This article reviews the place of Indigenous politics in the last 50 years of Canadian political science. Focusing on the CJPS, it looks at broad themes and clusters in the literature over time, while also trying to explain how the roots of the discipline continue to impact the development of political science in Canada and thus CJPS. I argue that while at least 43 articles have dealt with Indigenous politics (solely or as a significant focus) and at least 18 have had some significant discussion thereof, there nonetheless remains a disconnect between Indigenous politics and the discipline. This disconnect exists because of the methodological and epistemological foundations of the discipline which have resulted in a focus limited to the Westphalian state. While the disconnect between Indigenous politics and the discipline has waned considerably (43 of 61 articles have been published since 2000) as there has been an awakening of sorts, a disconnect nevertheless still exists.

Over the past five years transgender children and their parents have emerged as visible actors in public discussions about the rights of transgender people in Canada. In this article, I track the work of emotions in parent advocacy, showing how the enactment of filial (family) ties sheds new light on the gendered relationship between intimacy and political practice. I argue that an affective shift in parenting has opened up space for some cisgender parents to emerge as political actors in trans advocacy work. The affective politics of parent advocacy nonetheless operates through dominant frames of gendered, classed and racialized normativity, limiting both who can become a parent advocate and potentially narrowing the focus of the struggle.

This article proposes a historiographical analysis of the franco-quebecois political science on Indigenous peoples. Political science participates in representing social realities of populations that, in the present case, have been historically marginalised. It is thus critical to understand the processes that underlie its production and diffusion. By exploring the political circumstances that impacted the development of research on Indigenous peoples, we conclude that franco-quebecois scholars have built a field of study that is distinct in terms of its volume, tone, and recurring themes. In particular, we suggest that the study of the place of Quebec within Canada shaped and eclipsed that of Indigenous peoples in the province. Finally, we situate the contributions and limits of franco-quebecois political science with respect to Indigenous peoples. In so doing, we uncover some of the most significant dynamics in the development of Canadian political science in this area of study and provide indications for future research in the field.

No established liberal democracy has achieved sex balance in its national legislature. Scholars agree skewed candidate pools put forward by parties during elections cause sex-disproportionate seat distribution, but disagree as to whether disproportionality is caused by too few women aspirant candidates coming forward (supply) or party selectors preferring men (demand). This paper uses a multistage method to explore supply and demand during the British Labour party's candidate selection process. Rare data from three elections and 4622 aspirants allow for an unobstructed look inside the secret garden of politics and reveal the party is not fully feminized insofar that women aspirants are disproportionally filtered out of its selection process and are disproportionally underrepresented in its candidate pool. Testing reveals a lack of selector demand for women aspirants has a greater impact on women's underrepresentation than an undersupply of women aspirants, a finding which supports using sex quotas to level imbalanced candidate slates.

The scarcity of reviews of “gender and politics” books in disciplinary journals limits opportunities for “mainstream” political scientists to learn about the field. As chair of the jury to select the 2015 winner of APSA's Victoria Schuck prize for “the best book … on women and politics,” I realized that the field's size and diversity makes it hard to identify central themes, especially since feminist scholars are also active across the discipline's many fields and in the multidisciplinary enterprise of gender studies. In my CPSA presidential address (Vickers, 2015), I argued that although the “gender and politics” field has expanded greatly in its four-decade history, its impact on the discipline generally hasn't been transformative, since gender isn't being used as a key category of analysis in the discipline and the field's key theme that “the personal is political” isn't reflected in the discipline's main approaches, especially its dependence on a liberal conception of the private/public divide. This essay explores how the books reviewed use gender and this key theme in explaining contemporary political issues.

The research model that has dominated the discipline of political science in Canada is based on a top-down approach that defines and finds solutions to problems as researchers see them, and diminishes the real world concerns of social and political actors. Advocating a more collaborative political science, we argue for a partnership approach that engages those actors in the research process, including problem definition, research design, analysis and knowledge dissemination. This inclusion sharpens the focus of the research and produces more contextually valid and socially valuable knowledge. We draw upon our research experience working with Indigenous communities in Canada to illustrate the value of this approach, and carry out a review of partnership-based research published in The Canadian Journal of Political Science. We find little evidence of partnership-based research in our flagship journal and discuss the implications for the future of our field.

Democracy depends on a competent citizenry. Individuals composing the citizenry, for instance, need to have the knowledge, skill set and disposition that will allow them to professionally engage their elected representatives, to deeply understand the characteristics of their polities, to meaningfully participate in the public sphere and, overall, to collectively embody a shared life observable to others as being democratic in its nature. Yet we are confronted with the realization that an institution of the citizenry, as here expressed, is not observable in any democracy. This reflects badly for practised democracies today. If anything it brings their democratic credentials into doubt.

How “historical” is Canadian political science? This paper sets out to answer this question through an analysis of historically oriented articles that have appeared in this journal from its first volume, in 1968, to 2015. We suggest that historical research in this journal is at once enduring and uneven, a pattern that we then explore in more detail in a case study, spanning forty years, of historical articles that focus on the interconnected themes of the constitution, courts, and federalism. The unevenness of this pattern suggests that the intellectual and methodological foundation of “historical” Canadian political science may not be as firm as it appears. We therefore conclude with a description of some methodological and conceptual tools, originally fashioned within the historically oriented subfield of American political development in the United States, that Canadian political scientists might deploy to probe important and enduring questions of Canadian politics.

Fifty years ago, Canadian political science (CPS) debated whether there was an “Americanization problem” in the discipline. Today, the idea does not have the same force. This article revisits the debate by focusing on one of the main points of concerns: the doctoral training of CPS faculty. The article presents an original dataset of tenure and tenure-track faculty at CPS departments. It then provides analysis of where these tenure and tenure-track faculty received their doctorates, by sub-field and rank, paying particular attention to the country of doctoral training. Unlike fifty years ago, Canadian-trained scholars form a much larger share of the professoriate. There is no evidence of a trend towards more American-trained scholars among recent hires of assistant professors. However, the results also suggest a continuing status hierarchy between the two countries. It concludes by arguing that CPS needs to be more reflective about its position within this status hierarchy.