A general perception of crisis at the end of the postwar period of growth has spawned two types of theoretical response: while a conservative theory of overload focusses on ungovernability caused by postmaterialist value change, radical analysis points to the structural contradictions of the welfare and intervention state. This article suggests that the current crisis is characterized by postmaterialist persistence and structural contradictions under the conditions of economic constraint. It examines polarization and potential mobilization of fragmented postindustrial societies in the context of neo-conservative politics, and it suggests a regime of economic dualism and/or corporatism as the most likely outcome.

The issue of moral dimensions of the state and its statecraft is the focus of this article. The issue is premised on two questions: how do we secure moral responsibility of the state and its functionaries; and what can be done to enhance the sense of mission, dedication and service which used to be the hallmarks of the public service? The concept of “administrative theology” is suggested as a possible answer in our search for a moral government and statecraft. Particular emphasis is placed on the concept of service and the doctrine of vocation. The author concludes by pleading the case of administrative theology as a possible source for a moral government and its statecraft.

This article discusses the ideological origins of Canadian Confederation. As such it directly challenges a belief commonly held by Canadian political scientists and historians that Canadian Confederation was the product of a purely pragmatic exercise. The author argues instead that the ideological origins of the Canadian federal state may be traced to the debate that divided eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain, America and France—a debate between the defenders of classical republican values and the proponents of a rising commercial ideology formulated during the Enlightenment. Only by understanding how this debate unfolded in nineteenth-century Canada can we understand the particular configuration of the Canadian state that emerged triumphant in the 1860s. Furthermore, an understanding of this debate also offers political scientists a broader context for interpreting long-held Canadian attitudes toward authority, the uses of political patronage, the public debt, capitalism, and the state and economic development.

Canada is a member of the very select club of the seven most industrialized countries. However, since the beginning of the 1970s the federal government has been trying to define a strategy allowing for a more favourable insertion of the Canadian economy in the world economy. Historically, the exportation of merchandise has always been essential to the growth of the Canadian economy, but the world market is more and more competitive and economic renewal is necessary if the Canadian economy is not to be marginalized. This article analyzes the decline of Canada's place in the world economy, external and internal constraints which are at the origin of this situation and the two strategies that have been put forward by the federal government in order to ensure the restructuration of the Canadian economy. Finally, the article demonstrates that the traditional dichotomy of weakening/strengthening is inadequate to understand the nation-state's role in relation to economic space.

Nordlinger's thesis regarding the capacity of state officials to act autonomously is examined by focussing upon the behaviour of elected officials in New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island during a debate to reform the potato marketing system. The article argues that Nordlinger overstates the autonomy of elected officials by failing to appreciate that dominant societal groups can deploy many of the same autonomy-enhancing instruments available to state officials. Their relative success in doing so is a function of the political economy of the geographic unit, and in particular the extent to which it is market-oriented, relatively underdeveloped and characterized by a traditional political culture. Federalism and the nature of the policy issue under debate are additional factors which affect elected state officials' steering capacity.

This article assesses the impact of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms on the Canadian political system. Unlike some commentators who have minimized the effect of the Charter, the author finds that the Charter is inducing significant and permanent changes in the conduct of Canadian politics. Canadian judges have shed their pre-Charter style of deference and self-restraint, and are playing a bolder and more influential role in the governing process. Charter decisions are remolding the Canadian criminal law process along the lines of the “due process” model and away from the “crime control” model of the pre-Charter era. The Charter has also begun to change the way the Canadian political system operates. Interest groups have responded by making greater use of Charter constitutional litigation as a tactic to pursue policy objectives. Law-making areas once solely the prerogative of provincial governments are now being threatened with uniform national standards laid down by the Supreme Court in the course of Charter decisions. Political executives are using the reference procedure to pass Charter issues on to the courts in order to avoid dealing with political “hot potatoes” such as abortion and minority language education. In sum, the predicted “judicialization of politics” is well under way.

The Supreme Court's position in federal states, especially in Canada and the United States, is often delicate when it has to settle cases under dispute involving the sharing of powers between the states (or provinces) and the central government. For the United States, even if civil rights affect only indirectly these powers, several Supreme Court decisions curtail the autonomy of the states, from which follows a long process of centralization. Nonetheless the Supreme Court is only one actor among others, and a limited one, in this process.

It is frequently argued that section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms should be interpreted to protect Canadians not only against intentional discrimination based on the prohibited grounds, but also against “systemic discrimination.” Since systemic discrimination against one group can always be described as intentional discrimination against another, this approach seems redundant in the context of an open-ended list of prohibited grounds. It may be explained as a way of promoting discrimination against unlisted groups upward on the scale of scrutiny, thus expanding the range of policy-making in inherently contestable areas that is subject to judicial determination or oversight. This article explores the political and institutional ramifications of this interpretation.

Twenty years’ debate have revealed many weaknesses in the Hartz-Horowitz interpretation of conservatism, liberalism, and socialism in Canada, but it continues to be widely taught, for it provides a simple and appealing explanation for some striking differences between Canadian and American politics. This article argues that the interpretation is best understood as a form of neo-Marxism, that its basic weaknesses are most easily seen by examining its treatment of French Canada, and that its explanation for the exceptional strength of socialism in English Canada, linking socialism to toryism, can be strengthened by linking both socialism and toryism to nationalism.

This article discusses the relationship between marxism and feminism, a most controversial issue among marxists. A Canadian publication is analyzed to document how the woman question has been used to draw women into the bosom of a communist group opposed to feminism. The apparent contradiction is shown to stem from the fear that feminism may divide the working class on the basis of men-women relations, an opposition far less significant than the struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie.

Investigations with respect to proposals for government intervention generally deal with values, ideologies or strategies of party leaders. Theoretical studies predict that, in an environment where information is imperfect and costly, politicians have incentives to formulate interventions, the benefits of which are concentrated while their costs are diffused. The authors elaborate a theory of supply of government intervention which predicts the characteristics of interventions that increase the number of votes as well as the characteristics of actions that lead to vote losses. The predictions of this theory are tested by using the proposals for government intervention in the official programmes of the political parties of Quebec during the 1960–1981 period. The two basic findings are that (1) the prediction relative to the anti-consumer and anti-taxpayer bias of the political market is not supported by the facts, and that (2) the party leaders prefer to finance the cost of their proposals of government intervention through the mode of fiscal illusion instead of hoping for inattention on the part of consumers and taxpayers.

This article examines the relationship between the previous political experiences of immigrants and their subsequent involvement in Canadian politics. A 1983 Toronto-area survey of immigrants of various ethnic origins (British, West Indian, Southern and Eastern European) who had been in Canada for five years or less serves as the study's data base. Two hypotheses derived from the relevant literature are investigated: immigrants will have difficulty “transferring” or making relevant past political experiences; and only those (that is, the British) whose system resembles the new one (Canadian) can accomplish transference. However, a more optimistic perspective is proposed suggesting the likelihood of transference regardless of the system of origin. Test results support this latter view.

Many authors, both in academic and political circles, consider that the National Energy Program (NEP) was responsible for the “Canadianization” of the oil and gas industry. This article challenges that interpretation and shows, supported by data, that the decline of foreign control in the Canadian oil and gas industry started well before the launching of the NEP, and that it went on after the abolition of the Program. In fact, the “Canadianization” of the oil and gas industry can be interpreted as a larger process, of the decline of bargaining power of the multinational firms in this industry. A similar process has taken place in other countries, even if the Canadian model has some dimensions of its own.

The predominant view of Marx's communist society is that it is a form of Utopia in which there is complete social harmony, with no private space for individuals, no conflicts, and no politics. The author argues that this “orthodox” view is a misreading of Marx's works, especially of certain key early works. According to his interpretation, in Marx's communist society there is private space, private/particular interests, controversy, politics, and rights. The author discusses the major theoretical/ methodological errors of the “orthodox” interpretation, such as interpreting key statements by Marx at the wrong level of generality.

The article compares the Ecclesiastical Polity of Richard Hooker with Thomas Hobbes's Christian Commonwealth focussing primarily on the political dimension of religious life. The comparison serves to undermine the position—still surprisingly widespread—which sees Hobbes as sacrificing religion to political stability by displaying the extent to which and the way in which Hooker takes religious practice (since Constantine) to be a matter of public policy requiring authoritative determination. Also, a somewhat novel suggestion is elaborated regarding the relationship between the “rational” and “religious” parts of Leviathan. It is suggested that the first part of Leviathan is a kind of conceptual primer—a guide to Scriptural exegesis—and that the parts of Leviathan thus form an integrated whole.

Recent research on voting in United States presidential elections has begun to disentangle long-term and short-term components of electoral choice. This has been achieved through the use of complex models involving instrumental variables and two-stage or three-stage least squares regression. These techniques are particularly appropriate to understanding the voting decision in Canada because of the short-term variability of partisan identifications. Modelling voting choice, using simultaneous equations and data from the 1979 Canadian National Election Study, it was found that the major attitudinal determinants of voting—party identification and attitudes towards issues and party leaders—were strongly related to one another and to the direction of vote whereas sociodemographic characteristics were only weakly related to political attitudes and behaviour. In addition, the strength of these variables may vary across the major parties in any given election.

Students of Canadian politics and public policy have produced numerous studies on the importance of regionalism in Canadian politics. A wealth of essays now exists on regional political culture and numerous suggestions have been put forward to make our national political institutions more regionally sensitive. One institution—the federal public service—has been virtually ignored in this context. Yet many now recognize the considerable influence the federal public service has on the government's policy-making process. With the aid of a survey, this article assesses if senior federal officials themselves view the government's policy-making process as centralized or decentralized. The survey also seeks to assess the importance senior federal public servants attach to regional economic circumstances in policy-making. The survey is broken down on a regional basis.

This study will investigate the problematic character of externalization theory, which posits that national leaders sometimes engage in foreign conflict in order to restore domestic cohesion. The first stage is a reassessment of the behavioural literature that, for two decades, has failed to support the theory, despite commonly held expectations to the contrary. Some significant discrepancies between theory and testing are uncovered during the review. These missing elements of externalization subsequently are incorporated in a crisis-oriented model. This model of crisis resolution, based on domestic conflict change as the independent variable and war versus de-escalation as the dependent variable, is tested using International Crisis Behaviour Project data from 1948–1975. The results are encouraging to the theory and suggest the value of further research in the area.

This article analyzes the impact of freer trade on Canadian foreign investment policy. Its object is to identify new measures of control that were applied to the activities of foreign companies between 1975 and 1983. The evolution of relations between governments and multinationals is traced and followed by an analysis of the various measures that were implemented to control foreign investment by these governments. Finally, the study of the Canadian situation focusses on the four following measures: direct aid, procurement policies, the Foreign Investment Review Agency and world product mandates. These measures have a specific sectorial impact and attempt to increase Canadian benefits from foreign multinationals.

Montesquieu may be a better guide to understanding the nature of the Canadian state, past and present, than Hobbes or Locke of any of the other political philosophers of the past. This article argues that Montesquieu's doctrine has two major components–a discussion of the mixed constitution, blending monarchical, aristocratic and democratic features, and the separation of powers that distinguishes among executive, legislative and judicial. Each of these components can be used to illuminate the operation of state power at the central level in this country, the first the long period between 1867 and the Second World War, the second the post-Second World War period, and more especially the situation that has arisen with the passage of the Constitution Act, 1982.