The cohesion of interest associations has been seen to depend, among other factors, on the character of the political regime. Federal regimes are said to have negative consequences for group cohesion because of their tendency to force extensive regional differentiation in associations. These conclusions are examined here and shown to be in need of elaboration. To explain differentiation in business associations, factors other than regime structure must be considered, specifically the structure of the sector being represented and the nature of the collective bargaining arrangements. When this is done, the wide variety of internal regional arrangements found in associations is better accounted for. Furthermore, some of these arrangements are shown to be more likely to weaken cohesion than others. The argument is based on a study of business associations in Canada and the United Kingdom that are active in three economic sectors—food processing, chemicals, and construction.

Drawing from the organizational behaviour that is described in Michel Crozier's Bureaucratic Phenomenon, two similar public service organizations, one (anglophone) in Ontario, one (francophone) in Quebec are compared. Even if the type of behaviour found in The Bureaucratic Phenomenon is quite sensitive to noncultural factors (sex, organizational level, type of work), francophones correspond more closely than their anglophone counterparts to certain types of behaviour found in Crozier's descriptions. Data collected are compared to those in other studies, both empirical and historical, and different hypotheses are examined to explain certain similarities that exist between organizational behaviour in French Canada and in continental France.

The authors aim to reveal both the potentialities and limitations of recent attempts by Dworkin and Rawls (especially in the latter's work since the publication of A Theory of Justice) to work out a constructivist conception of right to serve as the groundwork of a rights-based theory of justice. The constructivist conception of right is promising, the authors argue, because it points beyond both teleological naturalism and instrumentalism as conceptions of right. The authors, however, find Dworkin and Rawls's constructivism to be ultimately inadequate, and argue that their project would be furthered through consideration of the constructivist aspects of Rousseau's conception of right as articulated in The Social Contract.

This article aims to illustrate the relevance of Michel Foucault's thought for contemporary political reflection. Once beyond the archaeological dead-end, Foucault's project has taken the shape of genealogical analyses of a number of elements of modernity: the tendency towards homogenization, the emergence of a complex of bio-power and the constitution of human beings as subjects and objects. This enterprise makes it possible to conceive of the actual existence of a strategy of normalization. Foucault's last two books can be interpreted in the sense of this possibility. Finally, the examination of criticisms addressed to Foucault leads to the clarification of his vision of the role of the intellectual.

The sharp difference in Canadian party choice between Catholics and Protestants is perplexing as it finds no obvious parallel in policy and it cannot be explained away by reference to other social characteristics, such as class or language. A family socialization explanation for the cleavage which has gained wide currency proves defective on logical grounds. This article argues instead that any voting cleavage, however archaic, must be sustained by active partisan influence whose direction differs between the groups that define the cleavage.

Richard Johnston's article is addressed to an article of mine and to another, co-authored with Haim Gold.2 It is much more relevant to the former than to the latter, despite the fact that Johnston uses the data from the 1974 National Election Survey on which the Irvine and Gold article was based. The purpose of that article was to discover whether, if at all, a cleavage between two groups is sustained by social processes involving members of those groups.

Eighteenth-century British Whig and Tory accounts of mixed government and the balanced constitution are examined together with the similar doctrine favoured by British liberals of the Great Reform Bill period, among them Lord Durham. Durham's Report of 1839 is particularly interesting, it is argued, since it purports to demonstrate the superiority of mixed government to the kind of majoritarian democracy put forward in those years by British and colonial radicals. Durham's proposal to curtail the powers of the democratic branch of government in Lower Canada—the Legislative Assembly, he wrote, had “endeavoured to extend its authority in modes totally incompatible with the principles of constitutional liberty”—is compared to the eighteenth-century “court” party argument for a strong political executive. It is suggested that Durham and the eighteenth-century thinkers together provide grounds for supposing that even today the egalitarian aims of modern societies are furthered by a political system that recognizes man's natural inequalities.

This article examines the structure and setting of Encounter '79, the televised debates between party leaders which took place a week prior to the 1979 federal election, and considers the possible impact of this event on individual voting behaviour and on the outcome of that election. Using data from the 1979 National Election Study to measure exposure to the debates and perceptions of their content, it is argued that much of the potential effect is limited by public exposure to other political information through television and by the tendencies of such events to reinforce existing attitudes. The direct effects, if any, are more likely to be on participation than on voting decisions.

This work extends the authors' earlier work on incumbency by examining, riding by riding, results in 10federal elections from 1926 to 1980. Regression results indicate that incumbency generally had a significant impact, and between 1957 and 1980 incumbency was worth about four points for the Liberals, Conservatives and New Democrats, and significantly more for the Social Credit. The results vary and seem to be smaller than those observed in Ontario provincial elections, but this may be due to the greater instability in federal politics, since general shifts in party allegiance seem to reduce incumbency effects.