Recent scholarship on Mary Wollstonecraft portrays her as either a liberal who disrupts the boundaries between public and private spheres or as a proto-socialist paving the road for a class-based feminism. Neither of these characterizations adequately captures the radical quality of her work. A close study of her views on class and family place her squarely within the liberal tradition of political economy. While she politicizes these institutions and, in so doing represents a threat to the latenineteenth-century British ruling classes, she neither disrupts the basic tenets of liberalism nor seriously anticipates the class insights of socialist feminism.

A school of thought has emerged within constitutional and political theory that a middle road exists between liberalism and anti-liberal communitarianism. This road, which the author terms “command liberalism” permits societies that follow it to bypass the obvious inequities of liberalism while still enjoying the benefits of liberal democracy. The existence of this middle road would be but a piece of intellectual trivia were it not for the fact that for the past two decades it has formed the normative basis for constitution-making in Canada. It has been a root cause of constitutional conflict, intergroup animosity, constitutional paralysis and, potentially, the break-up of the country. Command liberalism is well represented in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In addition, largely as a consequence of the Charter, it was the raison d'etre of the ill-fated Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords. For the most part, those who seek to travel this road in Canada do so with good intentions; they point to the appalling conditions of Native reserves, blatant examples of gender discrimination and institutionalized racism and homophobia within liberal democratic society as evidence of the need to construct more pluralistic means of collective representation. But good intentions do not square the circle of command liberalism. Indeed, the problem with this middle road is that it is circular, leading us back to where we started.

This study addresses three questions: to what extent lobbying efforts undertaken by associations vary across different types of associations; what are the different lobbying instruments used by Canadian associations; what factors explain the intensity of the lobbying efforts deployed by the Canadian associations? These questions are dealt with through a sample of 438 associations operating in 12 different policy domains and at three possible levels of government (Canadian, provincial and municipal). The results show that leisure associations deploy less intense efforts in lobbying than public and private goods associations. Likewise, public and private goods associations do not appear to differ significantly with respect to efforts deployed in lobbying. Furthermore, the results show that the lobbying instruments used by associations differ across the different types of associations. Finally, the results indicate that competition between associations, participation in coalitions of associations and the number of policy domains in which associations have intense interests are significantly related to efforts deployed in lobbying by associations in many different policy domains. However, the variables related to the material resources of the associations have been shown to exert no significant impact on the lobbying efforts of Canadian associations.

This article examines the popularity of Canadian governments between 1974 and 1998 as revealed by the monthly Gallup poll. Approval of each majority government in the 1974–1993 period underwent a cycle of honeymoon, decay and recovery. Underneath the cycle was a long-term downward trend. A simple politicoeconomic model accounts for a large fraction of long-term decay and helps explain the anti-government landslides of 1984 and 1993. But the model leaves inter-election popularity cycles largely unexplained. After 1993, the economy ceased to account for popularity and a wholly new, but apparently stable, electoral cycle emerged. The article concludes with speculation on causes of and contingency in electoral cycles.

The political impact of difficult economic conditions in the democracies of the developing world depends in part on how people at the grass roots evaluate their political interests. This article argues that understanding the political interests of lower-income persons requires two separate analyses: how people think about their material conditions, which is affected by the type of material hardships and the objective capacity to cope with those conditions; and how people think about politics, given party and class identities and economic, historic and political contexts. Using in-depth interviews in Argentina, the research develops an analytical framework through which to evaluate the conditions under which people would, and would not, support a government that does not alleviate their economic difficulties. The analysis is used to examine recent events in Argentina and is applied to other cases.

In Australia, religion historically has been seen as a secondary but nonetheless significant sociopolitical cleavage, in part cutting across the class divide. In recent times, Australian scholars, like those elsewhere, have been inclined to argue that the political significance of religion is a legacy of the past and that religion no longer plays an important role in shaping mass political behaviour. Although class is also said to have declined in political significance, it is still treated as being of some importance as a cornerstone of the party system. However, many scholars seem more willing to dismiss the relevance of religion altogether. Using sample survey data collected over more than 25 years, this article examines the role of religion in modern Australian electoral politics and assesses the adequacy of such arguments.