In the winter of 1970–1, about 1000 questionnaires were sent to members of the Canadian Political Science Association and la Société canadienne de science politique and to known political scientists outside the two associations with a view to procuring information about political scientists and the state of research, publication, and funding in Canada.

Sometime between 30 October 1972 and the spring of 1973, the government led by the Rt. Hon. Pierre Trudeau, with fewer than half the members of the House of Commons belonging to the Liberal party, discovered that, unless it was prepared to use maps based on the 1961 census, one of the courses not immediately available to it was the dissolution of Parliament and the calling of another general election. The handicap (and it must also have particularly affected the strategy of the New Democratic party), was not for any constitutional reason; nor was it based on the possibility that the governor general might refuse the prime minister a dissolution. That possibility existed, although no one in the cabinet or Commons appears to have recognized it. Eugene Forsey concluded years ago, after his exhaustive study of the prerogatives governing dissolution: “Even where a great new issue of public policy has arisen, the Crown would be justified in refusing dissolution if Supply had not been voted, or a redistribution or franchise Act had not yet had time to come into operation, provided an alternative Government could be found, or provided the issue was not one which brooked no delay, e.g. a mandate for the despatch of troops overseas.” Two of the conditions noted by Dr Forsey three decades ago existed in 1972–3: a redistribution act had not yet had time to come into operation, and an alternative government could be found.

Strategic analysis is used in this article to report on a case study of candidate choice in an urban constituency. Several concepts are presented first. During a game, several agents, pursuing the objectives of a partisan organization, interact. It sometimes happens that the rules of the game do not anticipate completely the actions that ought to be advanced by the agents. There exists then a zone of uncertainty. If the agents come into conflict over the action to be taken there is a “crisis point.” Around a “crisis point” there occurs a particular play that can lead to several results. The agents have preferences regarding the results and they try, with the help of their resources, to impose their preferences on others. In order to leave nothing to chance, these rational agents establish strategies that guide their actions.

The game described in this article has at stake the choice of a candidate for legislative elections. The agents are activists (or groups of activists) of the partisan constituency association. At the outset of the study there is one aspirant to the candidature; certain activists, for diverse reasons, reject the aspirant as candidate. They form a coalition and present another candidate. The two aspirants and their organizations campaign among members of the association who will decide the choice of candidate. In the course of the campaign several “crisis points” emerge: the two rival organizations oppose each other.

Conclusions were drawn about the utility of case studies when they are made within a certain theoretical framework such as strategic analysis.

The federal government withdrew from the field of direct financial support of universities in 1967 under provisions of the new Act. Along with the full responsibility for university finance, the federal government transferred to each province certain tax revenues and a post-secondary education adjustment payment to bring the total financial transfer to at least 50 per cent of the allowable operating cost of post-secondary education. Costs allowable under the Act exclude capital costs, federal grants, student aid, and income for assisted, sponsored, and contract research. The federal councils and agencies continue to be the primary contributors to university research funds. The purpose of this note is to determine the current financial contribution of the government of Canada to university research. Much of the problem is its definition. To establish the framework for this definition, three sets of ideas are explored. These are: direct and indirect costs of university research, university research as an embedded activity, and the problem of relating university activity costs to incomes received from specific sources. These notions lead to formulae which yield divergent alternatives of the federal contribution depending upon the set of assumptions deemed appropriate. Much of the data needed for these calculations were gathered from primary sources and illustrate the application of the formulae for the four-year period 1966–70.

Normally in political studies the term public policy is construed to encompass the societally binding directives issued by a society's legitimate government. We usually consider government, and only government, as being able to “authoritatively allocate values.” This common conception pervades the literature on government policy-making, so much so that it is hardly questioned by students and practitioners of political science. As this note attempts to demonstrate, some re-thinking seems to be in order. For purposes of analysis in the social sciences, this conceptualization of public policy tends to obscure important realities of modern corporate society and to restrict unnecessarily the study of policy-making. Public policy is held to be public simply and solely because it originates from a duly legitimated government, which in turn is held to have the authority (within specified limits) of formulating and implementing such policy. Public policy is public then, our usual thinking goes, because it is made by a body defined somewhat arbitrarily as “public”: a government or some branch of government. All other policy-making is seen as private; it is not public (and hence to lie essentially beyond the scope of the disciplines of poliitcal science and public administration) because it is duly arrived at by non-governmental bodies. Thus policy analysts lead us to believe that public policy is made only when a government body acts to consider some subject of concern, and that other organizations are not relevant to the study of public policy.

In a brief footnote in Political Man, S.M. Lipset argued that political scientists had, in the past, approached the phenomenon of electoral change in terms of its being “a rational reaction to new situations or factors.” Sociologists and social psychologists who had channelled their endeavours in this directtion, on the other hand, had, Lipset argued, placed emphasis elsewhere: when it came to explanations of the vote, group pressures and the fulfilment of personal needs were first in their repertoire.

Contemporary political science is increasingly interested in the problem of empirical measurement and at various times researchers need scales to measure political attitudes and behaviour. In this process the Canadian political scientist is faced with two alternatives: (1) he can develop new scales, or (2) he can use existing measures from the literature which in most cases mean using scales empirically developed and used in the United States.

The interactions of a group of non-identical voting units may be studied by applying the concept of the Shapley value from n-person co-operative game theory. In this theory one assumes that voting units, or players, may form coalitions of various kinds in order to achieve success in the game, and one may assign a “value” to each such coalition based on what it can accomplish against arbitrary coalitions of the remaining players. The relative value of an individual player is calculated by considering how much he brings to each coalition he might join, that is, by how much the value of that coalition increases because of his membership, and summing this figure over all coalitions of which he could be a part.

Social scientists have for some time been interested in the socialization of young people. An increasing number of studies are available which deal with Western Europe, Japan, South America, and the United States. However, little empirical research has been done on the socialization of Canadian children. The purpose of this paper is to consider the development of English- and French-Canadian children's attitudes toward government in Quebec and to determine, in particular, the impact of their cultural membership on their perception of government. The ultimate goal of this research – though not of this paper – is to investigate empirically the development of national identity in Canada, a concept that has been singled out by several scholars as crucial in political development and nation building.

One of the most interesting points raised in Thomas A. Hockin's introductory essay to Apex of Power was the apparent contradiction he noted between S.J.R. Noel's use of Arend Lijphart's consociational model to describe the “Canadian political network” and the cabinet, and George Szablowski's interpretation of the same political ralationship through the application of F.G. Bailey's models of transactional and bureaucratic leadership. “The traditional transactional interpretation of prime ministerial-cabinet relations emphasizes each Minister's personal (mostly regional) ‘representative’ role in getting into the Cabinet and explaining his leverage within it … It may be in keeping with S.J.R. Noel's identification of the necessary attributes of the consociational political network in this volume. Yet George Szablowski in this volume questions whether this transactional dynamic is not threatened in Cabinet by a policy-making system which, with the aid of programme budgeting and clear leadership from the Prime Minister in the Cabinet Committee on Priorities and Planning, emphasizes rationality and the supra-regional functions of policy.”

From my perspective, two interesting questions arise from Stark's comment: first, a question concerning the usefulness or explanatory power of Lijphart's élite accommodation theory; and second, a question about the changing nature of infra-élite relations (specifically those occurring within the federal cabinet system) as distinct from inter-élite relations, primarily at the governmental level in Canada. Bailey's model becomes relevant in the discussion of the second question.