This paper argues that, despite significant increases in the number of women professors and the growth of feminist political science, transformative change hasn't occurred in how conventional political scientists think about politics. “Transformative change” requires the successful mainstreaming of gender-focused knowledge and the use of “gender” as a category of analysis in studies of politics. The article first explores the insights of leading feminist political scientists in the five Anglo-American democracies, about why gender mainstreaming has not succeeded to date. It establishes the extent of the failure and explores its causes, including the discipline's fragmented structure, polarized culture and a number of theoretical and methodological incompatibilities between mainstream and feminist political science. Finally, several promising strategies for achieving transformative change are explored.

The origins and implications of partisan identification are well-studied, but negative partisan attitudes—dislike for a particular party—have escaped such scrutiny, even as the politics of negativity enjoys sustained popularity, especially come election time. In this paper we build upon the comparatively modest negative partisanship literature to consider the effects of negative partisan attitudes on a range of political behaviours. There are reasons to suspect that negative and positive partisanship may have different effects; thus, accounting for the unique influence of negative attitudes is important for understanding the full effect of partisanship on political behaviour. Our results, based upon Canadian Election Study data from 2008 and 2011, reveal that, in addition to vote choice, negative partisanship influences voter turnout and a range of political activities, both related and unrelated to parties. These findings provide evidence of the power of the “dark side” of partisanship.

External political efficacy, the belief that government is responsive to the demands of its citizens, has been declining in the United States since the 1960s. However, scholars do not yet fully understand the reasons for its decline. Nor have they found suitable explanations for why it fluctuates within the electorate. Drawing on the growing literature on the effects of income inequality on public policy, I posit that increasing income inequality factors into the decline of external political efficacy. Using multilevel regression models accounting for individual and contextual factors, I find increasing state-level income inequality has a substantial negative effect on external political efficacy. It is greater than most state and national-level economic measures or individual-level variables on external political efficacy. These results have important implications both for research on income inequality and political participation and also for research on income inequality and distributional public policy.

For different reasons, identification with political parties has been on the decline everywhere. Using polling data, we show that political identification in Chile increased in times of polarization before 1973 and in the transition to democracy in 1990 and fell under democratic consolidation. The decline comes primarily from falling identification with the largest party, the centrist Christian Democratic Party (PDC). Assessing the determinants of party identification, we report that while in the 1960s the PDC had a wide appeal as it attracted voters identified with the left, centre and right, in recent years the PDC attracts support from centrists and older people.

This research note tests the hypothesis that lobbying activities in Canada are primarily aimed at the members of the executive branch. It uses the data of the Canadian lobbying registry to measure the number of contacts between lobbyists and public office holders between the summer of 2008 and the summer of 2013. The results indicate that the majority of lobbying activities are aimed at the executive branch. However, it appears that the House of Commons is one of the most popular targets of lobbying activities. In fact, empirical evidence shows that numerous lobbying organizations are engaged in integrated strategies that consider both the legislative and executive institutions.

In 2006, the Canadian government introduced a new component to its process of selecting Supreme Court justices, a review committee composed of members of Parliament. Tasked with interviewing justices prior to their appointment to the bench, the committee met four times, interviewing only five of the eight judicial candidates appointed to the bench before the Conservative government announced the committee's termination in 2014. This study offers the first comprehensive analysis of the performance of this ad hoc judicial review committee. Using an original dataset, we find that MPs asked little by way of probing questions, such as those related to policy or a candidate's previous jurisprudence. However, we do find some evidence that the hearing process was used to further the political aims of the participating political parties.

Satisfaction with the workings of democracy seems to have declined in Canada, as it has in other established democracies. Political scandals are one frequently invoked explanation for that shift. But there is substantial scholarly disagreement about whether political scandals undermine democratic satisfaction. This paper uses evidence from a conveniently timed round of the CES (Canadian Election Study) from 2004, as well as the CES panel from 2004 and 2006, to explore this relationship more definitively than is usually possible. The results indicate that the scandal eroded satisfaction with the way democracy works but did not undermine support for democracy more generally.

In 2012, Canada's federal government announced cuts to refugee health coverage. Evidence suggesting that the cuts represent a social policy failure has since been accumulating, including the 2014 Federal Court ruling ordering their reversal. This explanatory case study uncovers the problem definition process that led policy development by applying coding methods to governmental publications, transcripts of parliamentary proceedings and internal governmental correspondence obtained under the Access to Information Act. The systematic analysis identifies avoidable gaps that occurred and proposes an avenue for strengthening future federal social policy processes so as to avoid negative outcomes such as those that resulted here.

Recent media accounts suggest certain faith-based interest groups are increasingly pressuring provincial governments across Canada to ensure their views on education policy are acted upon. This paper offers a qualitative assessment of the policy influence possessed by faith-based groups active on the education file in Alberta and the factors responsible for this level of influence. Overall, such influence is not directly attributable to the group's size or resources nor can it be explained by the assumption that Alberta is overrun with religious citizens demanding socially conservative policies. Rather, the explanation is found in a more nuanced appreciation of the self-interested electoral calculations made by the long-governing Progressive Conservative party, on the one hand, as well as well as the party's long-running commitment to “school choice” on the other. This sentiment is intimately related to both the province's populist political culture as well as a broader ideological convergence around the principle of “free choice” in general, and the benefits of marketization in particular.