Despite long-standing academic interest in Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state, there has been little study of Indigenous elected officials as representational actors. We ask: What are the distinctively Indigenous forms of representation practised by Indigenous elected officials in Canada? And how does clarifying the role of Indigenous elected officials as representatives both contribute to and enhance our overall understanding of Indigenous politics, governance and sovereignty? We draw on the existing literatures on substantive representation as well as original interviews conducted with current and former Indigenous elected officials to develop an original conceptualization of Indigenous representation. These actors differ in their perceptions of themselves and their roles as representatives, the representational behaviours they engage in and the outcomes they seek. Our conceptualization of Indigenous representation engages with four themes: Indigenous perspective, Indigenous advocacy, balance with other imperatives including constituency representation and party discipline, and Indigenous nationhood.

Who runs and is elected is one of the most fundamental questions in political science as it pertains to the issue of descriptive representation. Despite the importance of this issue, until recently there were no longitudinal datasets on candidates in Canadian elections. This article presents two novel datasets including information on all candidates who ran in Canadian federal and Ontario provincial elections from 1867 to 2019. I present how these data were collected and how they can be used to gain new insights. I expect these data will be a valuable resource to Canadian political scientists for both research and teaching purposes.

How ambitious are MPs in European parliaments and how does progressive ambition affect their strategies? We argue that progressively ambitious members of parliament try to generate individual visibility and seek the support of party leaders who decide on promotion while at the same time ensuring reelection by adjusting to electoral system incentives. Using novel data from a 15-country MP survey we show that progressive ambition is widespread in Europe and Israel. As hypothesized, progressively ambitious MPs are more likely to favor personal rather than party-centered electoral campaigns and to address the national or regional party leadership instead of their local party. Electoral system features and party ideology also have the theoretically expected effects.

This study examines discursive constructions of older people by analysing the talk of members of parliament in parliamentary discussions in Finland. While the perceptions of older people that are constructed in various public and private arenas have been relatively widely examined, the talk of political decision makers has not been studied to any large extent. However, decision makers' understandings of older people are likely to influence the ways in which service systems are developed and services organised for older people. The parliamentary discussions examined in this study were related to the process of enacting legislation to secure services for older people. Using discourse analysis, three ways of constructing older people – as ‘the dependent’, ‘the active’ and ‘the deserving’ – are identified. Although the results are to some extent in accordance with previous findings, indicating that older people are constructed as either totally dependent and passive or extremely active, this study also breaks this dichotomous view and highlights the overlap between those constructions. Nonetheless, the picture of older people remains fairly one-dimensional. There was an absence of recognition of diversity among older people, which might inhibit the development of a customer-oriented service system.