Despite the overwhelming prevalence of democratic ideals in contemporary political relations throughout the world, a potent ideological challenge to liberal democratic norms is the recent claim that “differential” rights are essential to foster and protect the identity of individual rights within culturally distinct groups. This article examines the claim that cultural identity confers sufficient normative force upon which to base distinct political rights for specific groups. In what, precisely, does the normative force of “cultural identity” lie? The article challenges the claims that individuals' sense of personal identity can only arise through a “secure cultural context”; that a passive sense of group identity is a “primary good” that equals or even precedes the importance of universal human rights; and that this “politics of inclusion” based upon differential rights for different groups will lead to greater equality and tolerance within the larger political community.

The theoretical literature on representation tends to read the work of Edmund Burke as a defence of a functional-corporatist conception of society, in which the groups relevant for political representation are stable and objective economic “interests” whose cooperation in and contribution to the life of nation and empire are essential for the status of Britain as a pre-eminent commercial power. This article presents an alternative, contractarian Burke that emerges out of his defence of the interests of non-economic “descriptions” of citizens such as Irish Catholics, a Burke who offers us an illuminating perspective from which to assess the claims of historically marginalized groups in contemporary liberal democratic societies.

The authors present a new game-theoretic interpretation of Hobbes's state of nature that, unlike existing rational-choice models, questions the possibility of individually rational decision making. They provide a general formulation of the two-player two-strategy game applied to the state of nature and derive existing models as special cases. A nonstandard version of Chicken under incomplete information, that interprets “death” as infinitely bad, provides an explanation for important and hitherto unaccounted for claims by Hobbes. The authors suggest that rational choice in Hobbesian political philosophy ought to examine not so much the mechanics of rational action in natural conditions, but rather the means whereby citizens already living in civil associations can be persuaded of the irrationality of civil war.

The rise of postmaterialist values in democratic societies is likely to affect traditional representative institutions such as political parties. This article seeks to ascertain whether the leaders and followers of Quebec's two mainstream political parties, the Liberal party and the Parti Québécois, adhere in any different fashion to these values. It is based on two surveys, the mail survey from the 1993 Canadian Election Study and another established by the authors. Data show important cleavages between these two parties on postmaterialism, the leaders and followers of the Parti Québécois being clearly more postmaterialist than their Liberal counterparts. However, the values associated with “New Politics” do not fill the place of old economic cleavages such as those that are based on the redistribution of wealth, still present in the Quebec party system.

This article uses British Columbia forest policy to test our ability to distinguish between policy change and policy learning using the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) developed by Paul Sabatier. The authors find the ACF a useful way of approaching policy change in this sector, but argue that finer discriminations are needed to detect policy learning. They argue that Sabatier underestimates the extent to which the legitimation function of key ideas forces dominant advocacy coalitions to respond to criticisms in ways that promote learning. They conclude that, in this case, adaptive strategies undertaken by a dominant advocacy coalition in response to criticism has resulted in policy-oriented learning that may cause a major policy shift without an externally induced crisis in the forest policy sector.

Ken Lertzman, Jeremy Rayner and Jeremy Wilson provide an idea-based approach to explaining changes in British Columbia's forest policy by applying the concept of learning developed by Paul Sabatier as part of his “advocacy coalition framework.” This effort to highlight the importance of ideas and learning is a welcome development in Canadian policy studies. But a word of caution is in order as well, because the article has some indications of slipping into a disconcerting pattern in the development of our discipline. For periods of time we seem to single out one significant variable and pay an inordinate amount of attention to it, the most striking examples being interest groups in the 1950s and 1960s and institutions in the 1980s. As we seize upon the new variable, we discredit the previous generation of scholars who we claim (sometimes misleadingly) ignored it.

In “Putting Ideas in Their Place,” George Hoberg raises some important and persistent questions about the explanation of policy change. In particular, he suggests that our attempt to demonstrate the role played by ideas in changing forest policy in British Columbia using Paul Sabatier's Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) gives excessive weight to ideas at the expense of more traditional concerns with power and interest. Although it is unclear whether he places the blame on the ACF itself or merely on the way we have employed it, the burden of his critique is that we fail to live up to our commitment to show how ideas and interests can be combined in a more comprehensive form of explanation than one which appeals to interests alone. Worse still, by our reckless overstatement of the case for ideas, we risk creating a “straw monster,” thereby warping the judgment of an entire generation of political scientists.