For the last three decades, scholars of Canadian political culture have favoured ideological explanations for state formation with the starting point being the American Revolution and Loyalist resettlement in British North America. This article challenges both the ideological bias and the late eighteenth-century chronology through a reassessment of early modern developments in the British imperial state. It shows that many of the institutional features associated with the state in British North America and later Canada—strong executives and weak assemblies, Crown control of land and natural resources, parliamentary funding of colonial development and accommodation of non-British subjects—were all institutionalized in the imperial state before the American Revolution and before the arrival of significant numbers of ethnically British settlers to Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and Quebec. Ideological discourses in the British North American colonies that became Canada, unlike those that became the United States, traditionally acknowledged the presence of a strong state in its imperial and colonial manifestations. Rather than challenging its legitimacy, as had Americans, British North Americans, whether liberals, republicans or tories, debated the function of the state and the distribution of power within it.

Historically, Canadian Confederation was both a compact of equal provinces and a compact of founding peoples, which established the province of Quebec in order to conserve French-Canadian culture in its historic homeland. This observation suggests a solution to the apparent conflict between the principle of provincial equality and the demand for special status for Quebec. The appearance of conflict arises from the habit of equating constitutional status with legislative power. If one distinguishes between status and power, it becomes possible to preserve the constitutional equality of the provinces while according special powers to the government of Quebec in furtherance of its unique historic purpose.

With the rise of the new managerialism in the 1980s, public policy makers have increased their use of management consulting knowledge in reforming their bureaucracies. To describe this situation, some have coined the term « consultocracy,» assuming that the emergence of managerialism created a growing demand for business management expertise in government circles that has allowed consultants to penetrate the state and become powerful actors in the process of administrative reform. This article asks how it has been possible for consultants to become (or not) influential players in the process of bureaucratic reform. The analysis shows that because of historical and institutional reasons, Britain has been more likely than France to give rise to a «consultocracy.»

This article examines resolutions passed by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights from 1982 to 1997, which targeted specific states, governments and other political actors for violations of human rights. The types of actors that were named, their regional distribution and the actions taken by the Commission are each analyzed. Among the findings presented are that the Commission's effectiveness has been limited by its inability to address most systematic government violations of human rights, by a lack of universality in its application of international standards and by a recent trend toward consensus decision making.

Two of the new states of interwar Europe were Estonia and Finland. Both arose out of the Russian Empire and both were literate, Protestant nations. Yet democracy broke down in Estonia but survived in Finland. These outcomes would seem ironic, given that Finnish independence involved a brutal civil war and Finland was linguistically divided—factors not present in Estonia. This study, however, examines not just the nature of independence but also the constitutional structures, party politics and regime crises of these two neighbouring cases. In terms of the factors commonly cited as favouring stable democracy, the Estonian-Finnish contrast shows the particular explanatory importance of political culture, the speed of democratization, the views of elites and the nature of the party system. What happened in Finland also implies that a presidential, or at least a balanced semipresidential, system cannot be considered as inherently dangerous for democratic stability.

This article takes an empirical measure of the extent to which feminism has altered the discipline of Political Science in Canada and Québec since the mid-1980s. The authors, members of the second cadre of female political scientists in the field of women and politics, single out for particular attention the current relation between anglophone and francophone feminist scholarship in the field. They maintain that the two linguistic solitudes remain fundamental to the women and politics field as much as was the case before the emergence of feminist perspectives in the discipline.