The political use of political science

Political scientists claim for science and for themselves, as scholars, a maximum of independence in their dealings with government and Parliament. At the same time, science finds itself so inextricably bound up with the actual political process that it has become an “establishment” as strong and formidable as religion was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Liberal political scientists put themselves into a contradictory position when they demand for themselves, in the pursuit of their task as scholars, a political status which would protect them from the scrutiny of the elected representatives of the people, a condition which, they would refuse to grant to any other social group, and yet simultaneously in their teaching and writing set themselves up as the ardent defenders of representative and responsible democracy. What must one sacrifice, science or democratic responsibility? Is it necessary to aim at excluding science from the democratic process, at the risk of seeing our society regress towards a pre-industrial age, or should one regard representative and responsible democracy as relevant to questions of minor importance while significant issues which concern the present and future of society are to be dealt with by other political methods?

Public Housing in Hull

The purpose of this article is to explain the program of public housing construction in Hull. The first section evaluates the construction completed. Basing their appraisal on several indices, the authors conclude that the municipality began the program enthusiastically but that its activity has decreased since then. Certain factors which could explain these two phases are identified. The authors point out the importance of relating public housing to urban renewal, although the latter would not explain the whole situation by itself. After having noted that pressure groups played a negligible role, the authors examine the chain of communication among the local political elite. One thing they show is how the perceptions of the elite can sometimes be influenced by a certain bias in the information that comes to them from the public. Finally, the authors note the impact of “external” information which connects the local elite to those in other Quebec municipalities and in the neighbouring province.

In March 1973 this Journal published an article in which I attempted to show that section 51 of the British North America Act had been wrongly applied when seats in the House of Commons were allocated amongst the provinces as a result of the 1971 decennial census. I pointed out that my analysis was in conflict with that of the Representation Commissioner, the official having the legal duty to implement the section in question. In my penultimate paragraph I wrote: “There is a pressing need for some authoritative person or institution to analyse the present ambiguities and to decide which interpretation is correct and for what reasons. Alternatively the Canadian Parliament could clarify the situation by amending section 51 of the bna Act while at the same time retroactively applying the amended rules to the post-1971 redistribution.” While writing these words I actually expected that someone would take some interest in the problem I had discovered and would show me where I had erred. The reference to the bna Act was a theoretical flourish.

More than two years after the publication of this article no one has shown my interpretation to be wrong, although Stanley Knowles has made a number of relevant comments. In general, however, it seems that nobody cared about an argument which was admittedly obscure and even legalistic (surely the ultimate sin in modern political science). Those constitutional lawyers who might have been exposed to the article were no doubt put off by the complicated arithmetic.