This article introduces a new dictionary for the automated analysis of the tone of French media. We named it the French Lexicoder Sentiment Dictionary (LSDFr) in reference to the English lexicon developed by Young and Soroka (2012), the Lexicoder Sentiment Dictionary (LSD), from which the LSDFr was built. We compare the LSDFr to the only other French sentiment lexicon, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). First, we detail the construction of the dictionary. We then test the internal validity of the LSDFr comparing it with a corpus of manually coded texts. Finally, we test the external validity of LSDFr by measuring how the media tone, calculated using our dictionary, predicts voting intentions in the last four Quebec elections. Our goal is to enable other researchers to conduct media analyses with a comparable corpus of texts in French.

This paper revisits and rebuts the mainstream view that Brazil and Argentina were led to form the Southern Common Market to end more than a century of rivalry and competition. We find the elements characterizing an interstate rivalry diminishing in the nineteenth century through the promotion of peaceful settlements and strategic alliances while those that could prompt security concerns disappeared years before the Southern Common Market was formed. Except for diplomatic disputes over the distribution of shared water resources, a disagreement settled in 1979, the decades preceding the Treaty of Asuncion were typified by security alliances, co-operation on economic complementarity and the promotion of bilateral institutions. We find little evidence for the implied security motivations being proposed in the literature. Rather, the establishment of the Southern Common Market was driven primarily by Argentina's and Brazil's desire to improve economic performance and advance political leverage through the promotion of a common stance in global affairs. This view challenges a common component in integration theory that, as applied to the European Union and elsewhere, asserts the privileged role of security concerns as prime driver for integration. This matters because there is a misapprehension that affects both the theory about integration as well as the formulation of policy prescriptions for South America.

Indigenous peoples have, to varying degrees, turned to the courts to litigate their ongoing disputes with Canada's settler colonial governments. Scholars have examined well the ways courts are used for strategic political ends by a variety of Indigenous and non-Indigenous litigants and are laden with settler values and institutional logics that are foreign to Indigenous peoples. However, it is less clear what effect turning to the courts in pursuit of strategic goals has on specific relationships between Indigenous peoples. This gap is more pronounced in Métis scholarship where there have been few final appellate cases. This paper argues the interaction between the Manitoba Métis Federation and Treaty 1 peoples seeking leave to intervene at the Manitoba Court of Appeal in MMF v. Canada illuminates the way litigating Indigenous-settler disputes can advance divisive, exclusionary, zero-sum political relationships between Indigenous peoples. These fractious interactions serve to undermine the construction of a co-ordinated and related inter-Indigenous decolonizing politics.

In this article I use new archival and elite interview data to improve our knowledge of how the Canadian Multiculturalism Act came into existence. I show why some Canadians began to seek such an act, why political parties promised an act and how this act was created. The evidence in this article will also correct claims that scholars often make about this act and the policy of multiculturalism that it contains. This evidence also improves our knowledge of why the policy of multiculturalism in this legislation does what few scholars would expect. This is because scholars often claim that policies of multiculturalism are used to “repudiate” and remove understandings of a country. But my evidence helps to show why the policy of multiculturalism in this act promotes understandings of a country. Scholars also claim that policies of multiculturalism can be divisive if they are unaccompanied by nation-building policies. But my evidence helps to show why the policy of multiculturalism in this legislation was designed to be a nation-building policy.

The 2011 Canadian federal election results changed the face of federal politics in Quebec. In a sudden and spectacular reversal of electoral fortunes, BQ support crumbled while that of the NDP surged. While most commentators focused exclusively on the 2011 election itself to explain what had happened, we offer an interpretation that takes a longitudinal approach. Using data from the Canadian Election Study and political party manifestos from 2006 to 2011, we propose a three-dimensional proximity model of voter/party congruence to explore the evolution of the ideological stances of Quebec voters and parties. Empirical results suggest these ideological distances between the NDP and Quebec voters decreased over time, whereas the BQ has distanced itself from voters. Furthermore, ideological distances between party and voters are a significant predictor of vote.

Voting behaviour in municipal elections is understudied in Canada. Existing research is limited by the type of data (aggregate instead of individual-level) and the cases evaluated (partisan when most contests are non-partisan). The objective of this study is to contribute to this literature by using individual-level data about a non-partisan election. To do so, we use data from the Toronto Election Study, conducted during the 2014 election. Our research goals are to evaluate whether a standard approach to understanding vote choice (the multi-stage explanatory model) is applicable in a non-partisan, municipal-level contest, and to determine the correlates of vote choice in the 2014 Toronto mayoral election in particular. Our analysis reveals that, although it was a formally non-partisan contest, voters tended to view the mayoral candidates in both ideological and partisan terms. We also find that a standard vote choice model provides valuable insight into voter preferences at the municipal level.

Multicultural policy is an increasingly salient, and contested, topic in both academic and public debate about how to manage increasing ethnic diversity. In spite of the longstanding commitment to multiculturalism policy in Canada, however, we have only a partial understanding of public attitudes on this issue. Current research tends to look at general attitudes regarding diversity and accommodation–rarely at attitudes towards specific multicultural policies. We seek to (partly) fill this gap. In particular, we focus on how support for multiculturalism policy varies across benefit types (for example, financial and other) and the ethnicity/religiosity of recipient groups. Using a unique survey experiment conducted within the 2011 Canadian Election Study (CES), we examine how ethnic origin (Portuguese vs. Turkish) and religious symbols (absence and presence of the hijab) influence support for funding of ethno-religious group activities and their access to public spaces. We also explore whether citizens’ general attitudes toward cultural diversity moderate this effect. Results provide important information about the state of Canadian public opinion on multiculturalism, and more general evidence about the nature, authenticity and limits of public support for this policy.

Do women vote for women and men for men? Do visible minorities vote for minority candidates, and white voters for white candidates? And what happens when a minority woman appears on the ballot? This study tests for the presence of gender and ethnic affinity voting in the Toronto mayoral election of 2014, where Olivia Chow was the only woman and only visible minority candidate among the three major contenders. Our analysis, which draws on a survey of eligible Toronto voters, is the first to examine the interactive effects of sex and ethnicity on vote choice in Canada in the context of a non-partisan election and in a non-experimental manner. We find strong evidence of ethnic affinity voting and show that Chow received stronger support from ethnic Chinese voters than from other minority groups. Our results also reveal that gender was related to vote choice but only when connected with race.