The world is still a closed economy, but its regions and countries are becoming increasingly open. The trend, which has been manifested in both freer movement of goods and increased mobility of capital, has been stimulated by the dismantling of trade and exchange controls in Europe, the gradual erosion of the real burden of tariff protection, and the stability, unparalleled since 1914, of the exchange rates. The international economic climate has changed in the direction of financial integration and this has important implications for economic policy.

My paper concerns the theoretical and practical implications of the increased mobility of capital. In order to present my conclusions in the simplest possible way, and to bring the implications for policy into sharpest relief, I assume the extreme degree of mobility that prevails when a country cannot maintain an interest rate different from the general level prevailing abroad. This assumption will overstate the case but it has the merit of posing a stereotype towards which international financial relations seem to be heading. At the same time it might be argued that the assumption is not far from the truth in those financial centres, of which Zurich, Amsterdam, and Brussels may be taken as examples, where the authorities already recognize their lessening ability to dominate money market conditions and insulate them from foreign influences. It should also have a high degree of relevance to a country like Canada whose financial markets are dominated to a great degree by the vast New York market.

The staple approach to the study of economic history is primarily a Canadian innovation; indeed, it is Canada's most distinctive contribution to political economy. It is undeveloped in any explicit form in most countries where the export sector of the economy is or was dominant. The specific terminology—staple or staples approach, or theory, or thesis—is Canadian, and the persistence with which the theory has been applied by Canadian social scientists and historians is unique.

The leading innovator was the late Harold Innis in his brilliant pioneering historical studies, notably of the cod fisheries and the fur trade; others tilled the same vineyard3 but it is his work that has stamped the “school.” His concern was with the general impact on the economy and society of staple production. His method was to cast the net widely. The staple approach became a unifying theme of diffuse application rather than an analytic tool fashioned for specific uses. There was little attempt to limit its application by the use of an explicit framework. Methodologically, Innis' staple approach was more technological history writ large than a theory of economic growth in the conventional sense.

We have yet to know the ultimate global impact of the novel coronavirus pandemic. However, we do know that delays, denials and misinformation about COVID-19 have exacerbated its spread and slowed pandemic response, particularly in the U.S. (e.g., Abutaleb et al., 2020).

Abstract. This article is an attempt to qualify existing evidence that increasing diversity is detrimental to a vibrant civil society. We focus specifically on immigration-generated diversity, and argue that while it may have negative effects on some specific civic and political outcomes in some contexts, these effects vary widely across advanced democracies. Our argument rests on analysis of a cross-national, cross-sectional time-series dataset that brings together individual-level World Values Survey data with country-level variables. With these data, we track within-country changes over time in trust and engagement. We show that immigration can have a negative effect on social trust, organizational membership and political engagement, but that institutional arrangements shape this relationship in systematic ways. In more economically equal societies and in more multicultural countries (where cultural minorities are recognized and accommodated), the negative effects of immigration on trust and engagement are mitigated or even reversed. We conclude that there is no general link between immigration-generated diversity and collective-mindedness. Rather, the direction and strength of the relationship depend on institutional and policy contexts.

Résumé. Cet article vise à nuancer les preuves existantes que la diversité croissante porte préjudice à une société civile dynamique. Nous nous concentrons particulièrement sur la diversité produite par l'immigration. Nous soutenons que même si elle peut exercer une influence négative sur quelques indices dans certains contextes, ces effets varient considérablement selon le pays examiné parmi les démocraties avancées. Notre argument repose sur l'analyse d'un ensemble de données multinational, transversal et longitudinal qui rassemble des données au niveau individuel du World Values Survey avec des variables au niveau des pays. Au moyen de ces données, nous examinons les changements survenus à l'intérieur des pays, au fil du temps, sur le plan de la confiance et de l'engagement. Nous montrons que l'immigration peut avoir un effet négatif sur la confiance sociale, l'adhésion à des organisations et l'engagement politique, mais que les arrangements institutionnels influencent cette relation de manières systématiques. Dans les sociétés plus économiquement égales et dans les pays plus multiculturels (où les minorités culturelles sont reconnues et accommodées), les effets négatifs de l'immigration sur la confiance et l'engagement sont atténués, voire inversés. Nous concluons qu'il n'y a aucun lien général entre la diversité produite par l'immigration et l'esprit collectif. La direction et la force de la relation entre les deux dépendent plutôt des politiques et des contextes institutionnels.

The COVID-19 disease was first identified in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, having since spread rapidly across the world. The infection and mortality rates of the disease have forced governments to implement a wave of public health measures. Depending on the context, these range from the implementation of simple hygienic rules to measures such as social distancing or lockdowns that cause major disruptions in citizens’ daily lives. The success of these crucial public health measures rests on the public's willingness to comply. However, individual differences in following the official public health recommendations for stopping the spread of COVID-19 have not yet to our knowledge been assessed. This study aims to fill this gap by assessing the sociodemographic and psychological correlates of implementing public health recommendations that aim to halt the COVID-19 pandemic. We investigate these associations in the context of France, one of the countries that has been most severely affected by the pandemic, and which ended up under a nationwide lockdown on March 17. In the next sections we describe our theoretical expectations over the associations between sociodemographics, personality, ideology, and emotions with abiding by the COVID-19 public health measures. We then test these hypotheses using data from the French Election Study.

[1] In a recent paper the thesis was advanced that while it is not possible to demonstrate rigorously that free trade is better (in some sense) for a country than all other kinds of trade, it nevertheless can be shown conclusively that (in a sense to be defined later) free trade or some trade is to be preferred to no trade at all. I should like here to amplify these remarks with respect to the last point, that some trade is better than no trade.

This is by no means a novel proposition. Indeed, it can be traced back to the beginnings of the Classical theory of international trade. It has become associated, however, quite unnecessarily in my opinion, with a labour theory of value, or a “real cost” theory of value, or more recently, with an opportunity cost theory of value. All of these have come in for considerable criticism in recent years as restrictive special cases of the so-called theory of general equilibrium. Those writers who have insisted on the need for a modern theory of value for a positive description of behaviour in international trade have in general ignored the normative aspects of international trade, presumably in the belief that as soon as one gives up the inadmissible special theories indicated above, nothing can be said concerning this problem. It will be argued here that this is a mistake, that from the most general theories of equilibrtlim all valid normative propositions can be derived.

The COVID-19 pandemic requires an effort to coordinate the actions of government and society in a way unmatched in recent history. Individual citizens need to voluntarily sacrifice economic and social activity for an indefinite period of time to protect others. At the same time, we know that public opinion tends to become polarized on highly salient issues, except when political elites are in consensus (Berinsky, 2009; Zaller, 1992). Avoiding elite and public polarization is thus essential for an effective societal response to the pandemic. In the United States, there appears to be elite and public polarization on the severity of the pandemic (Gadarian et al., 2020). Other evidence suggests that polarization is undermining compliance with social distancing (Cornelson and Miloucheva, 2020). Using a multimethod approach, we show that Canadian political elites and the public are in a unique period of cross-partisan consensus on important questions related to the COVID-19 pandemic, such as its seriousness and the necessity of social distancing.

Abstract. Past research suggests that citizens' attitudes toward immigration are driven by perceptions of immigrants' (a) economic status and (b) ethnicity. In this study, we use an online survey conducted with a representative sample of Canadians to test to what extent economic and cultural cues influence support for individual immigrants. In particular, by drawing on a parallel US survey, we explore whether Canadians' relatively unique (positive) attitudes toward immigration make them more immune to economic and cultural threat manipulations than their American counterparts. The analysis is based on an experimental design embedded in a series of immigrant vignettes that vary the ethnoracial background and social status of an individual applying for immigration. We examine overall support for immigration, as well as the extent to which both ethnic and economic status cues affect support for individual immigrants. We also explore variance within Canada, specifically, in Quebec versus the rest of the country. Results offer new and unique information on the structure of attitudes on diversity and immigration in Canada. Most importantly, they suggest the relative importance of economic cues in support for immigration in both countries.

Résumé. Divers travaux de recherche ont suggéré que les attitudes des citoyens au sujet de l'immigration sont influencées par leur perception (a) du statut économique et (b) de l'ethnie des immigrants. Afin de tenter de savoir jusqu'à quel point les informations socioéconomiques et culturelles ont effectivement un impact sur le soutien des citoyens envers les immigrants, la présente étude fait usage d'un sondage mené en ligne avec un échantillon représentatif de la population canadienne. En nous appuyant sur un sondage américain similaire, nous cherchons plus précisément à savoir si l'attitude (positive) relativement unique des Canadiens vis-à-vis de l'immigration les rend moins susceptibles d'être manipulés par l'évocation de menaces économiques et culturelles que leurs voisins américains. Notre analyse se fonde sur une expérience utilisant une série de vignettes qui modifient les caractéristiques ethnoraciales ainsi que le statut social d'un individu procédant à une demande d'immigration. Nous examinons non seulement le soutien pour l'immigration en général, mais aussi la mesure dans laquelle les informations relatives à l'ethnie et au statut économique d'un immigrant affectent le soutien que les citoyens lui offrent. Nous étudions aussi la variance à l'intérieur du Canada, plus spécifiquement entre le Québec et le reste du pays. Les résultats ainsi obtenus fournissent de l'information nouvelle et unique ayant trait à la structure des attitudes par rapport à la diversité et l'immigration au Canada. De surcroît, ces résultats suggèrent le rôle relativement important que jouent les informations d'ordre socioéconomique dans le soutien de l'immigration tant aux États-Unis qu'au Canada.

Conspiracy theories (CTs) are not solely the domain of extremists and paranoids. They cut across demographic and political differences (Uscinski and Parent, 2014) and can have negative social/political consequences. For example, Imhoff and Lamberty (2020) find that belief that the seriousness of COVID-19 is being exaggerated is negatively correlated with self-reported preventative behaviours such as hand washing and social distancing, and belief that the virus was intentionally created by humans is positively correlated with self-reported hoarding of food, sanitary products, and gasoline/oil, as well as stocking up on weapons.

The professions, conceived as a select body of superior occupations, have existed from time immemorial, although their identity has often been in dispute. The ancients wrote and argued about them, while Herbert Spencer traced their origin among primitive peoples. The earliest view to which we need here pay attention was that occupations should be judged and valued according to their compatibility with the good life. They were to be tested by their effect on the giver of the service rather than on the recipient. The professions were, in English parlance, the occupations suitable for a gentleman. This idea naturally flourished in societies which distinguished sharply between life lived as an end in itself, and life passed in pursuit of the means which enable others to live as free civilized men should. The professions in such a society were those means to living which were most innocuous, in that they did not dull the brain, like manual labour, nor corrupt the soul, like commerce. They even contained within themselves qualities and virtues which might well find a place among the ends of the good life itself. Leisure, based on the ownership of land or of slaves, was the chief mark of aristocracy, and here too the professions were but slightly inferior. For leisure does not mean idleness. It means the freedom to choose your activities according to your own preferences and your own standards of what is best. The professions, it was said, enjoyed this kind of freedom, not so much because they were free from the control of an employer—that was assumed—but rather because, for them, choice was not restricted and confined by economic pressure. The professional man, it has been said, does not work in order to be paid: he is paid in order that he may work. Every decision he takes in the course of his career is based on his sense of what is right, not on his estimate of what is profitable. That, at least, is the impression he would like to create when defending his claim to superior status.

Abstract. Work exploring the relationship between public opinion and public policy over time has largely been restricted to the US. However, a wider application of this line of research can provide valuable insights into whether and how representation varies across political systems. This paper takes a step in this direction using a new body of data on public opinion and government spending in Canada. Analyses reveal that the Canadian public notices and responds (thermostatically) to changes in public spending in particular domains, and also that Canadian policymakers represent these public preferences in spending. The extent and nature of public responsiveness and policy representation varies across domains. Relationships are more pronounced in certain domains, and they are more ‘specific’ in some domains and more ‘global’ in others. The findings generally accord with the results of similar work in the US and the UK, although the details differ in important ways. Indeed, the differences are strongly suggestive about the structuring role of institutions.

Résumé. Les travaux portant sur la relation entre l'opinion publique et les politiques publiques se sont longtemps limités surtout aux États-Unis. Cependant, l'élargissement de cette piste de recherche peut fournir de précieuses connaissances sur les variations de la représentation au sein des systèmes politiques. Cette étude s'oriente dans cette direction en utilisant un nouveau corpus de données sur l'opinion publique et les dépenses du gouvernement au Canada. Les analyses révèlent que, dans certains domaines, la population canadienne observe les changements liés aux dépenses publiques et y réagit (de façon thermostatique) et que les décisionnaires canadiens traduisent les préférences de la population dans les dépenses. La portée et la nature de la réceptivité de la population ainsi que la représentation des politiques varient d'un domaine à l'autre. Les connexions sont plus étroites dans certains domaines, plus “ spécifiques ” dans d'autres et enfin, plus “ globales ” dans d'autres encore. En général, les résultats sont en accord avec ceux des travaux similaires menés aux États-Unis et au Royaume-Uni, malgré des différences importantes sur certains points de détail. En fait, les différences sont très évocatrices du rôle structurant des institutions.

Abstract. This paper examines the role of national identity in sustaining public support for the welfare state. Liberal nationalist theorists argue that social justice will always be easier to achieve in states with strong national identities, which, they contend, can both mitigate opposition to redistribution among high-income earners and reduce any corroding effects of ethnic diversity resulting from immigration. We test these propositions with Canadian data from the Equality, Security and Community survey. We conclude that national identity does increase support for the welfare state among the affluent majority of Canadians and that it helps to protect the welfare state from toxic effects of cultural suspicion. However, we also find that identity plays a narrower role than existing theories of liberal nationalism suggest and that the mechanisms through which it works are different. This leads us to suggest an alternative theory of the relationship between national identity and the welfare state, one that suggests that the relationship is highly contingent, reflecting distinctive features of the history and national narratives of each country. National identity may not have any general tendency to strengthen support for redistribution, but it may do so for those aspects of the welfare state seen as having played a particularly important role in building the nation or in enabling it to overcome particular challenges or crises.

Résumé. Cet article examine le rôle de l'identité nationale en matière d'appui populaire à l'État-providence. Les théoriciens du nationalisme libéral soutiennent que la justice sociale sera toujours plus facile à réaliser dans les États ayant une forte identité nationale, laquelle, selon eux, peut à la fois atténuer l'opposition à la redistribution chez les personnes à revenu élevé et réduire les effets corrosifs de la diversité ethnique engendrée par l'immigration. Nous évaluons ces propositions à la lumière des données canadiennes de l'Étude sur l'égalité, la sécurité et la communauté. Nous concluons que l'identité nationale augmente effectivement l'appui envers l'État-providence parmi les Canadiens fortunés de la majorité, et qu'elle aide à protéger l'État-providence contre les effets toxiques de la suspicion culturelle. Cependant, nous constatons également que l'identité joue un rôle plus restreint que ne le suggèrent les théories existantes du nationalisme libéral et que ses mécanismes de fonctionnement sont différents. Cela nous amène à proposer une autre théorie de la relation entre l'identité nationale et l'État-providence, une théorie selon laquelle cette relation est fortement contingente et reflète les caractéristiques propres de l'histoire et de la tradition nationale de chaque pays. L'identité nationale n'a peut-être, en soi, aucune tendance générale à renforcer l'appui à la redistribution, mais elle peut le faire pour les aspects de l'État-providence considérés comme ayant joué un rôle particulièrement important dans l'édification de la nation, ou lui ayant permis de surmonter des crises ou des défis particuliers.

Governments appear increasingly constrained in their ability to make independent policy choices in an era of global economic finance and communication. As a result, scholars are more closely examining how actors, institutions and economic forces that extend beyond state borders can influence domestic public policies and politics. This scholarship on “globalization” and “transnational relations” serves as a corrective to a comparative public policy literature that has tended to treat external pressures as either exogenous shocks, or as simply other interests to which the state must respond.

Relatively recent contributions to the policy literature have called into question the utility of the "network" approach to the study of public policy making, including a challenge to long-held views concerning the impact of the structure of policy subsystems on policy change. This article uses empirical evidence accumulated from case studies of four prominent Canadian federal policy sectors over the period 1990-2000 to address this issue. It sets out a model that explains policy change as dependent upon the effects of the articulation of ideas and interests in public policy processes, and generates several hypotheses relating different subsystem configurations to propensities for paradigmatic and intra-paradigmatic policy dynamics. It suggests that the identification of the nature of the policy subsystem in a given policy sector reveals a great deal about its propensity to respond to changes in ideas and interests.

This article examines the differences in pre-1914 France and the United States in two kinds of state policies regulating women's behaviour, those “protecting” the condition under which women participated in certain occupations and those providing infant and maternal protection. Those policies are examined to illuminate the argument that politics, including state policies, makes an important contribution to the maintenance and change of ongoing systems of social relations. Central to this argument is the notion that meaning systems around which actors constitute collective identities are a crucial analytic focus for understanding stability and change. At the end of the nineteenth century hegemonic societal paradigms, constructed out of the processes institutionalizing new social relations, emerged in France and the US. The French paradigm of “citizen-producer” and the American one of “specialized citizenship” had quite different implications for the patterns of gender relations embedded within them. These implications are visible in the treatment of women's work and maternity in these years of the emerging welfare state.

Along with criticisms of the U.S. government's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the disruptions to home, work, and school life resulting from social distancing orders recommended by public health experts, as well as the uncertainty about how long the disruptions will be necessary and when (if ever) we will have a vaccine, have come COVID-19 conspiracy theories (CTs).

In the United States, organized socialism is dead; in Canada socialism, though far from national power, is a significant political force. Why this striking difference in the fortunes of socialism in two very similar societies?

Any attempt to account for the difference must be grounded in a general comparative study of the English-Canadian and American societies. It will be shown that the relative strength of socialism in Canada is related to the relative strength of toryism, and to the different position and character of liberalism in the two countries.

In North America, Canada is unique. Yet there is a tendency in Canadian historical and political studies to explain Canadian phenomena not by contrasting them with American phenomena but by identifying them as variations on a basic North American theme. I grant that Canada and the United States are similar, and that the similarities should be pointed out. But the pan-North American approach, since it searches out and concentrates on similarities, cannot help us to understand Canadian uniqueness. When this approach is applied to the study of English-Canadian socialism, it discovers, first, that like the American variety it is weak, and second, that it is weak for much the same reasons. These discoveries perhaps explain why Canadian socialism is weak in comparison to European socialism; they do not explain why Canadian socialism is so much stronger than American socialism.

This article addresses the question of the applicability of John Kingdon's theory of agenda-setting to Canadian political life. It examines the extent to which agenda-setting in Canadian governments is routine or discretionary, predictable or unpredictable, and the extent to which it is influenced by events and activities external to itself. The study uses time series data collected on issue mentions related to Native affairs, the constitution, drug abuse, acid rain, the nuclear industry and capital punishment in parliamentary debates and committees between 1977 and 1992. It compares these series to other time series developed from media mentions, violent crime rates, unemployment rates, budget speeches and speeches from the throne, elections and first ministers' conferences over the same period in order to assess the impact of such events on public policy agenda-setting.