This study evaluates the visibility of French-speaking scholars in Canadian political science by analyzing the reading materials assigned in Canadian politics courses. Extending Daoust et al.'s (2022) research, we establish a baseline for their calculations and build an original dataset gathered from all political science departments’ websites and Google Scholar. Our analysis based on three assumptions about the expected academic representation of francophones—Canada's linguistic composition, the makeup of political science departments and faculty members’ productivity—reveals a discrepancy favouring anglophone scholars by up to four percentage points. Our findings extend Daoust et al.'s (2022) contribution by highlighting a similar language-based bias in overall citation practices among Canadian scholars, with French-speaking authors being significantly under-cited compared to their English-speaking counterparts despite demonstrating higher levels of overall productivity. Implications for the future of the discipline are also discussed.

Academics across Canada, an officially bilingual and multicultural country, devote a lot of attention to diversity and representation. This is particularly true for political scientists. In this research note, we focus on the linguistic composition of panels and overall linguistic fragmentation of the most important in-person event for Canadian political science: the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association (CPSA). To do so, we generated a dataset based on the official program of the 2023 annual conference. Our main results are twofold. First, we find an important under-representation of French-speaking events and academic communications (i.e., panels and papers). Second, we computed Herfindahl-Hirschman indexes demonstrating that francophone-dominated panels and co-authored papers with francophone first authors are significantly more linguistically diverse than anglophone panels and papers. Our results highlight important blind spots in Canadian political science and help make sense of the lack of representation of French-language work in Canadian academia.

Secularism—i.e., the separation between the state and religious institutions—is a fundamental characteristic of liberal democracies, yet support for secular arrangements varies significantly across Western countries. In Canada, such attitudinal divergences are observable at the regional level, with citizens from Quebec displaying higher levels of support for secularism than other Canadians. In this paper, we test three hypotheses to account for this regional discrepancy: religiosity, liberal values, and out-group prejudice. Using data from an online panel survey (n = 2,000), our findings suggest that support for secularism in Quebec is mostly explained by the province's lower baseline levels of religiosity, anticlerical feelings, and by its distinctive understanding of liberalism. These factors are likely to result from Quebec's unique religious and sociohistorical history. Results also suggest that while negative feelings toward religious minorities are positively correlated with support for secularism across the entire country, negative feelings toward ethnic minorities are associated with lower support for secularism in Quebec. These findings disprove the commonly held assumption according to which support for secularism is driven by ethnic prejudice in Quebec.

This article examines the effect of racial attitudes on the electoral performance of the New Democratic Party (NDP). Since 2017, the NDP has been led by Jagmeet Singh, the first non-white leader of a nationally competitive Canadian political party. Voters’ racial attitudes and the race of party leaders have a significant effect on vote choice in the United States. Less is known about whether similar effects exist in Canadian elections. I show that NDP vote choice polarized on the basis of racial attitudes following Singh's ascension to party leader. Voters with cold feelings toward racial minorities were less likely to vote for the NDP in 2019 and 2021 than in comparable historical elections. In contrast, there is no significant difference between 2019/2021 and prior elections in support for the Liberals and Conservatives among such voters. These results suggest that racial attitudes are salient in Canadian elections and that national parties may face an electoral penalty when selecting non-white party leaders.

Gender-based violence is a prevalent and persistent societal problem in Canada that permeates all spaces, including politics. Yet sexual harassment, sexual assault and/or gender-based violence research is rarely found in mainstream political science in Canada or elsewhere. This article argues that this absence is highly problematic for a discipline that purports to centre itself on understanding power—who has it and who doesn't, and how to access it. It further argues for a normative intersectional and interdisciplinary approach, highlighting promising avenues of research in feminist institutionalism and Indigenous feminism to help achieve elusive solutions to gender-based violence in the future.

The representation of Canada's two main linguistic groups in the teaching of Canadian politics is crucial, but we know little about it. In this article, we analyze the systemic underrepresentation of francophone authors in Canadian political science by examining the research that students are exposed to. Based on data from 351 syllabi across 42 Canadian universities, as well as data from the reading list of the doctoral qualifying field exams in Canadian politics, our findings show that francophone authors are systemically underrepresented (when not totally absent). About 38 per cent of Canadian politics courses include no francophone authors in their reading lists. Our findings suggest that Canadian politics is not an inclusive and comprehensive field. This result entails important implications not only for current professors and students but also for the profession more generally, given that the students who will make up tomorrow's faculties in Canadian universities are shaped by these biases.

Depuis un an, le Parti conservateur du Québec (PCQ) a fait des gains considérables dans les sondages d'intention de vote. Le parti peut-il encore faire des gains ou a-t-il atteint son plein potentiel? Dans cette note de recherche, nous tentons de répondre à cette question en utilisant un nouvel indicateur, l'index relatif de confiance (IRC), qui permet de mesurer le potentiel de croissance et la solidité du vote des partis.

Have universities heeded the call from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and taken concrete action to integrate and promote Indigenous scholarship in their classrooms? In the field of Canadian political science, this question is vital but underanalyzed. Indigenous knowledges, histories, languages, customs, legal traditions, systems of governance and research methodologies are integral to Canadian politics, but calls for indigenization have often not been met. By analyzing comprehensive exam reading lists for Canadian politics doctoral students in programs across the country, this article argues that a fractured approach to indigenization begins early on in the training of faculty. Indigenous content remains largely underrepresented on exam lists and siloed into Indigenous- or diversity-focused sections of the political science literature. Most Indigenous politics readings engage centrally with sovereignty and the Constitution, with very few exploring the political dimensions of residential schools, gendered violence and other contemporary political issues.

This article introduces White identity as an understudied concept in Canadian politics and compares how White settlers’ ingroup attachments and their outgroup attitudes—specifically, White settlers’ anti-Indigenous attitudes—shape Canadian politics. We find that White identity is associated with greater support for government spending on policies that disproportionately benefit White Canadians, such as pensions, whereas Indigenous resentment is associated with greater opposition toward government spending on policies that are often perceived as disproportionately benefiting Indigenous peoples, such as welfare. In Canada outside Quebec, both White identity and anti-Indigenous attitudes are associated with voting Conservative. In Quebec, White identity mobilizes support for the Bloc Québécois, while White settlers’ negative attitudes toward Indigenous peoples are not associated with vote choice.

This article introduces and discusses the findings of the Canada School Choice Policy Index (CSCPI). This is the first index of its kind that measures the development of school choice policies across the Canadian provinces from 1980 to 2020 using eight unique indicators of choice. In contrast to other countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the CSCPI reveals that although Canada has witnessed an increase in school choice over time, this increase has largely been contained within public education systems rather than in the expansion of private education options. Our findings raise the importance of future research to address growing choice in public education systems across the provinces, in addition to choice in the private sphere.

To enable new research on local ideology and representation in Canada, we construct a latent measure of the policy ideology of 37,500 Canadian Election Study respondents using 56 policy-relevant questions and then use multilevel regression and poststratification to estimate the average ideological position of each of Canada's 338 federal electoral districts and 250 largest municipalities. We use these local ideology estimates to examine ideological representation in Canadian municipal politics. Combining our municipal ideology estimates with elite survey data from more than 900 Canadian municipal politicians, we find evidence of a strong relationship between mass and elite ideology. This relationship is consistent across differing municipal population sizes and institutional structures. We conclude with additional detail on our publicly available individual and aggregate measures and describe their potential uses for future research on ideology and representation in Canadian politics at all levels.

This research note reports on a new effort to track candidate diversity in Canadian elections. The dataset covers 4,516 candidates who ran in the 2008, 2011, 2015 and 2019 federal elections and includes novel data on their race, Indigenous background and age, alongside information on gender, occupation, prior electoral experience and electoral outcome. We outline the process for collecting and systematizing these data, which relied on genealogical methods and the principle of triangulation. The data can be used to track diversity among electoral candidates over time or merged with other sources to answer district-level questions about representational diversity, electoral dynamics, vote choice and political communications. The method could also be replicated and applied to other levels of government.

Cet article fait l'analyse des discours homonationalistes dans un contexte qui a été peu exploré à ce jour, soit celui d'une nation minoritaire (le Québec) à l'intérieur d'un État multinational (le Canada). Dans la mesure où le nationalisme se construit souvent en opposition avec un « Autre », nous tentons de cerner qui est cet « Autre » dans l'homonationalisme québécois. En particulier, nous explorons si cet « Autre » peut également prendre la forme de la nation majoritaire par l'entremise d'une analyse d'articles publiés entre 1990 et 2017 dans différents journaux québécois (La Presse, Le Devoir et le Journal de Montréal). Nos résultats démontrent que si c'est le « Canada anglais » qui était plus susceptible dans la première moitié des années 2000 d’être « l'Autre » du nationalisme sexuel québécois, depuis la fin des années 2000, ce sont davantage les musulman/es (ici et ailleurs) et les immigrant/es qui font l'objet d'une altérisation dans les discours homonationalistes au Québec.

War comes with terrible costs both in terms of money and lives. Do voters punish incumbents for these costs? Much of the existing literature on the effects of war deaths on public opinion toward incumbents and their war efforts suggests that the answer is yes. We test this proposition on data from a non-US case: Canada's war in Afghanistan. We estimate models of the effect of local war deaths on incumbent support using individual-level panel data from the 2006, 2008 and 2011 Canadian Election Studies and aggregate district-level data from the 2008 and 2011 general elections. In none of our models do we find support for the conclusion that war deaths decrease support for candidates of the governing party. Instead, we find evidence at both the individual and district levels that support for Conservative party candidates is higher in districts that experienced war deaths.

Scholars have long studied the influence of parties on citizens’ policy preferences. Experiments conducted outside Canada have convincingly shown that the cues offered by political parties can influence people’s attitudes. However, the most prominent study of party cue effects in Canada finds weak effects, concluding that Canadian parties are less influential because they are less clearly ideological than parties elsewhere. We propose that parties are actually more influential than they appear because party cue effects partly depend on variables other than partisanship, notably attitudes toward the cue-giver. This is especially true in countries like Canada with multi-party systems. We show that attitudes toward parties are not clearly reflected in partisanship in Canada. We then show that more specific measures of party and leader attitudes better account for how experimental participants react to cues than does party identification alone.

Research has long observed the absence of gender in child care policy, media, and elections. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has invoked critical questions about child care and its importance to states’ economic recoveries around the world. In this research note, we analyze news coverage of child care in major Canadian daily newspapers to explore whether and how news narratives regarding child care are shifting in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, are we seeing a focus on women and gender in child care coverage amid the compounding pressures that women face in the current social and economic climate? The results of our analysis suggest that the pandemic has not shifted the conversation on child care and that current coverage principally reflects long-standing trends in child care framing. We find that gender remains systematically written out of coverage of child care, occluded by a larger focus on health-, economic-, and accessibility-related concerns about child care services.

In this article, we study how polarization affects the propensity of supporters of non-viable parties to cast a strategic vote. To do so, we rely on Canadian election panel surveys from the Making Electoral Democracy Work project that were specifically designed to identify strategic voting. We find that the polarization between viable parties increases the probability of a supporter of a non-viable party casting a strategic vote, because it increases how much she likes her favourite viable party, and decreases how much she dislikes her least favourite viable party. Polarization thus increases strategic voting because it alters partisan preferences.