism with democracy, giving each its due, but indirectly, so that neither would be taken to self-destructive extremes. Populism and the judicialized politics of rights threaten to dissolve this salutary blend, at the cost of liberal democratic constitutionalism.

A number of theoretical propositions are advanced through a consideration of the shifting strategies of feminist organizations in Canada during three rounds of constitutional negotiations. First, interest-oriented formulations alone do not capture the intricacies of representation. Representation should be conceived more broadly in terms not just of interest, but also of identity. Second, there are multiple routes to representation that include intersecting forms of representation. Finally, “special interest” designations can be used to undercut the democratic potential of collective mobilization.

Little research provides concrete evidence of relationships between socialization by the women's movement and support for feminism and equality. Support for these issues has increased in Canada since the early 1970s, and using cohort analysis this study demonstrates clear generational differences in this support. The greatest support appears among women's movement and post-women's-movement cohorts. Furthermore, this article identifies gender differences on feminism and equality not appearing in the aggregate data. These differences increase with added controls for education and employment, suggesting links between women's attitudes and the development of a gender consciousness.

While prior studies have applied schema theory to belief systems in the mass public, it has yet to be used to assess attitudes held by elites in society. This article uses schema theory to suggest that justices of the Supreme Court of Canada employ an information processing model when deciding search and seizure cases. Specifically, it implies that the justices have a schema, or an organized set of attitudes, that are triggered by the factual and legal circumstances in particular search and seizure cases. The belief that justices would use such a heuristic device makes sense, given that they are expected to resolve disputes in a quick and efficient manner as well as maintain consistency in the law. The study uses factor analysis to provide evidence that there is an underlying structure to the attitudes that Canadian justices use in these cases (1984–1994). It adds to the prior research in this area, because it moves schema theory beyond the study of mass belief systems, and it represents a unique way of assessing the judicial decision-making process of Canadian justices since the adoption in 1982 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.