Le fardeau administratif renvoie au phénomène selon lequel la mise en œuvre des politiques publiques et, plus généralement, les interactions avec l’État, sont coûteuses et difficiles. Chaque personne est en effet confrontée à des coûts d'apprentissage lorsqu'elle acquiert de l'information sur les programmes et services publics, à des coûts de conformité lorsqu'elle tente de satisfaire à leurs règles, et à des coûts psychologiques (stress, etc.) lorsqu'elle interagit avec ceux-ci. Cette littérature, presque exclusivement anglophone, s'est développée à un rythme effréné. Cette synthèse critique fait le bilan de ces récents développements et propose une discussion articulée autour de trois thèmes : 1) Que sont les fardeaux administratifs et quels enjeux soulèvent-ils? ; 2) Quelles sont les sources des fardeaux? ; et 3) Quelles en sont les conséquences distributives et politiques? Des pistes de recherche future sont proposées pour chacun de ces thèmes.

While much of the scholarship on gender and corruption suggests that women in political office are, or are perceived to be, less corrupt than men, in just the past few years corruption accusations against Brazil's Dilma Rousseff and South Korea's Park Geun-hye have made headlines and led to their impeachment. In this article, we argue women heads of government are actually more likely to be charged with corruption due to pervasive beliefs that women, by their very presence, corrupt public office. Using cross-national data, we first demonstrate that women executives are significantly more likely to be formally accused of corruption than their male counterparts. We then present case studies of Brazilian President Rousseff and Turkish Prime Minister Çiller to demonstrate the powerful role of gendered discourse in motivating suspicion and inflaming elite and public sentiment and thereby driving corruption charges. These findings make a substantial contribution to the literature on gender, leadership and the politics of corruption.

By appealing to public concern over environmental issues, Green parties have emerged to gain secure positions in several party systems. However, in Canada, we know very little about why people support the Green Party. This research note draws upon the Canadian Election Study (CES) to explore the ways in which demographic factors, personality traits and individual environmentalism impact vote choice. Theorizing Green Party support as a form of pro-environmental behaviour, we build a model that tests the impact of demographic factors and personality traits as mediated through environmental attitudes. It finds that, while pro-environmental policy attitudes are the strongest predictor of Green Party support, several demographic factors and personality traits—specifically conscientiousness, openness to experience, agreeableness and extraversion—have an effect.

The United States has long represented one of Canada's primary international allies. This partnership has remained strong despite turbulent times in the relationship, such as the one brought forth by the Trump presidency. Our article seeks to understand the sources of such continuity through the lens of continentalism. While historical accounts of continentalism have portrayed it as a passive force stemming from Canada's material self-interest, scholars have recently identified the emergence of an evolved form of continentalism that represents a dominant idea and a coherent analytical framework in Canadian foreign policy. Has this new form of continentalism indeed gained widespread acceptance among Canadians? We answer this question by considering continentalism in the ideational realm. Using novel public opinion data, our analysis investigates whether continentalist attitudes have become embedded in Canadians’ national identity and foster closer alignment preferences vis-à-vis the United States. We find significant and robust evidence of such effects.

This study evaluates the visibility of French-speaking scholars in Canadian political science by analyzing the reading materials assigned in Canadian politics courses. Extending Daoust et al.'s (2022) research, we establish a baseline for their calculations and build an original dataset gathered from all political science departments’ websites and Google Scholar. Our analysis based on three assumptions about the expected academic representation of francophones—Canada's linguistic composition, the makeup of political science departments and faculty members’ productivity—reveals a discrepancy favouring anglophone scholars by up to four percentage points. Our findings extend Daoust et al.'s (2022) contribution by highlighting a similar language-based bias in overall citation practices among Canadian scholars, with French-speaking authors being significantly under-cited compared to their English-speaking counterparts despite demonstrating higher levels of overall productivity. Implications for the future of the discipline are also discussed.

The ideological and issue positions of parties are known to shape citizens’ political attitudes and voting behaviour. One important way to obtain estimates of parties’ positions is to ask experts to place parties on salient ideological dimensions. The Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) has been collecting such estimates for democracies in Europe and elsewhere. CHES Canada adds to this project by providing estimates of party positions and characteristics of Canadian federal parties and provincial parties in Ontario and Quebec. This note introduces this new data source, clarifies how the data were collected and illustrates how the data can be used to (comparatively) study party politics in Canada.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In 2021, Alberta held Senate nominee elections for the fifth time in the province's history. Conducted concurrently with municipal elections and multiple referenda/plebiscites, the Senate race had a much lower participation rate than any of the other votes held that day. The purpose of this research note is to identify patterns of ballot roll-off—the phenomenon whereby electors cast a ballot for one race but not another—in the Senate election. Using data from a three-wave survey of Calgarians, the note describes the attitudes of electors toward the Senate election, revealing that electors viewed it as less important than any of the other votes contested that day. It also considers the role of partisan and geographic identities in shaping participation rates. Survey data reveal that both types of identities are associated with roll-off in the Senate election but not any of the other votes with which it was held concurrently.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Cet article propose une analyse du contexte québécois, actuellement marqué par une prolifération des titres miniers visant des minéraux critiques. Nous examinons la thèse selon laquelle nous aurions une obligation morale d'exploiter le territoire en vue de la transition énergétique. Selon cette idée mise de l'avant notamment par l'industrie minière et le gouvernement provincial québécois, l'opposition des communautés locales à l’égard des projets miniers serait un cas de « NIMBY ». Pour répondre à cette accusation, cet article propose une réflexion sur le rapport qu'entretiennent les communautés politiques avec le territoire à partir des travaux de Margaret Moore, de Cara Nine, et d'intuitions provenant de la Green Legal Theory. Cet article conclut en un droit prima facie des communautés locales de ne pas exploiter les minéraux critiques sur leur territoire.

The Canadian Judicial Council is primarily responsible for regulating misconduct among federally appointed judges. Over the last decade, the Council has faced some highly publicized challenges to its authority when judges facing misconduct complaints commenced judicial review proceedings pursuant to the Federal Courts Act. In response to these challenges, the Council sought to immunize itself from judicial review, first by pleading its case in court and then by pressing for legislative changes in the form of Bill C-9. The new legislation, which exempts the Council from almost all external judicial oversight, was driven by the Council and assented to by a government willing to delegate its power to judicial elites. The legislation not only fails to provide adequate checks on the Council's power as an administrative decision maker, it represents a high-water mark in judicialized politics, pointing to a judicialization of governance in the area of judicial discipline.