This article seeks to clarify the meaning of conscience and to exhibit its role in the philosophy of Hobbes. The author compares Hobbes's philosophy to Locke's doctrine. Instead of the usual contrast of Hobbes, the enemy to the claims of conscience, and Locke, the defender of the rights of conscience, he shows that Hobbes found a place for conscience within the law—the rights of defendants to a jury of their choice, and the rights of jurors to a verdict according to their conscience—whereas Locke found a place for conscience outside the law, in the judgment of revolutionaries when a revolution is justifiable or successful. In elaborating Hobbes's views of trial by jury, the author suggests that the best forensic metaphor for conscience is a juror (rather than the more usual ones of a witness, a judge or a legislator). Conscience is subjective certainty, dangerous outside an institutional setting, but indispensable for decisions not based on demonstrable knowledge, such as a juror's verdict beyond reasonable doubt.

Hobbes regarded traditional Christianity as one of the leading threats to the preservation of civil peace. This article argues that he responded to this threat by developing an innovative reinterpretation of Christianity designed to tame it from within. This reinterpretation involved the reshaping of leading Christian doctrines around the same liberal principles that underlie his conception of political authority, the natural law principles of equality of right and inalienable rights. Although this political “liberalization” of Christianity may well have enhanced the prospects of civil peace, it did so by undermining doctrines central to Christianity's biblical roots.

This article uses a regression decomposition approach to explore the meaning of the gaps in electoral support for the federal Liberal party between Ontario, the West and Atlantic Canada, as well as the gap in Reform party support between the West and Ontario in the 1997 federal election. The analysis proceeds in two stages. The first stage involves determining whether the regional vote gaps reflect “true” regional differences or whether they can be explained simply in terms of differences in the sociodemographic makeup of the regions. Having ascertained that the gaps are not spurious, the second stage of the analysis probes the beliefs and attitudes that underlie them. The authors conclude that the gaps are driven not just by differences in political orientations and beliefs from one region to another, but also by more fundamental differences in basic political priorities.

This study tests explanations of the growth of Canadian provincial governments that draw from the political budget cycle approach. The approach assumes that governments jointly respond to electoral and partisan goals. When the next election is not expected soon, the government uses its discretionary power to pursue its ideological target. When the next election is near, politicians in government, fearing electoral defeat, deviate from their normal behaviour and engage in a re-election effort by undertaking an expansionary policy. This study suggests that provincial governments behave in the opportunistic fashion described by the model. Moreover, there is no sign that this opportunistic behaviour has been affected by government cutbacks in the 1990s.

The rise and electoral success of the Confederation of Regions Party (CoR) in New Brunswick was seen as a major surprise in the context of provincial politics. The first reaction was to analyze the new party as mainly a party opposed to official bilingualism. In this article the author looks at another aspect of importance that is the populist dimension behind the CoR party. Four aspects are studied: the period of emergence (1989–1991), party organization and structures, ideology, attitudes of the membership.

There are three ideal types of revolutions: spontaneous, planned and negotiated. The role and importance of structural factors versus human agency vary according to the general category to which a particular revolution belongs. In spontaneous revolutions, both the transition and conslidation phases are heavily conditioned by prevailing structural factors, especially those that result in the weakening of ruling state institutions and the political mobilization of one or more social groups. By contrast, in planned revolutions self-declared revolutionaries take the lead in both mobilizing supporters and weakening the state, in fact often having a highly elaborate ideological—as well as tactical and strategic—blueprint for the acquisition and consolidation of power. Negotiated revolutions see the greatest coalescence of forces involving both structural developments and human agency. The seeds of the revolution have germinated, but the prevailing structural developments are not by themselves sufficient to bring about the revolution's success. Actors representing both state and society must step in to negotiate, and only then might the revolution succeed and be consolidated.

Despite the important role they played during Iran's constitutional revolution, ulama fell short of reaching their goal. Success came 70 years later during the 1979 revolution when the monarchy was overthrown under ulama's leadership. In this article, the author compares the theoretical relationships between these two revolutions.