Political science is both a generalizing and an anchored, nationally defined, discipline. Too often, the first perspective tends to crowd out the latter, because it appears more prestigious, objective, or scientific. Behind the international/national dichotomy, there are indeed rival conceptions of social science and important ontological, epistemological and methodological assumptions. This article discusses these assumptions and stresses the critical contribution of idiographic, single-outcome studies, the importance of producing relevant, usable knowledge and the distinctive implications of studying one's own country, where a scholar is also a citizen, involved in more encompassing national conversations. The aim is not to reject the generalizing, international perspective, or even the comparative approach, but rather to reaffirm the importance of maintaining as well, and in fact celebrating, the production of social scientific knowledge directly relevant for our own times and places.

Canada's political class is embracing ethnocultural news media with increasing zeal, highlighting the need to understand the role of these news organizations in the political process. This study investigated coverage of Canada's 2011 federal election in five Toronto-area ethnocultural newspapers. The publications, which carried campaign news to varying degrees, provided coverage that was distinct in many ways from mainstream media. Content such as the focus on ingroup candidates had the potential to strengthen community bonds while more general election news equipped readers with information that would facilitate participation in society through informed voting. Analysis of reporting about the Conservative Party of Canada, which pursued an aggressive ethnic media strategy, identified no clear pattern of stories with explicitly biased content. In most newspapers, however, the CPC did enjoy an advantage in that it received more coverage than the competition.

The use of active sampling methods for online surveys is generally considered superior to passive sampling methods, both for recruiting new participants and in terms of sample representativity. In active sampling, specialized firms contact respondents directly, whereas in passive sampling participants are required to visit a Web platform and complete the survey on their own, without being directly recruited to do so. In this article, we evaluate the relative efficiency of passive sampling in the context of the Web experiment Votes Quebec, which was conducted during the 2012 Quebec provincial election. This project had a media outreach dimension whose goal was to increase the number of participants and to increase the representativity of the sample. Our results suggest that the media outreach had a significant but limited impact on these two dimensions. The results also show that passive sampling was less efficient than active sampling at generating a truly representative sample. However, our analyses show that a better and more intensive use of traditional medias may lessen the digital divide often observed in these contexts and improve the representativity of the final sample.

This article seeks to measure and explain interprovincial differences in inequality and poverty reduction since the 1980s for non-elderly Canadian families. These variations are compared with dissimilarities among the advanced capitalist welfare states, where they are large. Interprovincial discrepancies are shown to be ample by this international standard. The article also finds that power resources theory, which draws attention to the role of union strength and partisan incumbency in explaining welfare state variations, accounts for an important part of these interprovincial differences. These findings suggest that sub-national jurisdictions can be more consequential for welfare state outcomes than comparative research has acknowledged, and that power resources accounts deserve more attention in Canadian social policy scholarship.

As part of a multi-year, $816 million initiative to assess the risks posed by thousands of commonly used chemicals and compounds, Canada became the first country in the world to declare that bisphenol A (BPA) was toxic and justified regulation in April 2008. The process set up to conduct this risk assessment differed from the previous Canadian experience with the regulation of hazardous substances in that it was more formal, systematic and more pluralistic with much greater participation from interest groups. This case study explores the politics and process behind this decision and argues that the government's decision went beyond what scientific evidence could justify. The decision resulted from long-term institutional factors such as the incentive structure of Canadian federalism and values embedded in legislation as well as short-term factors such as media coverage, public opinion and interest group pressure.

Why has Australia not followed Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom in adopting a formal bill of rights at the national level? We argue that the Australian Constitution has made the difference. The Constitution has underpinned a comparatively strong parliamentary check on the executive, weakening the rationale for a bill of rights and impeding legislative initiatives towards this end; thwarted the drive for a constitutional bill of rights; and helped delegitimize statutory approaches to a bill of rights in general and the “dialogue model” in particular. The article ultimately questions the notion that a common approach to rights protection can apply across Westminster democracies.

In Canada, voter turnout at the municipal level is lower than in elections at other levels of government. The reasons that might explain this low turnout are still unclear. The research tests 15 hypotheses to explain municipal electoral participation based on the case of the province of Québec (mayoral elections in 2005 and 2009 in all municipalities in the province, n = 949). The results show that four factors explain voter turnout and its variations: the size of the electorate, the presence of elderly voters, the margin of victory, and the number of candidates. These results improve our understanding of the cost of voting at the municipal level and they stress the need for conducting additional monographic investigations on this topic in Canada, especially in larger municipalities where voter turnout is often lower.

Voter participation is widely viewed as invaluable by democratic theorists, and a large majority of members of the Canadian public believe that low turnout weakens Canadian democracy. In response to decreasing rates of turnout in federal elections, Elections Canada has run advertising campaigns during the last several election campaigns encouraging Canadians to participate by voting. Using Election Canadian Study data from 2006 and 2008, this note examines the effect of Elections Canada's advertisements upon turnout and the partisan outcome of elections. Results reveal that the ad campaigns have effects upon both factors. The ads increase turnout among segments of the population with traditionally low turnout rates and are associated with an overall decrease in the Conservative party's vote share.

This article examines executive responses to economic decline in Ontario and Michigan from 2003 to 2012, when the two governments struggled to adjust to a severe manufacturing crisis which greatly worsened during the Great Recession in 2008–2009. Sharing an international border, these cases offer control over an unusually large number of economic, social and political factors, permitting a focused analysis of the impact of divided government and fiscal decentralization on executive policy making. The research finds that greater fiscal decentralization in Canada and unified government in Ontario allowed the province to develop a more rapid and more robust response to the economic crisis in comparison to the State of Michigan. Budgetary constraints and a partisan veto at the state level forced Michigan's governor to redirect her efforts to the federal venue.