The comparative literature has devoted considerable attention to why individuals join political parties. This is especially important in the context of the declining party membership and activism that political parties face in contemporary politics. While the question of why members join parties has been well-documented, considerably less work has considered incentives to join other party positions. In the Canadian case, for example, we know very little about the incentives to join an electoral district association (EDA). This is surprising given the consequential role—both formal and informal—that local party associations and their presidents have been known to play in intra-party politics (influencing candidate nomination, membership recruitment and so forth). This study applies Clark and Wilson's (1961) framework of material, solidary and purposive incentives to local party association membership and asks why individuals join their local party executive and whether this motivation shapes the subsequent character of the EDA.

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).

This article examines statements issued by municipal governments, local organizations, and Indigenous communities that cancelled Canada Day celebrations in 2021, following news confirming physical evidence of unmarked graves at former residential schools. We argue that the statements reflect political logics of the past, present, and future, including dominant national narratives of liberal multiculturalism, residual logics of white nationalism, and emergent, transformative projects of Indigenous-defined reconciliation and resurgence. Through dominant narratives, the policy of cancelling Canada Day is presented as an expression of Canadian values, while settler-colonialism is obscured. Meanwhile, the residual white nationalism of the post-Confederation movement surfaces as statements tend to speak to an imagined normative Canadian subject who—only temporarily—suspends their celebration of the nation-state. Finally, the statements evidence emergent political forces, including Indigenous articulations of transformative reconciliation, resistance to settler-colonialism, and expressions of sovereignty, which signal the potential for major shifts in practices of national celebration in Canada.

Even though the Parti Conservateur du Québec (PCQ) did not manage to elect any members to the Assemblée nationale in Quebec's 2022 general election, this political party nonetheless received nearly 13 per cent of the popular vote. The party mainly campaigned on issues related to the economic right, but also discontent with the Legault government's COVID-19 health measures. We assess the extent to which these different drivers of support explain vote choice in favour of the PCQ using individual-level survey data from the 2022 Quebec Election Study. We find that the PCQ did succeed in gathering support on the basis of these issues, but that it was also able to attract voters with a lesser appetite for climate change mitigation as well as a populist and cynical outlook on politics. The party also appears to be especially popular among younger, male and less educated voters living outside the Greater Montreal region.

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.

Les élections municipales de 2021 à la Ville de Québec ont été marquées par une forte compétition entre cinq candidats et une saillance des enjeux concernant la construction d'un tramway et d'un troisième lien autoroutier entre Québec et sa Rive-Sud. Ainsi, cette élection représente un contexte idéal pour étudier le comportement électoral au niveau local et plus spécifiquement le vote sur enjeu qui a été très peu étudié dans le contexte municipal. Nous soutenons que ces deux enjeux ont acquis une valeur symbolique et ont été exploités comme enjeu de brèche par le candidat à la mairie Jean-François Gosselin. À l'aide d'une analyse multivariée, nous testons la relation entre l'appui aux deux projets de transport et l'intention de vote. Nos résultats montrent que les attitudes des électeurs envers ces deux enjeux sont fortement corrélées avec leur choix de vote et suggèrent une continuité entre le comportement électoral municipal, provincial et fédéral, du moins lorsqu'il est question de vote sur les enjeux.

Cet article étudie le rôle des fonctionnaires parlementaires de l'Assemblée nationale du Québec et la nature des relations qu'ils entretiennent avec les acteurs politiques. En prenant appui sur la séparation classique entre les sphères politiques et administratives, cette étude illustre l'ambiguïté inhérente à cette relation au plus haut niveau de l'État. Les hypothèses examinées portent sur la perception de la hiérarchie, la distinction des rôles entre fonctionnaires parlementaires, fonctionnaires de l'exécutif et le personnel politique, ainsi que les qualités attendues des fonctionnaires parlementaires. Sur la base de données empiriques originales, les résultats mettent en évidence des perceptions communes entre élus et fonctionnaires parlementaires, tout en faisant ressortir certaines nuances. Il conclut que la séparation entre les domaines politique et administratif observée dans le cas étudié favorise le bon fonctionnement du parlement et protège l'institution des querelles partisanes, mettant en évidence le rôle essentiel des fonctionnaires parlementaires pour assurer la stabilité de la branche législative de l'État.

The proliferation of agencies and arm's-length bodies provides opportunities for elected governments to reassert political control in a fragmented public service through staffing and board appointments. We have little basis to make systematic claims about the politicization of agencies in Canada. This study addresses this gap by drawing on the Government of Canada's Staffing and Non-Partisanship Survey (SNPS) micro data from 2018 and 2021, which surveys employees in departments and agencies with questions related to political impartiality in carrying out government duties. We ask: Do employees in agencies in the Government of Canada report a climate of less political impartiality than those working in conventional departments? The data reveals that those working in agencies are less likely to report their organizations acting impartially politically in carrying out their duties than those in conventional departments, though this is driven largely by particular types of agencies, namely those focused on enforcement.

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.

Aaron Mills (2017) has argued persuasively that to understand treaty relationships as contracts is to betray the spirit of those relationships. In this, he joins numerous Indigenous scholars who express wariness of contractualist understandings of treaty. This article inquires into the distinction between contractualist and relational understandings of treaty in order to think about the phenomenon of collective, transhistorical debt. Drawing out the distinction between relational and contractarian modes of thinking about long-term collective obligations, the article examines whether ongoing historical debts to Indigenous nations can be made sense of on a Kantian, contractarian logic. It concludes that the widespread colonial incomprehension of treaty as understood by many Indigenous nations was and remains tied to contractarian confusions. While contractarian thought can serve as a heuristic for articulating the injustices of colonial dispossession, it cannot capture the type of long-term collective responsibilities that treaties are supposed to represent.

According to the “miracle of aggregation” principle, in the absence of systematic biases, errors in individual judgments within a population should cancel each other out and lead to a correct decision at the aggregate level. This article explores potential individual- and group-level correlates of the accuracy of citizens’ electoral expectations and investigates how potential markers of political sophistication—namely, educational attainment and political interest—could be used to improve upon the raw aggregation of citizens’ forecasts using massive survey datasets collected during six Canadian national and provincial election campaigns between 2011 and 2022 (n = 279,003). We find that while educational attainment and interest increase the probability of a correct forecast at the individual level, delegating the forecasting task based on these variables does not necessarily lead to improvements in the accuracy of aggregate-level predictions. At the group level, we fail to uncover any evidence that sociological or informational diversity increases forecasting accuracy.

This article asks why states choose to explicitly label themselves as feminist and critically examines the case of Canada. Drawing on constructivist insights, I suggest that identity insecurity is a key contextual factor driving states’ decision to adopt a feminist branding. Through a thematic analysis of 1,551 statements from the Canadian House of Commons and additional documents published by the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development from 2006 to 2017, I find that Canada’s choice to adopt a feminist brand occurred within a broader context of identity insecurity, with gender equality emerging as a strategic area to enhance the country’s role through strengthened leadership in this sector. This article advances the study of feminist foreign policies by highlighting the strategic motivations behind the adoption of the feminist label, offering insights into its diffusion despite differing levels of commitment to gender equality.

This article examines the effects of changes in 2018–19 to the Income Tax Act and Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) regulations that were ostensibly intended to facilitate public policy engagement by Canadian charities. The article examines a case study of charities in the international development sector through interviews with charity leaders and quantitative analysis of data from the Canada Revenue Agency, Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying, and House of Commons Standing Committees. The article finds that the 2019 change in CRA regulations had very little effect on policy engagement by international development charities. Rather, a series of other factors continue to shape and constrain policy engagement by charities—including concerns about the future repoliticization of the CRA, misunderstandings of the regulations, difficulties fundraising for public policy work, fears of jeopardizing federal government funding, and a strategic preference for insider approaches to policy advocacy.

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.

This research note presents the results of audit studies that were conducted with the constituency offices of provincial and federal elected representatives across Canada. We investigate whether individuals from ethnic minority groups, the LGBTQ+ community and French or English speakers are discriminated against when contacting their constituency office for administrative services. Survey experiments administered to both candidates of the 2021 Canadian election and a representative sample of Canadian citizens complement these studies. Our results indicate the absence of discrimination towards constituents from an ethnic minority or who identify with the LGBTQ+ community. We found, however, that emails sent in French were less likely to be answered by Members of Parliament (MPs) than those sent in English. Constituency offices of anglophone MPs and those representing ridings with a small proportion of francophones were significantly less likely to respond to French emails. A similar pattern, albeit more moderate, is observed among constituency offices of francophone MPs in response to English emails. The survey experiments show similar discrimination from citizens but less so from candidates.

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.

Depuis le lancement en 2016 du mégaprojet d'exploitation minière à ciel ouvert de l’« Arc minier de l'Orénoque » au Venezuela, plusieurs groupes armés appelés sindicatos ont pris possession de certains territoires d'extraction. En faisant nôtre la définition wéberienne de l’État, nous formons l'hypothèse selon laquelle le groupement politique du sindicato présent sur l'un de ces territoires, celui de Las Claritas, peut être qualifié d’État embryonnaire. Poursuivant alors les interrogations de Bourdieu sur l’émergence de l’État, nous cherchons à documenter le processus d’étatisation et à témoigner de la façon dont les « bandits » deviennent des « princes ». Basée sur une démarche ethnographique et documentaire, notre recherche nous conduit à mettre en avant quatre mécanismes participant au processus d’étatisation : l'institutionnalisation, la monopolisation, la légitimation et la démarcation.

Deliberative processes are an antidote to despair about the inadequacies of politics-as-usual, but the “deliberative wave” (OECD 2021) of these initiatives around the globe has the potential, in some contexts, to be the latest face of colonization. In Aotearoa New Zealand, one project has worked since 2019 to design a climate assembly that enacts Te Tiriti o Waitangi (1840) obligations to honour Māori political authority. This article outlines the project's three innovations to the citizens’ assembly design that centre Māori forms of governance and reflect Māori deliberative protocols, and highlights three important distinctions to how a group of tangata Tiriti (people of the Treaty) has worked in partnership with tangata whenua (people of the land). Each feature has been vital to becoming Te Tiriti-led despite a context of ongoing colonization, with this place-based assembly having major implications for deliberation theory and practice worldwide.

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.