Does the political knowledge gender gap extend to knowledge about federalism, an institutional arrangement that increases the cognitive demand on voter knowledge? We answer this question by drawing upon data from three national surveys administered in Canada between 2020 and 2022. We find evidence of a gap between men and women in terms of their knowledge of the distribution of authority across the three orders of government. Across four of our knowledge items, the gender gap favouring men gets smaller as the issues vary from the federal to provincial to municipal level. Knowledge about national defence and sewage/water, however, do not fit this pattern. These results suggest future research should examine whether the gendered knowledge gap with respect to federalism can be explained by which levels of government have responsibility over areas of jurisdiction that have a strong effect on or are used by women on a daily basis.

This study assesses the validity and reliability of empirical strategies derived from the study of European populisms by applying them to the case of Canada. Using a dataset of 5,845 original tweets by Canadian federal party leaders in 2022, we compare the prevalence and intensity of three characteristic populist discourses: “people-centrism,” “anti-elitism” and “exclusion of others.” Our results raise questions about the role of party ideology in shaping populist communication styles, by revealing a convergence among opposition leaders around primarily economic representations of the “people” and political portrayals of the “elite.” We also confirm the hunch that Canada is “exceptional” with respect to the prevalence of “exclusion of others,” demonstrating that this discourse is rare and has not been embraced by mainstream politics. Finally, the study adds to the skepticism about the value of “people-centrism” to operationalizing populism, given the widespread nature of this discourse.

Affective polarization is often blamed on the rise of partisan news. However, self-reported measures of news consumption suffer serious flaws. We often have limited ability to characterize partisan media audiences outside of the United States. I use a behavioural data set of 728 respondents whose online behaviour was tracked over four weeks during the 2019 Canadian federal election. These data were paired to a survey for a subset of respondents. I find that audiences for partisan media are small, and web traffic is driven by an even smaller share of the population. There are few major partisan differences in news media use, and partisan news exposure is higher among highly attentive, sophisticated news consumers, rather than those with strong political commitments.

Despite over 50 years of advocacy and policymaking toward deinstitutionalization, residential institutions for people labelled with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) remain operational in six Canadian provinces. In addition, the lack of public, community-based housing has led to contemporary housing models that represent the re- or trans-institutionalization of labelled people. This article asks: why does the institutionalization of people labelled with IDD still occur in Canada? We argue that institutionalization is propelled by a policy legacy of systemic ableism that is manifested in three pervasive logics, which “haunt” the public provision of IDD housing: exclusion, elimination, and extraction. Empirical support is drawn from textual analysis and interviews with policymakers, advocates and people labelled with IDD in two Canadian provinces (Ontario and Nova Scotia). We conclude by discussing the interrelation of institutionalization and systemic ableism and presenting implications for counteracting ableism in Canadian IDD housing policy.

In this research note, we propose a new typology of geographic places for use in advancing Canadian politics research on the political effects of place. We use hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) to inductively derive place types from Aggregate Dissemination Areas (ADAs), a fine-grained unit of geography covering all of Canada, newly available from Statistics Canada. Using this approach, we uncover seven distinct place types, adding nuance to earlier more aggregated approaches focused on urban-rural (or urban-suburban-rural) distinctions. We then demonstrate our typology's utility by showing how it provides new insight into the relationship between place and politics, using the example of the 2021 Canadian federal election. We conclude with a discussion of how our approach may be used to further the study of Canadian political geography, and we make available all files necessary for researchers to merge our place types with survey data for this purpose.

Aaron Mills (2017) has argued persuasively that to understand treaty relationships as contracts is to betray the spirit of those relationships. In this, he joins numerous Indigenous scholars who express wariness of contractualist understandings of treaty. This article inquires into the distinction between contractualist and relational understandings of treaty in order to think about the phenomenon of collective, transhistorical debt. Drawing out the distinction between relational and contractarian modes of thinking about long-term collective obligations, the article examines whether ongoing historical debts to Indigenous nations can be made sense of on a Kantian, contractarian logic. It concludes that the widespread colonial incomprehension of treaty as understood by many Indigenous nations was and remains tied to contractarian confusions. While contractarian thought can serve as a heuristic for articulating the injustices of colonial dispossession, it cannot capture the type of long-term collective responsibilities that treaties are supposed to represent.

This research note introduces the Canadian Vote Intention Dataset, a new, integrated, publicly available database of nearly eight decades of public opinion surveys from Gallup, Environics, Pollara, the Canadian Election Study and the Consortium on Electoral Democracy. The dataset contains 1,019,639 responses on Canadians’ federal vote intention as well as a suite of demographic and geographic variables, including age, gender, religion, language, education, union membership, occupation, community size, province and region. We describe the dataset and custom survey weights, as well as the R package and interactive online application we developed to accompany the dataset. We then demonstrate the dataset’s utility through new analyses of the long-term evolution of gender, education and community size gaps in Canadian party support from 1945 to 2022.

This study uses panel data to examine the relationships among citizen attitudes related to Quebec independence. It has long been established that support for sovereignty is correlated to expectations about the economic and linguistic consequences of independence. Proponents of Quebec sovereignty tend to believe it will enhance the economy and preserve the French language, while opponents anticipate adverse effects on both fronts. We investigate whether economic and linguistic expectations drive preferences about independence, or whether preferences shape expectations. The analyses rely on Canadian Election Study panel surveys from 2004 to 2011 and employ cross-lagged models. Findings show that economic and linguistic expectations do affect support for sovereignty to some degree. However, the influence of sovereignty support on expectations is much more pronounced.

The political importance of race has historically received limited attention across Canadian behavioural scholarship. Building on more recent work, this article comparatively examines the prevalence and effects of white identity and racial attitudes between white Canadians and Americans by leveraging original survey data and a novel conjoint experiment. This article presents several major findings. First, on average, white Canadians express lower levels of racial identity and racial resentment than white Americans, but more similar levels of racial affect. Second, experimental evidence shows that white Americans are more inclined to penalize nonwhite political candidates than Canadians. Third, white identity and racial resentment are strongly correlated with right-wing voting and partisanship in both Canada and the United States, but the magnitude of effects is greater among Americans. Race continues to be of greater political importance in the United States, but it is far from an irrelevant factor in Canada.

This article asks why states choose to explicitly label themselves as feminist and critically examines the case of Canada. Drawing on constructivist insights, I suggest that identity insecurity is a key contextual factor driving states’ decision to adopt a feminist branding. Through a thematic analysis of 1,551 statements from the Canadian House of Commons and additional documents published by the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development from 2006 to 2017, I find that Canada’s choice to adopt a feminist brand occurred within a broader context of identity insecurity, with gender equality emerging as a strategic area to enhance the country’s role through strengthened leadership in this sector. This article advances the study of feminist foreign policies by highlighting the strategic motivations behind the adoption of the feminist label, offering insights into its diffusion despite differing levels of commitment to gender equality.

This article investigates the incumbency effects in Canadian federal elections, examining how the 1972 amendments to the Canadian Election Act reshaped electoral dynamics. Using a Regression Discontinuity Design, I analyze the impact of incumbency on winning probabilities and vote shares from 1867 to 2021, with a focus on the periods before and after 1972. The findings show that incumbents have a 10-percentage-point higher probability of winning compared to non-incumbents. While incumbents, particularly from the Liberal and Conservative parties, enjoy significant advantages before 1972, this effect weakens afterwards, indicating a shift toward greater party influence in electoral outcomes.

After 30 years of relative neglect, Canada’s notwithstanding clause has been invoked in six different provincial laws since 2018. We argue that this resurgence can be explained by the growing judicial invalidation of provincial statutes and federal-provincial partisan conflicts. Drawing from an original dataset of Charter cases decided by the Supreme Court of Canada (1982–2020), we show that provincial statutes have been invalidated at much higher rates since 2010. We also show how increasing partisan conflicts between conservative provincial governments and the Liberal federal government have helped frame the notwithstanding clause as a partisan tool for resisting centralizing rights decisions. The strategic environment facing provinces has shifted as partisan federalism conflicts lower the political costs of using the clause, while rising invalidation rates incentivize provinces to use it to protect their jurisdiction. This supports the “regime politics” understanding of judicial power as partly a function of federal (central) regime power.

In affluent democracies, a broad rise in wealth concentration since the 1980s has not been accompanied by a broad rise in wealth taxation. As a large literature points out, conditions such as growing financialization, tax competition and tax avoidance have all curtailed the ability of left governments to tax wealth. This article argues that, despite the global constraint on taxing wealth, as left governments continue to influence wealth concentration and more advanced economies enter an era of slowing population growth, financial wealth of the rich tends to gain at the expense of (more equal) housing wealth. In response, left governments increase taxes on financial assets relative to housing wealth. By contrast, when population growth is still high, left subtly by adjusting the relative difference by which different types of wealth are taxed. In particular, as governments tax housing wealth more heavily instead. These predictions are tested using data from 15 to 16 advanced economies (1970–2015).