In affluent democracies, a broad rise in wealth concentration since the 1980s has not been accompanied by a broad rise in wealth taxation. As a large literature points out, conditions such as growing financialization, tax competition and tax avoidance have all curtailed the ability of left governments to tax wealth. This article argues that, despite the global constraint on taxing wealth, as left governments continue to influence wealth concentration and more advanced economies enter an era of slowing population growth, financial wealth of the rich tends to gain at the expense of (more equal) housing wealth. In response, left governments increase taxes on financial assets relative to housing wealth. By contrast, when population growth is still high, left subtly by adjusting the relative difference by which different types of wealth are taxed. In particular, as governments tax housing wealth more heavily instead. These predictions are tested using data from 15 to 16 advanced economies (1970–2015).

After 30 years of relative neglect, Canada’s notwithstanding clause has been invoked in six different provincial laws since 2018. We argue that this resurgence can be explained by the growing judicial invalidation of provincial statutes and federal-provincial partisan conflicts. Drawing from an original dataset of Charter cases decided by the Supreme Court of Canada (1982–2020), we show that provincial statutes have been invalidated at much higher rates since 2010. We also show how increasing partisan conflicts between conservative provincial governments and the Liberal federal government have helped frame the notwithstanding clause as a partisan tool for resisting centralizing rights decisions. The strategic environment facing provinces has shifted as partisan federalism conflicts lower the political costs of using the clause, while rising invalidation rates incentivize provinces to use it to protect their jurisdiction. This supports the “regime politics” understanding of judicial power as partly a function of federal (central) regime power.

The political importance of race has historically received limited attention across Canadian behavioural scholarship. Building on more recent work, this article comparatively examines the prevalence and effects of white identity and racial attitudes between white Canadians and Americans by leveraging original survey data and a novel conjoint experiment. This article presents several major findings. First, on average, white Canadians express lower levels of racial identity and racial resentment than white Americans, but more similar levels of racial affect. Second, experimental evidence shows that white Americans are more inclined to penalize nonwhite political candidates than Canadians. Third, white identity and racial resentment are strongly correlated with right-wing voting and partisanship in both Canada and the United States, but the magnitude of effects is greater among Americans. Race continues to be of greater political importance in the United States, but it is far from an irrelevant factor in Canada.

Despite over 50 years of advocacy and policymaking toward deinstitutionalization, residential institutions for people labelled with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) remain operational in six Canadian provinces. In addition, the lack of public, community-based housing has led to contemporary housing models that represent the re- or trans-institutionalization of labelled people. This article asks: why does the institutionalization of people labelled with IDD still occur in Canada? We argue that institutionalization is propelled by a policy legacy of systemic ableism that is manifested in three pervasive logics, which “haunt” the public provision of IDD housing: exclusion, elimination, and extraction. Empirical support is drawn from textual analysis and interviews with policymakers, advocates and people labelled with IDD in two Canadian provinces (Ontario and Nova Scotia). We conclude by discussing the interrelation of institutionalization and systemic ableism and presenting implications for counteracting ableism in Canadian IDD housing policy.

L’invasion de l’Ukraine par la Russie en février 2022 a suscité des réactions importantes au Québec, mettant de l’avant des traits distinctifs de sa culture stratégique. Cet article propose une analyse rigoureuse et systématique des attitudes québécoises face à la guerre en Ukraine, en examinant les discours des élites politiques, des élus et politiciens, des médias et de l’opinion publique du 1er novembre 2021 au 24 février 2024. L’objectif est d’explorer les caractéristiques de la culture stratégique québécoise, d’évaluer son évolution et d’analyser son articulation avec la culture stratégique canadienne dominante. L’article s’intéresse également à la présence d’attitudes prorusses au Québec. Bien que la culture stratégique québécoise évolue progressivement vers un internationalisme libéral, nos résultats démontrent qu’elle demeure marquée par certaines tendances pacifistes, antimilitaristes et anti-impérialistes. Les attitudes prorusses, bien que présentes, sont principalement véhiculées par un nombre restreint d’acteurs.

This study assesses the validity and reliability of empirical strategies derived from the study of European populisms by applying them to the case of Canada. Using a dataset of 5,845 original tweets by Canadian federal party leaders in 2022, we compare the prevalence and intensity of three characteristic populist discourses: “people-centrism,” “anti-elitism” and “exclusion of others.” Our results raise questions about the role of party ideology in shaping populist communication styles, by revealing a convergence among opposition leaders around primarily economic representations of the “people” and political portrayals of the “elite.” We also confirm the hunch that Canada is “exceptional” with respect to the prevalence of “exclusion of others,” demonstrating that this discourse is rare and has not been embraced by mainstream politics. Finally, the study adds to the skepticism about the value of “people-centrism” to operationalizing populism, given the widespread nature of this discourse.

Are shifting party-union relationships impacting the vote intentions of union members in Canada? By analyzing voting intentions within the Canadian labour movement, the findings illuminate the complexity of union members’ electoral behaviour and the strategic opportunities for parties vying for their votes. The authors find that while union members continue to be more likely than the average voter to support the NDP, this support is nuanced by factors such as union type, gender, education, age, and income. Notably, the study finds that the Conservatives have made significant inroads among construction union members and those with college education, challenging traditional assumptions about Canadian labour politics.

This research note introduces the Canadian Vote Intention Dataset, a new, integrated, publicly available database of nearly eight decades of public opinion surveys from Gallup, Environics, Pollara, the Canadian Election Study and the Consortium on Electoral Democracy. The dataset contains 1,019,639 responses on Canadians’ federal vote intention as well as a suite of demographic and geographic variables, including age, gender, religion, language, education, union membership, occupation, community size, province and region. We describe the dataset and custom survey weights, as well as the R package and interactive online application we developed to accompany the dataset. We then demonstrate the dataset’s utility through new analyses of the long-term evolution of gender, education and community size gaps in Canadian party support from 1945 to 2022.

Cette note de recherche vise à offrir une première introduction aux enjeux de la recherche par sondage, en particulier lorsqu’on utilise des données provenant de panels non probabilistes, comme les sondages en ligne. Nous expliquons le concept clé d’ignorabilité, qui aide à comprendre comment les biais de sélection peuvent affecter les résultats, et comment certaines techniques statistiques – comme la post-stratification et le raking – peuvent tenter de les corriger. À l’aide de simulations, nous montrons dans quels contextes ces méthodes peuvent fonctionner, et dans quels cas elles échouent. Les résultats suggèrent que les sondages non probabilistes présentent des limites importantes pour produire des estimations valides, mais qu’il existe aussi des pistes pour en améliorer l’usage, surtout dans le contexte actuel où ces données sont de plus en plus courantes en sciences sociales.

Affective polarization is often blamed on the rise of partisan news. However, self-reported measures of news consumption suffer serious flaws. We often have limited ability to characterize partisan media audiences outside of the United States. I use a behavioural data set of 728 respondents whose online behaviour was tracked over four weeks during the 2019 Canadian federal election. These data were paired to a survey for a subset of respondents. I find that audiences for partisan media are small, and web traffic is driven by an even smaller share of the population. There are few major partisan differences in news media use, and partisan news exposure is higher among highly attentive, sophisticated news consumers, rather than those with strong political commitments.

Does the political knowledge gender gap extend to knowledge about federalism, an institutional arrangement that increases the cognitive demand on voter knowledge? We answer this question by drawing upon data from three national surveys administered in Canada between 2020 and 2022. We find evidence of a gap between men and women in terms of their knowledge of the distribution of authority across the three orders of government. Across four of our knowledge items, the gender gap favouring men gets smaller as the issues vary from the federal to provincial to municipal level. Knowledge about national defence and sewage/water, however, do not fit this pattern. These results suggest future research should examine whether the gendered knowledge gap with respect to federalism can be explained by which levels of government have responsibility over areas of jurisdiction that have a strong effect on or are used by women on a daily basis.