This study is, to our knowledge, the first quantitative analyses of the relationship between local print newspaper health and voter turnout in Canadian municipal elections. Municipal turnout is understudied in Canada, and the few studies on the topic overlook the role of local media. This cross-sectional study fills a gap in the literature by determining the relationship between local print newspaper health and municipal election turnout in a unique dataset of 233 populous Canadian municipalities. Results reveal a significant positive correlation between turnout and two measures of newspaper health: (1) the total number of newspapers per population and (2) the publication frequency of the largest newspaper in a municipality.

Depuis un an, le Parti conservateur du Québec (PCQ) a fait des gains considérables dans les sondages d'intention de vote. Le parti peut-il encore faire des gains ou a-t-il atteint son plein potentiel? Dans cette note de recherche, nous tentons de répondre à cette question en utilisant un nouvel indicateur, l'index relatif de confiance (IRC), qui permet de mesurer le potentiel de croissance et la solidité du vote des partis.

As international migration has grown worldwide, the issue of how to assure the political rights of citizens living abroad has attracted much scholarly attention. One concern has been that if vote-buying is widespread in home countries, this practice could be exported to external elections. Although there have been numerous studies focused on electoral participation in external voting, there has been no systematic test of whether vote-buying is occurring across borders. This study aims to address this question by focusing on the 2018 federal elections in Mexico. Our list experiment shows that in our sample, approximately 32 per cent of Mexican immigrants in the United States experienced vote-buying during the electoral campaign. Furthermore, a multivariate analysis shows that the people most susceptible to vote-buying were living in areas where there was a high concentration of Mexican immigrants. The study results point to the importance of cross-border networks, which have been built between countries sending and receiving immigrants, in facilitating vote-buying across borders.

Alors que le clivage portant sur l'indépendance du Québec est en déclin, on aurait tort de croire que ce phénomène s'accompagne aussi d'un déclin du nationalisme québécois. Dans les faits, le nationalisme québécois structure toujours le débat politique. Pour une majorité de répondants, l’État québécois a toujours un rôle important à jouer en matière d'identité. Le nationalisme demeure pertinent et nécessaire. À ce jour, il est également toujours associé au caractère francophone du Québec. Ce nationalisme a cependant pris une nouvelle forme. À l'aide de données de sondages originales, ce texte permet de mieux comprendre l’évolution du nationalisme québécois contemporain porté par la Coalition avenir Québec et sa dynamique autonomiste. Enfin, ces données illustrent aussi certaines lignes de fractures sur le plan linguistique et partisan. Celles-ci peuvent contribuer à expliquer les difficultés posées au Parti libéral du Québec pour renouer avec l’électorat francophone, sans pour autant décevoir sa base électorale anglophone.

This review surveys the literature on vote choice in Canada. It highlights key findings regarding a variety of factors that influence Canadians’ vote choice, while also suggesting future avenues of research. The focus is on studies conducted on vote choice at the federal level, with an emphasis on studies that have been published since 2000.

Do voters use information about and preferences over who will form government in their vote choices? Voters might have preferences over both which party wins the most seats and what type of government that party can form, which they can use to inform their vote choice. To answer this question, we examine the influence of preferences over government types and compare them to trends in party support in the 2019 Canadian federal election. Using rolling, daily cross-sectional survey evidence from the Canadian Election Study, we find that preferences over government type are strongly related to vote choice and that this relationship depends on the perceived viability of the preferred party. We also find that this relationship differs outside and within Quebec: outside Quebec, only the Liberal Party suffers among voters preferring minority governments, while within Quebec, the Liberal Party, New Democratic Party and Conservative Party all struggle to hold on to voters who prefer minority governments.

Recent reforms to the Canadian Senate removed senators from the Liberal Party caucus and changed the appointment process to be more nonpartisan. This article asks: to what extent did the reforms affect legislative oversight in the Senate? By studying the Senate's legislative amendments, I find that the reformed Senate is more willing to amend bills than it was previously. The reforms led to sharp increases in the Senate's amendment rate, the number of amendments moved and the percentage of successful motions in amendment. In interviews, senators revealed that they see oversight differently following the reforms. Senators no longer have opportunities to advise the government in caucus, so they have begun using amendments to exercise oversight. This article concludes that the reforms shifted senators’ understanding of their function of oversight, leading to a higher amendment rate and increased visible scrutiny of government by the Senate.

Previous research has shown that the public tends to see some groups as less deserving of social rights. Our focus in this article is whether they are also seen as less entitled to engage in political claims-making. Recent theorists of inclusive nationalism argue that whether minorities are seen as having the right to codetermine the future may depend on whether the majority believes minorities are morally committed to the nation. Drawing on a unique survey experiment, we test this intuition by analyzing how majority perceptions of a minority's commitment to the larger society influence support for claims-making by immigrants and national minorities. We show that immigrants, French-speaking Quebeckers, and Indigenous peoples are judged more harshly about their right to make claims and that this is in part explained by the majority's views that these groups are not, in fact, committed members of the larger political community.

Much attention has been paid to the changing class cleavage that structured political conflict in the twentieth century. In contrast to most advanced democracies, class voting has traditionally been weak in Canada. Using the entire series of the Canadian Election Study (1965–2019), we find the historic pattern of working-class voting for the New Democratic Party (NDP) held outside of Quebec in recent elections, before suddenly falling off in 2019. Starting in 2004, we find a clear and distinct trend where the working class has increased its support for the Conservatives. Although greater partisan sorting is occurring over the economy, cultural issues such as moral traditionalism and anti-immigration are now significant drivers of working-class Conservative support. The findings carry important implications for class-party relationships and reveal that Canada, despite its comparatively weak nativist cleavage, is not immune from the tensions social democratic parties have recently experienced in maintaining cross-class coalitions amid socio-economic structural changes.

For three weeks in early 2022, the streets of downtown Ottawa were occupied by protestors associated with the so-called Freedom Convoy. The inability of Ottawa's municipal police to end the protest was not only a spectacular failure of local policing but also a failure of national security policy. This article brings together literatures on Canadian federalism, multilevel politics and federal capitals to argue that the occupation of Ottawa demonstrates a misalignment between the political and jurisdictional responsibility for Ottawa's public and national security. Potential reforms range from the expansion of federal authority over the Parliamentary Precinct to the restructuring of the National Capital Region as a federal district or territory.

Supervisors shape the PhD student experience and play a critical role in students’ development. To what extent and in what ways are faculty engaged in mentorship? Are faculty mentoring more or differently now than in the past? This study of political science faculty from political science departments offering PhD programs in the English language finds that graduate supervision is changing over time, with mentorship practices becoming both more common and more varied. Supervisors do not appear to be simply replicating their own limited experience of mentorship as a PhD student. Instead, supervisors are becoming more actively and directly involved in their students’ research careers in ways that increase their students’ career opportunities. There is opportunity for institutions, at both the university and department level, to further invest in building the capacity and ability of supervisors to be effective mentors.

Cet article a pour point de départ la querelle épistémologique survenue entre Anthony D. Smith et Jon E. Fox et Cynthia Miller-Idriss concernant les différentes approches du champ d’études du nationalisme. Alors que Fox et Miller-Idriss rejettent la pertinence d'une approche sociohistorique dans l’étude ethnographique du nationalisme, Smith considère l'ethnographie comme une pratique descriptiviste dénuée d'intérêt scientifique qui, de surcroit, fait abstraction des recherches sur la nation conduite au cours des dernières décennies. Afin de dénouer cette impasse, nous proposons une démarche méthodologique visant à concilier ces deux approches par l'entremise du concept de lieu de mémoire. À partir d'une étude de cas, la bataille des Éperons d'or et sa résonance dans les pratiques discursives, nous illustrons comment l'historicité du fait national peut s'avérer essentielle pour comprendre le fonctionnement de la nation au quotidien et nous éclairer sur la manière dont les Flamands se construisent en tant que sujets nationaux.

Under what circumstances do central and local party actors engage in gatekeeping to influence the outcomes of local nomination races? In this article, I develop a theory of gatekeeping in Canadian parties by synthesizing past work on candidate selection with a multi-method field study of New Brunswick provincial nominations (2017–2018). I present evidence in favour of this theory from participant-observation of 25 nominating conventions, 93 elite interviews, and an original dataset of major party nominations for the 2018 New Brunswick election. The theory and evidence show how gatekeeping by central party actors helps explain how nominations can go uncontested, even in competitive and safe seats. The theory also generates several testable claims for future studies of candidate selection in other places, time periods and levels of government in Canada.

Canada has not escaped trends in most liberal democracies with the rapid growth of agencies created by government to deliver public goods, often justified on elements of their mandate—service delivery, adjudication of disputes, regulatory oversight, among others—benefiting from an arm's-length relationship to the government of the day. Yet Canadian studies of this phenomenon remain mostly absent from the robust comparative literature theorizing and documenting the emergence of widespread “agencification” and its relationship to performance. This article draws on the Government of Canada's Public Service Employee Survey (PSES) microdata from 2017 to test key hypotheses advanced by proponents of agencification, specifically that agencies are more innovative, autonomous and efficient public organizations. We discover that those working in agencies generally report less climate of innovation and less work autonomy than those working in departments, though some types of agencies—namely regulatory and parliamentary ones—defy these trends.

Although the existence of strategic voting in the United Kingdom and Canada has been well documented, quantifying when a voter will cast a strategic ballot has yet to be done. This article draws on electoral data from five UK and Canadian elections in order to address this gap by identifying a precise “tipping point” for when a non-viable party supporter's probability of voting strategically crosses a 50 per cent threshold. I find the best tipping point measure occurs when a voter rates their favourite viable party greater than 59 out of 100 in the UK and greater than 73 out of 100 in Canada. Both countries also have clear tipping points for the likeability of an individual's highest preferred party and perceptions of that party's distance from contention. Overall, by calculating these tipping points, researchers can better gauge voter behaviour and how, or when, certain factors contribute to strategic voting.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to significant disruptions in Canada's public school system as provincial and territorial governments have enacted sudden and prolonged school closures. We compare the different school closure decisions in Alberta and Ontario during spring 2021, using official public briefings and publicly available data about rates of COVID-19 cases. We ask if provincial policy decisions can be explained by different epidemiological contexts and risks. We find that key epidemiological indicators such as the rate of cases were not directly linked to school closure decisions. This is important for policy makers and experts: it problematizes the assumption of a straight line between evidence and decisions and has implications for transparency and public trust in pandemic policy choices. A systematic description of the gap between evidence and policy is an important starting point for asking, What does drive decisions to close schools?

À partir d'une expérience s’étant déroulée au Québec auprès de plus de 200 personnes, cet article évalue dans quelle mesure l'humour peut alimenter les stéréotypes culturels et religieux. Si sur le plan des effets directs, les différences s'avèrent moins importantes, on remarque que le degré de participation religieuse joue un rôle significatif dans l'entretien d'une perception négative à l’égard des immigrants et de la communauté arabo-musulmane. Ce constat souligne la nécessité de considérer des facteurs modérateurs pour mesurer les impacts des diverses manifestations de la communication politique, dont l'humour, sur certaines attitudes liées à la diversité.

The revelation, via a leaked draft, that the Supreme Court of the United States was going to overturn the landmark decision in Roe v. Wade (1973) sparked immediate questions about whether a similar retrenchment of abortion rights could occur in Canada. Key legal, structural, and political cultural factors mitigate the forces of American-style erosion of norms on the Supreme Court of Canada and in our broader politics surrounding abortion rights. Despite this generally optimistic comparative context, complacency about the status of abortion rights in Canada would be unwise. This short Currents article canvasses factors crucial for not only preserving the policy status quo in criminal law (that is, the absence of criminal law abortion regulation in Canada), but also for advancing the scope of abortion rights in the positive sense, as serious barriers to access persist at the provincial level.

This article puts three discourses about resistance and violence, coming from two distinct settler colonial contexts, in conversation, to highlight a distinctive theory of change associated with contemporary Indigenous movements. The first, from South Africa, can be seen in the writings of Nelson Mandela. It offers a dialectical view of resistance, where the oppressor sets the terms of the confrontation and where violence is allowable in the pursuit of change. The second discourse can be seen in the writings of James Tully and offers a theoretical bridge between the first and the third. It focuses on civic citizenship as a nonviolent engagement with terms of governance. The third can be seen in the writings of Indigenous theorists whose work focuses on resurgence. It offers a disjunctive theory of change that centres transgression and prefigurative practices. The conclusion of the article braids these discourses to discuss how they both converge and diverge.