Despite the overwhelming prevalence of democratic ideals in contemporary political relations throughout the world, a potent ideological challenge to liberal democratic norms is the recent claim that “differential” rights are essential to foster and protect the identity of individual rights within culturally distinct groups. This article examines the claim that cultural identity confers sufficient normative force upon which to base distinct political rights for specific groups. In what, precisely, does the normative force of “cultural identity” lie? The article challenges the claims that individuals' sense of personal identity can only arise through a “secure cultural context”; that a passive sense of group identity is a “primary good” that equals or even precedes the importance of universal human rights; and that this “politics of inclusion” based upon differential rights for different groups will lead to greater equality and tolerance within the larger political community.

This address examines the relationship of political science and democratic governance by considering changes in both the political world and the discipline in Canada since the 1960s. It argues that the developing dynamics in political life, as significant as they have been, have not fundamentally altered the essential features of democratic governance in Canada. It suggests that a number of factors account for the diminished capacity of the discipline, as a collective scholarly and teaching enterprise, to contribute to democratic political life. On the one hand is the relative paucity of institutional mechanisms in Canada to link political science to democratic governance; on the other is the discipline's own fragmentation that lessens its focus on questions central to democratic governance.

This article examines relations between organized feminism and the federal Conservative government of Brian Mulroney, focusing on elements of the Canadian women's movement that targeted federal policy change from 1984 to 1993. In questioning the main priorities of both sides and the potential for conflict between them, the discussion uses the conceptual literature on social movement evolution as a base. It assesses formal decision making across five major policy sectors identified by Canadian feminism and presents the perspectives of movement activists on the Mulroney period. Although comparisons with policy action under the Thatcher and Reagan governments indicate a more pro-feminist record in Canada than the United Kingdom or the United States, Canadian materials suggest a narrowing of common ground between the organized women's movement and federal elites during the Mulroney years.

The end of the twentieth century is marked by tensions between universalism and particularism which are particularly glaring in plurinational and pluriethnic countries. This article attempts first to demonstrate the importance and the difficulty in reaching a balance between unity and diversity in pluralistic countries. Even in the cases of Canada and Belgium, where conditions are among the most favourable, federal solutions adopted since the 1960s have not achieved the desired balance. A comparison of the evolution of federalism and collective identities in both Canada and Belgium reveals that opposing federal solutions have led to a similar fragmentation of identities. Pierre Trudeau's pancanadianism and the constitutional linguistic and cultural cloisonnement in Belgium have inhibited the realization of balance between unity and diversity. These choices have further contributed to the fragmentation process already in progress, the first through excessive universalism, the second through excessive particularism. The last part of the article seeks to evaluate the implications of these results for the debates on citizenship in political philosophy.

This article looks at the political significance of the pro-choice movement in the Canadian province of Ontario. It focuses more specifically on the discursive practices of the Ontario Coalition for Abortion Clinics (OCAC) and its use of law as a tool to effective change. By comparing the language of the Morgentaler judgment to that of the prochoice movement, this article attempts to explore the reference to law as a path for social change and, namely, as a site of discursive construction of norms and representations, as opposed to a simplistic definition of law as a site of power struggles.

The disclosure in 1987 that dioxins were present in pulp mill effluents prompted governments throughout the world to revise their environmental standards for the pulp and paper industry. This article uses the pulp and paper case to examine the dynamics of environmental standard setting within the Canadian federal state. Provincial regulatory incentives are analyzed using two-player games as a heuristic. The article then considers the federal government's role in establishing national standards. Many authors have emphasized the importance of federal involvement to overcome provincial reluctance to regulate unilaterally, lest jobs be lost to jurisdictions with weaker environmental standards. However, few have considered whether the federal government has incentives to do just that. It is argued that those incentives are weak at best, in light of resistance from both the regulated industry and jurisdictionally defensive provinces. In environmental regulation of the Canadian pulp and paper industry, federal reluctance resulted in a two-tier system of environmental standards with strict standards for the largest provinces, and weaker ones for smaller provinces that rely more on the federal government.

There are many works on decentralization, but few of them have studied in a systematic way the power relations that are associated with the transfer of attributions from a superior level to an inferior level of government. In order to compensate for these shortcomings a conceptual framework and two research proposals are formulated about the different components of decentralization and the power relations pertaining to them. The model is then applied to various decentralization policies which were adopted since the 1980s in different countries. Two main conclusions can be drawn from this study. First, in the power relations between the actors of the different levels of government, those of the superior level are maintaining their domination by controlling the more important resources in the new relationships created by the decentralization policies. Second, the actors of the superior level of government are seeking to present their domination as plausible with reference to some values generally associated with centralization or decentralization.

The theoretical literature on representation tends to read the work of Edmund Burke as a defence of a functional-corporatist conception of society, in which the groups relevant for political representation are stable and objective economic “interests” whose cooperation in and contribution to the life of nation and empire are essential for the status of Britain as a pre-eminent commercial power. This article presents an alternative, contractarian Burke that emerges out of his defence of the interests of non-economic “descriptions” of citizens such as Irish Catholics, a Burke who offers us an illuminating perspective from which to assess the claims of historically marginalized groups in contemporary liberal democratic societies.

Employing a rational choice perspective, this article seeks to explain the shift in the trade policy position of the Canadian province of Ontario during negotiations that led to the North American Free Trade Agreement. In doing so it highlights an important, though often overlooked, phenomenon: issue linkage in public policy construction. Early in 1993, Premier Bob Rae's New Democratic party government significantly shifted its position on the proposed agreement. While never actively supportive of the accord prior to 1993, the provincial government maintained close contact with federal trade negotiators as a means of advancing its core trade objectives. By February 1993, however, the government's position hardened perceptibly. Specifically, the government actively undertook to derail the proposed agreement. This article suggests that this shift cannot be understood in terms of growing dissatisfaction with the impending trade agreement, nor solely to a change in Ontario's trade policy preferences. Rather, it suggests that a broader perspective is needed, and argues that Ontario's position on NAFTA was linked to other priorities of the Rae government: namely, those in the fiscal policy arena.

This article presents evidence concerning women's representation in Canada's provincial legislative assemblies over a 20-year period (1975–1994). Data from 3,755 elections and over 11,000 candidates are analyzed to inspect trends in representation. The authors find there has been a gradual increase in both female candidates and legislators. The New Democratic party has clearly been the leader in putting women on the ballot and into legislatures at the provincial level. In addition, hypotheses are tested to see if there are differences across provinces in parties' willingness to nominate and elect women, and whether women are more likely to be nominated primarily in districts where a party does not expect to win. The study finds that the Atlantic provinces lagged behind the rest of Canada as representation increased markedly everywhere else in the late 1980s and the 1990s. There is also evidence that the major parties nominated female challengers in ridings that were inferior to the ridings where the party's male challengers ran in the mid- to late-1970s. By the mid-1980s, however, evidence that women were treated as sacrificial lambs had disappeared.

The authors present a new game-theoretic interpretation of Hobbes's state of nature that, unlike existing rational-choice models, questions the possibility of individually rational decision making. They provide a general formulation of the two-player two-strategy game applied to the state of nature and derive existing models as special cases. A nonstandard version of Chicken under incomplete information, that interprets “death” as infinitely bad, provides an explanation for important and hitherto unaccounted for claims by Hobbes. The authors suggest that rational choice in Hobbesian political philosophy ought to examine not so much the mechanics of rational action in natural conditions, but rather the means whereby citizens already living in civil associations can be persuaded of the irrationality of civil war.

Previous literature has assumed that there is a trade-off between cabinet stability, by means of a majority manufactured by a single-seat plurality system, and the alleviation of regional conflict, by means of a more proportional electoral system. This study demonstrates that no such tradeoff exists. The objective of this study is to find an alternative electoral system which satisfies both the criteria of majority government and multiregional representation. In a quasi-experiment, an electoral system with a district magnitude of two (M2) satisfies both of the above criteria. The results of the study show that a district magnitude of two can provide a large diffuse party with a majority of seats for the same amount of voter support as the present plurality system. In addition, M2 rewards this large diffuse party with seats necessary to form a minority government at a much lower level of voter support than does the existing system. Thus, M2 solves the problem of underrepresentation of regions in the government party, and is at the same time even more advantageous to a large diffuse party than is the present electoral system. If the argument of this study is correct, beneficiaries of the existing system should not be averse to implementing it.

This article criticizes a group of contemporary political theories that describe the virtues appropriate to liberal citizens, the ills that result from a waning of these virtues and the kinds of public policies that would renew the traits of character necessary to the healthy functioning of a liberal polity. While enumerations of broadly liberal virtues can seem relatively uncontroversial, these pieties provide insufficient warrant for the concrete policy recommendations made in their name. Theoretical and practical discussions of citizen virtues need to take seriously the diversity of liberal “citizenship stories,” and to consider how legitimately to conciliate these perspectives in particular cases.

One of the most challenging developments for students of international relations is the resurgence of ethnic strife. While it may be true that there have been few recent interstate wars, it would be incorrect to assume that ethnic turmoil will remain an isolated domestic problem. Recent interventions by individual states, either in support of, or opposition to, ethnic challenges, raise important questions about the validity of conventional perspectives on interstate conflict: Why do some states intervene in ethnic strife while others do not? Why do some third-party states rely on violence to support ethnic conflicts while others support norms of peaceful mediation? This investigation uses Putnam's two-level game to examine the impact of ethnicity on third-party intervention. Evidence from the Balkans war and Indo-Sri Lankan conflict show how heads of state must coordinate actions at two bargaining “tables,” which correspond to domestic politics and international negotiation. By monitoring strategies and tactics at each, it becomes possible to understand superficially puzzling developments. More specifically, initiatives in one domain may be a function of constraints or opportunities imposed by the other. These insights appear as propositions related to commitment, autonomy, domestic costs and manipulation of perceptions

Between 1985 and 1995, 12 provincial parties in Canada elected their leaders by a direct vote of their membership. This article examines the motivation behind the switch to direct election, the direct election procedures used and whether the expected benefits have been realized. Claims that direct elections are more democratic than traditional conventions and that they can revitalize a party membership are scrutinized.

The rise of postmaterialist values in democratic societies is likely to affect traditional representative institutions such as political parties. This article seeks to ascertain whether the leaders and followers of Quebec's two mainstream political parties, the Liberal party and the Parti Québécois, adhere in any different fashion to these values. It is based on two surveys, the mail survey from the 1993 Canadian Election Study and another established by the authors. Data show important cleavages between these two parties on postmaterialism, the leaders and followers of the Parti Québécois being clearly more postmaterialist than their Liberal counterparts. However, the values associated with “New Politics” do not fill the place of old economic cleavages such as those that are based on the redistribution of wealth, still present in the Quebec party system.

This article uses British Columbia forest policy to test our ability to distinguish between policy change and policy learning using the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) developed by Paul Sabatier. The authors find the ACF a useful way of approaching policy change in this sector, but argue that finer discriminations are needed to detect policy learning. They argue that Sabatier underestimates the extent to which the legitimation function of key ideas forces dominant advocacy coalitions to respond to criticisms in ways that promote learning. They conclude that, in this case, adaptive strategies undertaken by a dominant advocacy coalition in response to criticism has resulted in policy-oriented learning that may cause a major policy shift without an externally induced crisis in the forest policy sector.

This research note considers the complex relationship between the electoral and party systems in Canada from 1921 to 1993. By drawing on Douglas Rae's theoretical model, the note demonstrates that the electoral system exerts a powerful influence on the party system and makes the case that important regional information is often washed out in national-level results. Furthermore, a novel approach is taken to the measurement of regional data in a federal election—a comparison of the indices of fragmentation of the regions and the country provide an interesting explanation for some of the stunning changes in parliamentary representation in 1993. In interpreting the 1993 Canadian general election in this framework, the author argues that although the results in parliament seem to indicate momentous changes in Canadian politics, the voting patterns are, nonetheless, consistent with Canadian political history.

This article summarizes the cartel model of party structure and tests it against the experience of the Canadian party system in the 1990s. Four claims are evaluated: that the three dominant parties in the House of Commons before 1993 colluded to exclude new parties; that they used state subsidies in their own interest; that the 1993 election result was a backlash against the cartel parties; and that Canadian parties are adopting new leadership selection methods in order to allow their leaders greater autonomy. The article concludes that the first two claims are valid while the latter two are not, and discusses some of the implications of these findings for Canadian parties and for the cartel model itself.

Arguments advancing the merits of Aboriginal Electoral Districts (AEDs) for Canada are informed by the view that the democratic integration of Aboriginal peoples into the institutions of the state ought to occur on the basis of their group-differentiated citizenship. This study advances the thesis that the attempt to fuse the conventional concern for democratic equality with a model of representation based on difference such as that offered by AEDs is to try to harmonize objectives that strain significantly against one another and thus are largely incompatible. AEDs are unsustainable as vehicles for the representation of Aboriginal peoples within Parliament because they are too tightly bound to a representational norm linked to a commitment to voter equality which, when measured against the normative thrust of differentiated representation, imposes a high degree of homogenization upon the citizenship of Aboriginal peoples.