Since 1964, federal electoral boundary readjustments have been the responsibility of independent commissions—one for each province and one for the Northwest Territories. The three redistributions completed to date under the new arrangements suggest that the commissions have increasingly accepted a substantial measure of intraprovincial population equality as the standard by which to define electoral boundaries. At the same time Parliament, in its debates and amendments to the Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act, has urged commissions to move in the opposite direction by creating more, rather than fewer, electoral districts of unequal populations. These contrary positions derive from different views of what counts in determining electoral boundaries—territory or population. Drawing on American experience since Baker v. Carr (1962), Canadian courts may eventually be called upon to resolve the issue.

The partisan preferences of Canadian Jews are compared with those of Catholics and Protestants using a sample of 218,738 electors obtained by merging 235 Gallup surveys from the period 1953–1983. The hypothesis guiding the analysis, that Jews are more likely to support left and centre parties (specifically the NDP and the Liberals), is derived from theories that seek to explain Jewish political inclinations. Controlling for the influence of education, province of residence (Quebec or not) and family union membership, this hypothesis is confirmed. Moreover, it is found that in Quebec Jews concentrate their votes to a greater degree than Protestants or Catholics and that the Liberals are the beneficiaries of that concentration; outside Quebec, Catholics and Jews have similar preferences that are markedly distinct from those of Protestants. The Jewish vote is best explained by combining left/right and centre/periphery models.

This article examines two opposing theoretical paradigms on social, political, economic and ecological questions, namely the neo-Malthusian and the futurological. It argues that these paradigms share an underlying Hobbesian assumption of human nature but differ in their response to this assumption. It argues further that the opposing response to a common assumption holds the key to their respective conceptions of reason. Finally, the article assesses the validity of the paradigms as models for public policy-making and outlines the relative theoretical and practical problems of each.

The “leader factor” in Canadian voting has received surprisingly little research attention. In this article, the authors employ data from the 1974, 1979, 1980 and 1984 Canadian National Election Studies to examine the organization of respondents' images of the major political party leaders. The central thesis developed here is that respondents' images of the leaders are not typically idiosyncratic to the leader or to the election in question. The images are shaped by a prototypical leader schema that affects the information about leaders that is processed and recalled. The authors test several implications of this thesis. They demonstrate that there is considerable commonality in the content of a citizen's images of leaders in any one election, and that there is evidence of both aggregate and individual-level stability in the structure of images across elections. The authors test an additional hypothesis from schema theory concerning individual differences in image content. In this regard, they demonstrate, contrary to some of the literature, that better-educated respondents are more likely than less-educated respondents to cite task-relevant dispositional attributes of the leaders.

Libertarian writers such as Hayek, Friedman, Hospers and Nozick have insisted that welfare state policies are, per se, inimical to the classical liberal notion of freedom. The purpose of this article is to test the internal coherence of the libertarian attack upon the welfare state. Special attention is given to Friedman's contentions in his Capitalism and Freedom. It is argued that the libertarian attack upon the welfare state is misguided. Indeed, it is suggested that in order to achieve the type of individual liberty that libertarians wish to secure the state must be assigned a positive welfare role.

This article seeks to provide an overview of the political thought of Egerton Ryerson (1803–1882), the influential political controversialist and educational reformer of nineteenth-century Upper Canada. It attempts to unravel Ryerson's thought in such a way as to go beyond earlier interpretations which have insisted that, despite the presence of certain countervailing reformist tendencies in his politics, Ryerson was at bottom a thorough conservative. In contrast to this view it is argued here that Ryerson was a thoroughly modernist thinker who accepted the basic teachings of the liberal tradition. It is also suggested that Ryerson was aware of certain key problems which a society premised on these teachings must inevitably face, problems such as narrow selfishness, private individualism and vulgar materialism. The article concludes that it was Ryerson's intention to correct these strong tendencies in liberal society by emphasizing the centrality of public spirit, moral cultivation and religious belief to a free polity's well-being.

In an assessment of Louis Hartz's fragment theory, H. D. Forbes contends that its basic weaknesses are most easily exposed in the case of French Canada. This article argues the opposite: Hartz's approach in this case is particularly illuminating rather than representing its Achilles’ heel. Hartzian analysis is consistent with the historiography of French Canada. The growth of liberalism in the nineteenth century that Forbes points to in the French-Canadian fragment pales when placed in a comparative perspective as Hartz's theory requires. It is the mix of feudal and liberal ideas in the twentieth century that helps to explain the rise of social democratic forces like the Parti québécois.

A rejoinder to a rejoinder must be brief, even if the issues it discusses are complex. Nelson Wiseman's rejoinder to my article on Hartz and Horowitz raises no important questions about my presentation of Hartzian theory, so I shall concentrate on his objections to my interpretation of French-Canadian history.

At the end of the 1970s, the corporatism growth industry in political science passed from its competitive stage (articles in journals) to its organized stage (articles collected in books). In the founding text of the new stage, Trends Towards Corporatist Intermediation, Philippe Schmitter explained that corporatism was not itself a theory capable of generating explanations and predictions. Rather, it was a phenomenon that had to be theorized within one of the major competing paradigms of social structure and social change, which he identified as those associated with Durkheimian and Parsonian “structural differentiation,” the historical materialism of Weberian and Marxist-revisionist “organized capitalism,” and the Marxist political economy tradition wherein he located the theories of the state popular at the time. Yet, it was perhaps inevitable, given the accumulation of academic capital associated with growth industries in the social sciences, that Schmitter's (and others') sound advice would be ignored and that grandiose claims would be made for corporatism as a theory in its own right.

Leo Panitch is at the same time far too generous and mistaken when he sees my book as representing the coming of the monopoly stage in the development of the growth industry of corporatism. If I were, by writing the first book-length work on the theory of corporatism, to succeed in cornering the vigorous international market in ideas, then this would be praise indeed. Of course, the notion is absurd and is as flawed as Panitch's reading of the book.