Liberal democracies are expected to provide residents with both negative rights, such as limitations against the abuse of police powers, and some range of positive (social) rights, such as access to social benefits. These rights are commonly deemed to apply equally, without respect to individuals’ ascriptive backgrounds. Existing research, often in the US context and focused on social programs, shows both support for abstract rights and group-specific prejudices. We interrogate whether similar patterns exist in Canada and innovate by directly examining negative and positive rights in the same study. Using a series of novel survey experiments, we demonstrate the degree to which categorical inequalities based on race and legal status affect public support for rights provision in Canada. Both rights are more recognized for citizens relative to out-of-status migrants, and legal status at times interacts with racialized minority status. Rights appear far from universal in the minds of Canadians.

Les instruments auxquels un État peut avoir recours pour atténuer les risques que font peser les inégalités économiques sur la démocratie sont nombreux et peuvent prendre différentes formes. Dans cet article, nous cherchons à mettre en lumière la dimension normative des trois principaux instruments auxquels on a généralement recours pour mitiger l'influence de l'argent dans la compétition électorale, ainsi que le contexte dans lequel ils furent institués, remodelés – et parfois démantelés – au Canada. Ces trois mécanismes sont la limitation des dépenses électorales, le plafonnement des contributions privées et le financement public des partis. Il ne s'agit toutefois pas uniquement de décrire ces instruments, mais de réfléchir aux justifications normatives spécifiques à chacun, et d'en comprendre leur complémentarité. Plus largement, il s'agit d'offrir un cadre pour penser les enjeux de financement électoral en philosophie politique, un sujet trop souvent laissé dans l'ombre par la théorie démocratique.

Calls for more family-friendly assemblies, specifically those able to accommodate representatives who are pregnant, postpartum or have young children, have become urgent in the last decade, as a mini-baby boom in the federal parliament and the provinces has called the inclusivity of legislatures into question. Drawing on interviews with legislative clerks, this article asks two questions: 1) Are Canadian legislatures family-friendly? And 2) what approaches to family-friendly legislatures emerge from policies and discussions within these legislatures? It identifies patterns both in the types of changes that are proposed and those which are actioned, finding that changes have leaned heavily on the least consequential improvements. Many calls for change continue to run up against structural challenges that have been, thus far, ignored. Although legislatures are more family-friendly than in previous decades, this article argues that the future of inclusive parliaments hinges on a broad rethinking of the parliamentary role.

This research note reports on a new dataset about legislators in four Canadian provinces since the establishment of their colonial assemblies in the eighteenth century. Over 7,000 legislators from Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia are included, with consolidated information drawn from multiple sources about parliamentarians’ years of birth and death, religion, electoral performance, kinship, and several other biographical indicators. We also illustrate the utility of such data with the help of a few descriptive examples drawn from the four provinces. We believe this consolidated dataset offers several opportunities for future research on representation, legislative activities and party politics.

Cet article propose une réflexion sur les initiatives politiques déployées ces dernières années un peu partout en Occident afin de rendre les forces armées plus « représentatives ». S'il est difficile de contester la légitimité démocratique de ces initiatives, celles-ci risquent néanmoins de porter atteinte à l'autonomie professionnelle des officiers au sein des forces armées, conformément à ce que nous appelons le « compromis huntingtonien », soit le modèle de relations civilo-militaires qui domine encore aujourd'hui en Occident. En effet, en intervenant directement dans les « affaires internes » des forces armées, le pouvoir civil se trouve ainsi à empiéter sur les pouvoirs et le champ des responsabilités professionnelles exercées par les officiers sur les forces armées. Pour pallier ce risque, nous proposons un élargissement du « rôle politique » de l'officier, à l'intérieur même du cadre fixé par le compromis huntingonien. Cela devrait se traduire par deux axes complémentaires d'action pour l'officier aujourd'hui négligés : d'une part, défendre la place singulière des forces armées dans la société et, d'autre part, agir en tant qu'agent de changement culturel au sein des forces armées.

Despite his influence on those interested by leisure, Marx's own conception of leisure is rarely discussed. Insofar as it is, he is generally either thought to see leisure as free time or as indistinct from necessary labour in communist society. In this article, I suggest that by reading Capital and the Grundrisse through an Aristotelian lens, we can find a third potential conception of leisure in Marx, which shares three features in common with Aristotle's. Leisure is distinct from free time simpliciter, it is a “state-condition” people are in when they perform ends in themselves, and it is constitutive of the final end. I conclude that adopting a conception of leisure grounded in this Marxian conception could have implications for contemporary debates around free time and the value of leisure goods like arts and culture.

I compare Christopher Lasch's thought to specific features that research in political science attributes to contemporary populism. Lasch openly favoured a historical form of populism but is rarely considered when current forms of populism are discussed. The research literature characterizes populism as superficially tied to democracy while undermining it, as committed to the moral binary of people and elites, and as intellectually “thin” because it does not engage with the complex theories that ground other ideologies. These characters make populism incoherent and inimical to democracy. Lasch manifests all three characters while connecting them to a sustained worldview. Humans’ awareness of death is the core feature that makes them rational, ethical and equal. Attempts to dilute that awareness are inimical to the equality at democracy's basis. Experts and professionals encourage this dilution by promising remedies and progress. Democracy depends on ordinary people who resist elites and their complex phraseologies.

L'existence et la persistance de mouvements nationalistes peuvent avoir plusieurs explications, dont l'une est liée aux générations – à la façon dont elles ont été socialisées à la politique dans des contextes sociétaux distincts, et comment les générations plus âgées sont remplacées par les plus jeunes à travers le temps. Pour mieux comprendre l’évolution du nationalisme au Québec, cette étude s'appuie sur les six dernières Études électorales québécoises (2007–2022) et utilise un modèle âge-période-cohorte pour examiner la relation entre les groupes générationnels et divers indicateurs du nationalisme. Les résultats révèlent effectivement une histoire générationnelle. Les baby-boomers se distinguent particulièrement des autres générations par leur attachement au Québec, leur soutien au projet d'indépendance et leur appui au Parti québécois, tandis que les millénariaux soutiennent davantage Québec solidaire et les membres de la génération X appuient davantage la Coalition avenir Québec. Ainsi, il cohabite actuellement différentes « générations nationalistes » au Québec.

In recent decades, Canada and other democracies have experienced a significant rise in migrant settlement. This has sparked much interest among scholars and policy makers in the forces that encourage or impede the political incorporation of newcomers. In this research note, we consider a factor that has received relatively little scrutiny, the impact of immigrants’ attention to native-country politics on willingness to participate in residential-country elections and affiliate with a political party in that country. We examine this through an original survey of Americans in Canada conducted during the 2020 US election cycle. A randomized experiment demonstrates that directing the attention of American emigrants to US campaigns can lower interest in Canadian elections and weaken attachments to a Canadian political party, particularly for those who are less integrated into Canadian society. These findings point to a potential tension between political engagement as an emigrant versus as an immigrant.

Recent political developments in established democracies have renewed attention to the politics of identity. Some commentators have expressed concern that polities are fracturing along increasingly narrow social identity lines, in the process, losing their ability to build solidarity around shared commitments such as redistribution. This article takes stock of the strength of Canadian social identities and their consequences for redistributive preferences. It asks: first, which group memberships form the basis of Canadians’ perceptions of shared identity, and second, do these group memberships shape preferences for redistribution? This study answers these questions using two conjoint experiments that assess respondents’ perceptions of commonality and support for redistributing to hypothetical Canadians who vary on multiple dimensions of identity and need. Findings support that Canadians perceive greater shared identity with some of their groups (their social class) over others (their region or ascriptive identity), but that they overwhelmingly prioritize redistributing toward those who need it over those with whom they share group memberships.

Cette étude se penche sur la communication du Parti conservateur du Québec (PCQ) sur Facebook et X au cours de l'année précédant l’élection générale québécoise de 2022. Basée sur une analyse de contenu d'un échantillon de 800 messages diffusés sur Facebook et X par le parti et son chef Éric Duhaime, l'analyse relève les éléments populistes des publications de même que les objectifs politiques de sa communication en ligne. L'article démontre comment le parti a utilisé ces plateformes numériques afin de tenter de mobiliser une base d’électeurs en contournant les filtres médiatiques traditionnels et en s'adressant directement aux électeurs afin de tirer profit du contexte médiatique hybride québécois. Deux conclusions découlent de nos analyses. Premièrement, le PCQ semble avoir employé un discours populiste à caractère antiélitiste de manière à exploiter une grogne pandémique présente au Québec. Deuxièmement, le parti a utilisé les fonctions de mobilisations qu'offrent les médias socionumériques afin de constituer une coalition d’électeurs.

Academics across Canada, an officially bilingual and multicultural country, devote a lot of attention to diversity and representation. This is particularly true for political scientists. In this research note, we focus on the linguistic composition of panels and overall linguistic fragmentation of the most important in-person event for Canadian political science: the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association (CPSA). To do so, we generated a dataset based on the official program of the 2023 annual conference. Our main results are twofold. First, we find an important under-representation of French-speaking events and academic communications (i.e., panels and papers). Second, we computed Herfindahl-Hirschman indexes demonstrating that francophone-dominated panels and co-authored papers with francophone first authors are significantly more linguistically diverse than anglophone panels and papers. Our results highlight important blind spots in Canadian political science and help make sense of the lack of representation of French-language work in Canadian academia.

In political science, federalism is often treated as an “antithesis” to empire. While Canadian Politics has recently become more attentive to the importance of ongoing settler colonialism as conditioning Canadian political life writ large, this has yet to induce a paradigm shift in understanding how the institutional logics of the state were established by, and in order to advance, colonial and imperial ends. This article contributes to this broader understanding by exploring how, in Canada, the federal arrangement congeals a constitutionalized whiteness that facilitates both the internal coherence of a settler class and its subsequent continental expansion. Attentive to the importance of this constitutional development within a world-spanning imperial context, this article also suggests that the simultaneous innovation of Dominion status contoured the early twentieth-century's global colour line, as self-determination was increasingly devolved to other white settler polities. The contradictory realities of these processes are also noted.