This article utilizes the “regulation approach” in order to rethink the origins and resolution of crisis. It provides an account of the political conflicts of the 1930s and 1940s which gave rise to a model of development in Canada which can be labelled “permeable fordism.” Rapid economic growth after the Second World War had specific national traits but these were based on wage relations and macro-economic policies similar to other countries which have been labelled fordist. The political compromise of Canada's “fordism” was, in contrast, quite different. The compromise was based on a new national discourse more than on one stressing the capital-labour relationship and organized by class-based parties. The article demonstrates how these differences were rooted in the political conflict of the 1930s and 1940s, the moment when the earlier model of development came apart around the challenges posed to Canadian federalism by the Depression and the Second World War.

This article studies the varied fortunes of public administration in Quebec political discourse. After being the object of both discussion and reforms from 1840 to 1870, the administration was largely neglected for the next 90 years, except in the context of political scandals. Then, after two decades of great attention, the administration fell under attack in the 1980s. After looking at the enduring themes of this discourse, the article concludes that, in addition to the conditions prevailing in all the provinces, in Quebec the apolitical nature of traditional ideology prevented the development of a local theory of the state.

This study measures the effects of macroeconomic conditions upon the popularity of the incumbent party in Canadian federal general elections from 1945 to 1988. In so doing it uses a model similar to the retrospective voting models used in electoral studies in the United States. The results suggest that for the elections from 1945 to 1972, bad economic conditions preceding the election benefited the incumbent party. For the elections from 1974 to 1988, these effects were diminished or reversed. Such results have precedents in separate studies that use Canadian poll data. However, they contradict the general conclusion of American studies that bad conditions hurt the incumbent. This contradiction suggests that the model's assumptions about voting behaviour, which appear to be verified by the American studies, do not apply universally.

This study proposes an empirical test of a classical hypothesis formulated by Philip Converse about the link between political information and opinion change. The study departs from previous ones on three aspects: (1) it is conducted outside the electoral field; (2) political information—the key variable of the analysis—is directly measured and is issue specific, and (3) the test of Converse hypothesis is carried through the utilization of a quasi-experimental design. The results—based on a sample of students expressing opinions about the Canada-USA free trade agreement—exhibit the expected non-linear relation between the individual's level of political information and his propensity to change opinion. This conclusion suggests that particular groups could be more sensitive to political information flows.

At present, the federal government is engaged in community-based self-government negotiations with a number of Indian bands and tribal groups across Canada with the objective of bringing about legislative arrangements for a limited form of self-government outside the Indian Act. An important part of these negotiations involves the federal government's promise to allow the incorporation of “customary or traditional structures,” where desired, into redesigned Indian governments. This article explores the difficulties confronting Indian leaders in their attempts to revitalize traditional governing practices within their respective communities. Through a comparison of traditional and contemporary governing practices in two plains Indian societies, the Blood and Peigan Nations, this article addresses the question of whether present Indian government, which represents an externally imposed form based on the Indian Act, has been institutionalized within these communities. If institutionalization has occurred, then a return to traditional governing practices, the author argues, is effectively precluded. After analyzing traditional and contemporary governing practices the author concludes that strong traditionalist orientations remain within these Indian communities, thus providing the opportunity for political revitalization.