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.

How did the Fathers of Canadian Confederation understand United States federalism? What lessons did they presume to draw from it and how did they apply them to the Confederation project? In this article, James Madison's comprehensive test of federalism, as set out in the thirty-ninth paper of The Federalist, is used as a tool to examine the Canadians' views of American federalism, particularly in relation to the questions of state sovereignty and the role of an upper chamber. The article suggests that their preoccupation with the threat of state sovereignty led them to concentrate on division of powers issues and, as a result, to pay little attention to the federal possibilities of a second chamber. And it concludes that, because they were working with a parliamentary model of government, not a republican one, these possibilities were not—and are not now—as promising as some political scientists suggest.

There are numerous definitions of power, but none of them has succeeded in promoting fruitful empirical research. To take steps in this direction a preliminary condition has to be fulfilled: to put the definition of power in the context of an important theory. The concept of voting power developed within collective choice theory fulfills this condition. Such a concept may be extended to all collective decisions. A systems approach to voting or non-voting power is concerned less with the notion of winning coalitions, or the notion of pivot within a winning coalition, than it is with the power structure which takes shape in the making of collective decisions. After a presentation of the power resources, the article closes with a case study bearing on the decision made by the Quebec cabinet, in 1962, to hold an election on the issue of nationalization of electric companies.

Following certain studies in the United States, this article examines the question of the replacement of political representatives in realigning elections. In responding to this question, a three-step verification strategy will be used. First, with the aid of a volatility index, the authors define the different types of elections in Quebec since 1867. They then examine the changes in parliamentary members (turnover-electoral defeat), as well as the socio-economic transformations (in age, education, occupation) amongst parliamentary members in realigning elections. In general, if a relation exists between electoral realignments and changes in elected members, the results are less pronounced than in studies of the United States Congress.

Leadership succession in the Soviet Union has always had some impact on the composition of the ruling Communist party, which is otherwise determined normally by the force of social status. As the CPSU constitutes the pool from which the Soviet political elite is drawn, changes in that pool brought about by the succession of Gorbachev are bound to have implications for the future. Apparently unable at the beginning of his term to stem the intake of new members, Gorbachev has made dramatic use of expulsions to regulate the composition of the party. In their overall effect, his policies have shown a remarkable continuity with the Brezhnev period. This includes the enhancement of workers’ and peasants’ chances of being drawn into full-time political roles at the expense of white-collar persons. The net effect is likely to be a widening of the gap between the party and the intelligentsia, who are effectively excluded from membership in the political elite.

The heuristic model commonly used to explain Canada's interests in development assistance is the mixed-motives approach. These motives are assumed to be philanthropic, economic, and politico-strategic, though there is little agreement among students of Canadian development assistance about which of the three is the most important. The purpose of this article is to examine the orthodox model; it concludes that these motives have little utility in accounting for contemporary aid policies. Instead, drawing on realist and statist theory, this study advances an alternative set of motives that it is argued more accurately accounts for the level and nature of Canada's development assistance policies. Elaborating on “politico-strategic” motives, the article suggests that the Canadian state's interests in prestige, organizational maintenance and limiting real expenditures provide a more proximate explanation of aid policy.

The article is an effort to think through the relation between the language of values, values education, and technology. It links Nietzsche's account of nihilism as the cognitive effort to create the illusion of adaptation and mastery of what is contingent and spontaneous and the process by which these life-denying values cause themselves to be devalued with a consideration of how psychology is turned to adjusting individuals and populations to the efficient securing of technological processes. George Grant's writings are employed as the vehicle of access to these reflections.

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.

The traditional interpretation of Plato's Republic in the English-speaking world, expressed most sharply by Sir Karl Popper, was that it represented a serious proposal for political rule. However, Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom have argued that Plato's real concern was to protect the position of philosophy within the city. Influenced by Simone Weil, this article argues that even Strauss and Bloom do not express the extent of Plato's rejection of the political life. By examining Plato's handling of such themes as gold and nakedness, the article concludes that Plato's central concern in the Republic was to explore how a soul could strive for the Good, given that the human condition inescapably required social life.

The discovery of important oil fields in the southeast of Mexico in 1972 transformed totally the petroleum industry. That transformation, which was a part of a more general policy of industrial decentralization, induced a considerable interurban population migration. The object of this article is to discuss the migration in detail and to analyze the new link between the population and the territory, the population trying to establish itself in a buffer region against Central America. This link can be understood from the kind of political and social mobilization that characterizes the populist political system of Mexico. However, the tie to that specific social mobilization was not so strong as the centripetal movement of rent-transfer was reinforced, throwing a light on some crisis components of Mexico's system.

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 apparent defeat of the medical profession on the issue of extra-billing presents an anomaly, in light of the historical and comparative literature on the political power of medicine and the more general interest group literature regarding the disproportionate political influence of concentrated interests. On closer examination, the extra-billing episode suggests some modifications to theories of the political advantage of concentrated interests, but does not present a deviant case. It rather provides an example of the political vulnerability of concentrated interests on issues of broad symbolic appeal; it illustrates the ability of a concentrated group to use its traditional advantages in processes of negotiation and accommodation with policy-makers to achieve tangible and positional gains in compensation for symbolic losses; and (in the case of the conflict in Ontario) it demonstrates the susceptibility of such negotiations over symbolic values to problems of misperception, miscalculation and “face.” In longer-term perspective, moreover, the extra-billing issue is best understood as an episode of conflict in a long history of accommodation between medicine and the state under comprehensive medicare.

Michel Foucault's framework has substantially changed the manner in which we understand power. His analysis substitutes for theoretical representations a study of complex mechanisms of production like strategy, tactic, apparatus, technologies, and so forth. Those terms are not simply figures of speech or analogies. The archaeology of knowledge brings a new perspective of study for social analysis: space. That concept shapes Foucault's approach from L'Histoire de la folie to Souci de soi. From that point of view, it is less important to linger on his notion of power than to inquire about his general theory of productions developped through the archaeological analysis of madness, jail, sexuality or subjectivity. It is in this fashion that Michel Foucault's work will contribute to modify social and human sciences' practices

The article assesses the utility of Eric Nordlinger's statist approach in explaining Canada's policies on deep seabed mining at the United Nations Third Conference on the Law of the Sea. Nordlinger argues that government decision-makers in liberal democratic societies enjoy considerable autonomy in translating their preferences into public policies even when opposition is mounted by major groups outside government circles. Nordlinger's thesis on state autonomy is useful in explaining Canada's deep seabed mining policies since government decision-makers determined policy outcomes. Nevertheless, the approach requires important modifications to enhance its relevance to the Canadian parliamentary system. It needs to distinguish between politicians and government bureaucrats, to identify the sources of their policy preferences and to recognize provincial involvement.

In July 1986, the Social Credit party of British Columbia held only the second leadership convention in its history. This article uses data from a survey of delegates to the convention to describe the divisions within the party, to assess disenchantment with the Bennett government and to estimate the effects of these and other factors on the final outcome of the convention. Analysis of a large number of policy and opinion items reveals a party largely united on economic policy but divided on social policy and issues of party organization and direction. However, leadership aspirants appeared unwilling to exploit these differences. The struggle for succession became one of “insiders” versus “outsiders,” between party professionals and the grass roots, between non-populists and populists, and the latter gave William Vander Zalm his victory.

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.

Does the fact that Canadian women obtained the suffrage in 1918 mean that the members of parliament agreed with the principle of equality between men and women? Through an analysis of the debates, we may easily see that equality was not at issue, that many other questions were related to the suffrage issue and that a debate on the fundamental problematic of equality never took place. This is the case in 1885 and 1918, when there is a semblance of debate, but it is all the more obvious in 1898 and 1917 in which cases one witnesses a game of hide-and-seek on the issue of women's suffrage. In conclusion, the consequences regarding women's citizenship are discussed.

Regional ministers, it is said, have declined in importance over the past three decades. While granting the disappearance of figures whose influence spanned broad regions, this article argues that in the last cabinet of Pierre Trudeau (1980–1984) the regional minister system was to a degree revived and formalized within the context of cabinet decision-making. The impact of this system is examined with respect to regional development and employment creation programmes. To account for the renewed influence of regional ministers, attention is focussed on changes in the machinery of government and on the political and economic climate of the time. The case of one minister in particular, Lloyd Axworthy, suggests that a contemporary regional minister's success is dependent primarily on the ability to mobilize the resources of the administrative state.

This note examines the impact of changing economic conditions on the popularity of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation-New Democratic party from 1954 to 1984. Using a form of aggregate analysis to test hypotheses developed from the literature, the study finds considerable variability over time periods, especially in the effects of income and inflation. It is suggested this may be a result of the brokerage party system and the minority status of the CCF-NDP in that system. More consistent results were evident for unemployment but the impact of unemployment was negative and therefore contrary to that hypothesized. The importance of this factor in NDP popularity, however, seems to have declined in the last decade.

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.