This article concerns the political ramifications of character-giving, the work we do intensifying our ideals in the environments and populations around us. The premise here is that strategies of character-giving are just as crucial to the construction of a well-ordered society as the promotion of justice or stability. This theme is explored through an examination of the works of Christopher Alexander, a modern urban planner who shares many of the concerns of contemporary political science. Alexander's central project is to learn how to bring a more humane and democratic character to the modern cityscape. This kind of "reconstructive" humanism might be seen as a fitting model for renewal in political science.

In order to remedy the difficulties arising from his lifeworld/system distinction, such as the inability of his theory to account for the possibility of legitimate political power, Jürgen Habermas' attention turned toward greater abstraction through an appeal to legal theory as the basis of political consensus in the face of problems of diversity, complexity and pluralism in the modern world. This turn is made possible by an appropriation of some concepts of liberal theory, specifically John Rawls's ideas of "overlapping consensus" and "reflective equilibrium." The author argues that Habermas' insufficiently critical appropriation of these concepts leads to an inadequate account of political power that takes the existing political order as already legitimate, thereby compromising the critical thrust of his own theory.

Aggregate cross-national analyses of political participation have reported correlations between civic literacy, political knowledge and election turnout. Enhancing civic literacy among Canadian voters, in part by encouraging greater newspaper readership in the general population, has been put forward as a strategy for combating falling turnout in national general elections. The idea is evaluated comparatively at the level of individual voters, using data from the British Election Study. Newspaper readership is related to political knowledge, but increased newspaper reading does not translate into a greater propensity to vote.

This article questions the relevance of the use of participatory democracy, in order to build a new theoretical frame for the understanding of the government of French cities. The nature of local actors, the way they are organized and deal with common issues, will be assumed to challenge the spreading of participatory democracy. The analysis will consider the problem of the adoption of the word “governance” from corporate and development patterns to urban ones, the structural shackles due to French municipal organization, and some special weaknesses in the way associations try to get involved in urban government.

This article formulates a model of alliance persistence and evolution to account for two aspects of behaviour that are largely neglected by traditional alliance theory. It argues that states that encounter common threats to military and nonmilitary interests (like political and economic stability) are likely to institutionalize their military pacts. This process raises material and normative obstacles to exiting the alliance, even as the performance of the alliance falters or the strategic context undergoes fundamental changes. The article tests several of the model's hypotheses by engaging in a comparative analysis of two Cold War alliance systems: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization.

COURTNEY, JOHN C. Commissioned Ridings: Designing Canada's Electoral Districts. By Jennifer Smith 1075

HIEBERT, JANET L. Charter Conflicts: What is Parliament's Role? By Matthew Hennigar 1076

COTÊ, ROCH ET MICHEL VENNE, sous la direction de. L'annuaire du Québec 2003. Par Marc Chevrier 1078

SROKA, GHILA. Où va le Québec? Par Christine Bout De L'An 1080

HOBERG, GEORGE, ed. Capacity for Choice. By Noemi Gal-Or 1081

MCFARLANE, LAWRIE AND CARLOS PRADO. The Best-Laid Plans. Health Care's Problems and Prospects. By Tamara Daly 1083

FUDGE, JUDY AND ERIC TUCKER. Labour before the Law: The Regulation of Workers' Collective Action in Canada, 1900-1948. By Greg Albo 1084

CHIPMAN, JOHN G. A Law unto Itself: How the Ontario Municipal Board Has Developed and Applied Land Use Planning Policy. By David Siegel 1087

HART, MICHAEL. A Trading Nation: Canadian Trade Policy from Colonialism to Globalization. By John Kirton 1088

MORTON, DESMOND. Understanding Canadian Defence. By Alistair D. Edgar 1090

JOYAL, ANDRÈ. Le développement local. Comment stimuler l'économie des régions en difficulté. Par Guy Chiasson 1091

ROTHSTEIN, BO AND SVEN STEINMO, eds. Restructuring the Welfare State: Political Institutions and Policy Change. By Andrew F. Johnson 1093

BACCIGALUPO, ALAIN. Police et droits de l'homme : droit pénal comparé Canada- France. Par Richard Dubé 1094

CARTIER, MICHEL. Les groupes d'intéret et les collectivités locales. Une interface entre le citoyen et l'État. Par Andrée Fortin 1097

CAPLOW, THEODORE, ed. Leviathan Transformed: Seven National States in the New Century. By Eric Langenbacher 1098

BROOKS, STEPHEN, ed. The Challenge of Cultural Pluralism. By Yasmeen Abu-Laban 1100

SMITH, T. ALEXANDER AND RAYMOND TATALOVICH. Cultures at War: Moral Conflicts in Western Democracies. By Matthew Mendelsohn 1101

SCHULTZE, RAINER-OLAF, ROLAND STURM AND DAGMAR EBERLE, eds. Conservative Parties and Right-Wing Politics in North America: Reaping the Benefits of an Ideological Victory? By Bruce Foster 1102

LUTHER, KURT RICHARD AND FERDINAND MULLER-ROMMEL, eds. Political Parties in the New Europe: Political and Analytical Challenges. By Gretchen MacMillan 1104

REVEL, JEAN-FRANÇOIS. L'obsession anti-américaine. Son fonctionnement, ses causes, ses conséquences. Par Yves Laberge 1106

TEICHMAN, JUDITH A. The Politics of Freeing Markets in Latin America: Chile, Argentina and Mexico. By Jean F. Mayer 1108

ROSECRANCE, RICHARD AVEC BERTRAND BADIE, PIERRE HASSNER ET PIERRE DE SENARCLENS. Débat sur l'État virtuel. Par Jean-François Thibault 1110

ARCHARD, DAVID AND COLIN M. MACLEOD, eds. The Moral and Political Status of Children. By Jean Bethke Elshtain 1112

HOLLAND, NANCY J. AND PATRICIA HUNTINGTON, eds. Feminist Interpretations of Martin Heidegger. By Leslie Paul Thiele 1114

VILLA, DANA. Socratic Citizenship. By Carol McNamara 1116

Many multilateral efforts have unfolded since the 1990s with the objective of discussing the improvement of migration regulations. Can these efforts be conceived as the sign that the sovereignty of the nation-state is eroding? The fact that states remain in control of many dimensions of migration policies invites a cautionary answer. An alternative interpretation consists in comprehending these efforts as conditioning a new world migration order. The article presents these efforts in order to discuss their underlying economic and political priorities, as well as the power relations involved. Some of the most important consequences of this transformation are then discussed.

The Gelman-King theory of enlightened preferences holds that the mass media play an important role in enlightening vote choices during election campaigns in the United States. This article adapts this theory to the electoral cycle in Britain. It also expands the theory to consider the media's role in facilitating consistent attitudes. Using data from the 1992-1997 British Election Panel Study, the author finds that attitudinal consistency and enlightened party preferences were highest immediately following elections. Moreover, there were significant differences according to the type of newspapers voters read, with broadsheet readers being the most enlightened. These findings suggest that enlightened preferences theory has wider applicability than simply US election campaigns.

This article considers the question: should rights extended to cultural communities to help them preserve themselves include the right to discipline dissident members who violate cultural norms? The case of the Pueblo Protestants is employed to consider two important defences of cultural rights (revisionist liberal and cultural communitarian) that offer conflicting answers. Both are found unsatisfactory because of their implicit reliance on "cultural monism" (that is, the assumption that individuals identify with only one cultural community). An approach to defining cultural rights is then outlined that avoids this assumption and its application is illustrated with respect to the Pueblo case.

There is little agreement about the degree to which parliamentary institutions can help overcome the democratic deficit in global governance. While much of the literature on the European Union's democratic deficit focuses on reforming parliament, most commentary on the subject in global governance and foreign policy holds out little hope that national parliaments could be used to mitigate the effects of the internationalization of public policy. This article examines the case of the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties (JSCOT), established by the Australian government in 1996 in an explicit attempt to use parliamentary reform to address the democratic deficit. Although JSCOT was highly active, it did not significantly change the way in which Australian national positions in international negotiations were arrived at; the democratic deficit created in Australia by increasing internationalization has not been mitigated by the creation of this committee. While the JSCOT initiatives might have been motivated by the concerns of the government of John Howard to overcome the democratic deficit, the way in which JSCOT actually evolved departed considerably from those original intentions. Ironically, JSCOT evolved in ways not dissimilar to the evolution of NGO consultation in Canada in the 1990s: as a tool of political management, a means by which the government could channel protest, deflect opposition, and in essence legitimize its own policy preferences.

Despite contentious debates within the field of environmental security, findings of the principal research projects undertaken in the 1990s suggest significant agreement about the process linking environmental change to conflict. This article offers a reconsideration of the theoretical arguments unifying much of the research in environmental security, and argues that cases must extend their time frames considerably. The authors suggest that this would improve understanding of the social effects of environmental change, but is likely to revise mainstream arguments connecting environment and security in dramatic ways. By focusing on the often neglected role played by adaptive mechanisms, longer-range case studies tend not to support the claim that environmental stress is an urgent security issue, viewing it instead as an issue with long-term theoretical and policy relevance to those concerned not only with security, but also with sustainable development and environmental justice.

Federal states like Belgium operate under conflicting pressures in the conduct of their international relations: centralizing pressures, on the one hand, imposed by the necessity of speaking with a single voice in order to forge a coherent international policy and decentralizing pressures, on the other, because globalization stimulates a qualitative and quantitative extension of the internal and international roles of substate players, mainly through the international deployment of substate paradiplomacy. This centralization of external affairs and the centrifugal forces introduced by globalization cause problems in this type of system, in which substate entities have numerous fields of jurisdiction. This new phenomenon is not without its risks because it leads to disorder and conflict. In many countries, the development of paradiplomacy by the substate actors creates conflict with the central government. The impression is created that the federal and the substate authorities are condemned to fight a zero-sum struggle for access to the international system, the former seeking to prevent the latter from playing a role in the development of foreign policy and to limit all international action by them. The case of Belgium is of particular interest since its substate entities are the most dynamic regions in the world in international relations. The objective of this article is to evaluate the impact of the Flemish identity paradiplomacy on the foreign policy of the federal state.

The role played by the middle powers in international economic negotiations is neglected by the literature on the subject. However, in an international trade negotiation characterized by a configuration of global asymmetry but with a relative symmetry between the dominant actors, the role played by the middle powers such as Canada constitutes a central factor in the success of the negotiation. Taking the example of the prenegotiations of the Free Trade Area of the Americas, this article shows how the middle powers facilitated the success of this crucial phase for the continuation of the negotiations. Le rôle joué par les puissances moyennes dans les négociations économiques internationales n'a pas beaucoup retenu l'attention des chercheurs. Pourtant, dans une négociation commerciale internationale caractérisée par une configuration d'asymétrie globale de pouvoir mais de symétrie relative entre les acteurs dominants, le rôle joué par les puissances moyennes comme le Canada constitue un facteur central dans la réussite de la négociation. Prenant l'exemple des pré-négociations de la Zone de libre-échange des Amériques, cet article démontre comment les puissances moyennes ont facilité la réussite de cette phase cruciale de la poursuite des négociations.

Political parties in Canada oscillate between periods of inter-election quiescence and active electoral year mobilization. This article moves beyond vote share accounts of party system change by using the financial accounts of local associations and central party organizations to track these patterns in the New Brunswick party system. The analysis covers several electoral cycles encompassing government turnover and the rise of a flash party. Ecological models rooted in electoral district-level data (including measures of party activity based on their annual financial records, census data describing the electoral districts and conventional aggregate electoral data) are developed to provide a more nuanced account of a party and party system change than those based on simple election results. The findings demonstrate that even in a period of remarkable electoral flux, party activity and success appears to be rooted in diverse constituency social and political contexts.

This article reports on a subset of results from a field-based research project that interviewed rural women community leaders in Atlantic Canada about their experiences and perceptions of leadership, public life and running for elected office. The project is motivated in part by an effort to understand why relatively few women are elected to public office in rural regions in general, and in Atlantic Canada in particular. This article focuses on a theme that emerged consistently and intensely during the interviews: participants' moral disapproval of, and aversion to, political life as they understand it in their local environment. Interviewees in all four Atlantic provinces describe deeply entrenched networks of patronclient relations that are played out in the administration of regional economic development programmes, and identify deterrents to their own electoral ambitions therein. These results are brought to bear on the question of what distinguishes the nature of political representation in rural communities from that in urban centres.

This article presents a test of the argument that vulnerability to economic dislocation, primarily as it is represented by economic homogeneity in communities, exercises a constraint on levels of support for Quebec nationalism. The guiding hypothesis is that residents of economically vulnerable ridings will be reluctant to accept the risks attached with political moves toward independence. The authors employ data on the level of support for the Bloc Québécois in the federal elections of 1993 and 1997, and the proportion voting "Yes" in the 1995 sovereignty referendum in Quebec, in the province's 75 federal electoral districts as their measures of support for sovereignty. Results suggest that there is a relationship between the geographies of potential economic vulnerability and the level of nationalist support, particularly evident in the 1995 referendum voting and the 1997 election. Calculations involving perceived economic vulnerability and risk remain as powerful defenders of the political status quo in Quebec.

Decades after Gad Horowitz's seminal article first appeared in 1966 in the Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, fragment theory's capacity to make sense of phenomena for which it might otherwise be difficult to account, still appears relevant. Support for the Reform party/Canadian Alliance is most robust in provinces marked by immigration from the western United States. By contrast, provinces where United Empire Loyalists settled have proven most resistant to incursions by Reform. Using fragment theory to formulate a possible hypothesis to explain this puzzle has two incidental benefits. It probes the failure of new federal parties to emerge from Maritime Canada, and it allows speculation about the simultaneous demise of the Conservative and New Democratic parties.

While it remains a diffuse field of enquiry, political psychology has established itself as an important approach to the analysis of political life. In the United States, political psychology is offered as an optional programme in a number of leading graduate schools and is a recognized subfield of the American Political Science Association. Despite the existence of a number of active political psychologists in Canada, there has been relatively little curiosity about the status of the field. This article offers an account of research in the field. Central to this exploration is an evaluation of the ideological, cultural and substantive research in political psychology in Canada.

Error from September 2003 issue (36:4) of The Journal (Michael Lusztig, Patrick James, and HeeMin Kim, "Signaling and Tariff Policy: the Strategic Multistage Rent Reduction Game".