This article examines the representational preferences of the represented, a perspective which has been largely neglected by political scientists in Canada. Using focus group interviews, I assess views of representation among three visible minority communities—black, South Asian and Chinese—within the urban and highly diverse setting of the Greater Toronto Area. Applying Hanna Pitkin's classic conceptual framework, I probe the multiple dimensions of political representation, examining the relative importance of its formal, descriptive, substantive and symbolic elements from minorities' perspective. Drawing on more recent advances in representational theory, I examine how minorities evaluate political actors' claims to represent them, and look at the “mobilizing objections” citizens raise in the face of such claims. Finally, I compare the three communities to assess similarities and differences in perceptions of representation along its various dimensions.

This paper argues that, despite significant increases in the number of women professors and the growth of feminist political science, transformative change hasn't occurred in how conventional political scientists think about politics. “Transformative change” requires the successful mainstreaming of gender-focused knowledge and the use of “gender” as a category of analysis in studies of politics. The article first explores the insights of leading feminist political scientists in the five Anglo-American democracies, about why gender mainstreaming has not succeeded to date. It establishes the extent of the failure and explores its causes, including the discipline's fragmented structure, polarized culture and a number of theoretical and methodological incompatibilities between mainstream and feminist political science. Finally, several promising strategies for achieving transformative change are explored.

Do international reputations matter and are they transferable from one context to another? These critically important questions continue to frame policy debates surrounding US responses to crises in Syria and Ukraine. For skeptics, past actions and reputations for resolve have no bearing on an adversary's assessment of US credibility; relative “power” and “interests” explain behaviour (Hopf, 1994; Mercer, 1996; Press, 2005; Walt, 2013; Zakaria 2013). We argue that scholars who dismiss the relevance of reputations typically sidestep important questions about how adversaries actually acquire relevant information about US interests and power. Building on an extensive collection of qualitative and quantitative studies of US deterrence encounters in asymmetric conflicts over the last two decades, we argue that lessons from past actions inform an adversary's interpretation of US interests in any given case and provide crucial information about Washington's willingness to deploy military force (capabilities). By implication, lessons learned from Bosnia 1992–1995 informed actions in Kosovo 1999, which, in turn, informed subsequent assessments of US interests and commitments in Iraq 1991, 1998 and 2003. Similarly, lessons about US reputations and credibility in Iraq from 1991 to 2003 were critically important to successful WMD diplomacy in Syria. Policy implications are addressed in the conclusion.

Like other policy subsectors, power generation has been affected by the governance changes of the last two decades, including a shift to more collaborative state-society relations. Collaborative governance implies new kinds of public engagement designed to provide both input legitimacy, through the involvement of a broader range of actors in policy design, and output legitimacy, through enhanced feedback and policy learning. This paper compares the impact of “governance-driven engagement” in the power generation subsectors in Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan, arguing that engagement increased the complexity of the policy mix in the subsector without succeeding in providing better feedback and learning. The paper notes a recent trend towards more expert-driven and less collaborative processes, as both provinces struggled to rationalize and simplify power generation policy goals and instruments.

The origins and implications of partisan identification are well-studied, but negative partisan attitudes—dislike for a particular party—have escaped such scrutiny, even as the politics of negativity enjoys sustained popularity, especially come election time. In this paper we build upon the comparatively modest negative partisanship literature to consider the effects of negative partisan attitudes on a range of political behaviours. There are reasons to suspect that negative and positive partisanship may have different effects; thus, accounting for the unique influence of negative attitudes is important for understanding the full effect of partisanship on political behaviour. Our results, based upon Canadian Election Study data from 2008 and 2011, reveal that, in addition to vote choice, negative partisanship influences voter turnout and a range of political activities, both related and unrelated to parties. These findings provide evidence of the power of the “dark side” of partisanship.

While the act of adopting a new portfolio raises a number of interesting queries, little attention has been paid to portfolio adoption, what motivates and what conditions predicate it. The Canadian case provides an excellent laboratory to test some broadly held assumptions about portfolio adoption, particularly given the contrast of the ten provinces' unique political cultures with their shared jurisdictional roles. We illustrate our case using a dataset that contains information on 85 portfolio adoptions in the Canadian provinces since 1982. Findings suggest little by way of a clear set of partisan or institutional motivations for portfolio adoption, although there is some evidence that governments are more likely to adopt portfolios in the first 100 days of governing and they are more likely to do so when elected with larger caucuses, possibly because of the need to find larger roles for party loyalists.

This paper examines public attitudes towards aboriginal policy in Canada, focusing on evidence from two surveys conducted in Saskatchewan, a province with a large and growing Aboriginal population. We show that although non-Aboriginals are collectively divided on Aboriginal public policies, expressing considerable support for some, but strong reservations when it comes to others; the individual-level evidence indicates that there is a single Aboriginal policy agenda in the minds of non-Aboriginal Canadians. Support for, and opposition to, the privileging of Aboriginal claims is structured in part by prejudice toward outgroups but also by non-Aboriginal people's more general position on the role of government in society. Moreover, the impact of positions about the role of government in society on attitudes toward Aboriginal policies is moderated by people's level of political sophistication: the more educated and politically interested they are, the greater the impact of those ideological views.

Scholarly opinions on the linkages between foreign military interventions and human rights promotions or violations are highly divided across the board. While many scholars see military interventions as effective means to save and promote human lives and rights from the clutches of repressive regimes, others reject such interventions as harmful to domestic reconciliations and rights promotions. The Arab Spring has renewed the debates between the liberal enthusiasts who staunchly supported NATO's military intervention to free up the Libyans from the Gaddafi regime and the critics who saw creeping dangers in this new intervention, ostensibly inspired by the “responsibility to protect” doctrine. This paper investigates the issue of Arab Spring-led foreign direct and indirect military interventions in Libya, Bahrain and Syria and critically examines the consequences of interventions for improvements or decline in Arab human rights conditions. Its findings support the position of the anti-intervention scholars that foreign military interventions produce deleterious effects on human rights in the target states.

There is a considerable amount of research about racial affinity effects, that voters are likely to support a candidate of the same race. However, it is unclear it this applies only to candidates of the voters' specific ethnocultural group or to racialized candidates in general. Previous research suggests that the prospects for “rainbow coalitions” on the basis of group identities are poor; indeed, findings of inter-minority conflict are common. This study uses new data from a web-based survey experiment with a large panel of racialized respondents. Respondents evaluated fictional candidates with the ethnicity of the candidates experimentally manipulated. While respondents show strong affinity for their own ethnocultural group, they also show some affinity for other minority candidates and certainly no inter-minority conflict. Effects are strongly conditional on the degree of ethnic self-identity. “Rainbow coalitions” may be more likely than previous research suggests.

Drawing on the literature on the process of cabinet appointments and on ministerial careers and the types of mobility that they involve, this article examines the hypothesis that the rate of ministerial promotion and demotion within a cabinet differs for women and men. To verify this hypothesis, we compiled a database that integrates the several hundred individuals who served as ministers in the Quebec Executive Council between 1976 and 2012. The quantitative analysis consists of descriptive statistics and negative binomial models; it takes into consideration a number of variables, including age, education, and past political mandates. Our results show that the ministerial careers of women and men follow a similar trajectory. Specifically, women and men begin their ministerial careers with minor portfolios, but as their ministerial experience accumulates, ministers of both sexes take on portfolios of increasing importance. In other words, the ministerial careers of women do not lag behind those of men. This observation negates the idea that the ministerial careers of women are less illustrious than those of their male counterparts.

In 1973, the federal government of Canada invited Aboriginal groups to enter into comprehensive land claims negotiations to settle outstanding claims not addressed by historical treaties. After eight years of negotiations, the Inuvialuit became the second group in Canada to sign a modern treaty, doing so in 1984. Missing from that agreement, however, was a self-government chapter, which was not open to negotiation at that time. In 1996, the Inuvialuit initiated self-government negotiations with the Crown but have yet to conclude an agreement despite increased institutional capacity. What explains this puzzle? Drawing upon the existing literature on land claims negotiations, Aboriginal self-government and historical institutionalism, we analyze a variety of primary and secondary sources to argue that a number of institutional and non-institutional factors have prevented the Inuvialuit from successfully completing self-government negotiations with the Crown.

External political efficacy, the belief that government is responsive to the demands of its citizens, has been declining in the United States since the 1960s. However, scholars do not yet fully understand the reasons for its decline. Nor have they found suitable explanations for why it fluctuates within the electorate. Drawing on the growing literature on the effects of income inequality on public policy, I posit that increasing income inequality factors into the decline of external political efficacy. Using multilevel regression models accounting for individual and contextual factors, I find increasing state-level income inequality has a substantial negative effect on external political efficacy. It is greater than most state and national-level economic measures or individual-level variables on external political efficacy. These results have important implications both for research on income inequality and political participation and also for research on income inequality and distributional public policy.

Despite an extensive dialogue on the subject of immigration, there has been little systematic cross-national investigation into the framing of immigration in the news media. Understanding the evolution of frames is an important piece of how we conceive of the link between the public's political priorities and policy makers’ responses. While the multi-directional relationships that exist between media, public policy and public opinion often pose challenges to precisely extracting media effects, there is still much that can be said about how the content and tone of immigration frames change over time in response to major policy changes or focusing events. Using automated content analysis (ACA) of print news data from Canada and Britain, I examine immigration framing from 1999 to 2013, identifying immigration-related frames in print news coverage and identifying trends in the volume and tone of frames over time. Results offer insight into striking commonalities in the frames used by each country's print media, and the divergent evolution in the emphasis on certain frames over others, largely predicated on coverage of focusing events.

For different reasons, identification with political parties has been on the decline everywhere. Using polling data, we show that political identification in Chile increased in times of polarization before 1973 and in the transition to democracy in 1990 and fell under democratic consolidation. The decline comes primarily from falling identification with the largest party, the centrist Christian Democratic Party (PDC). Assessing the determinants of party identification, we report that while in the 1960s the PDC had a wide appeal as it attracted voters identified with the left, centre and right, in recent years the PDC attracts support from centrists and older people.

This article critically examines the Conservative government's approach to official languages, through a policy instrument framework. Special attention is paid to the third federal roadmap for official languages—the first having been unveiled by the Liberal government in 2003 and the second by the Conservative minority government in 2008—and how this roadmap conveys a new representation of official languages in relation to Canadian identity and citizenship. The focus on the linguistic integration of new immigrants in the 2013 language roadmap generates interest. The policy instrument framework also shows how language roadmaps represent the fourth generation of official language policies in Canada; the first three generations found their respective bases in the 1969 Official Languages Act, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the 1988 Official Languages Act. The article concludes that an analysis of language roadmaps elucidates transformations initiated by the Conservative governments in the area of official languages in Canada. It also promotes further exploration and analysis of language policies through the policy instrument framework.

This article investigates the nature and role of authority contests—the claims and counterclaims about whose ideas matter on policy debates and via what procedures they should be heard—in policy paradigm contestation, reform and abandonment. Examining the authority contests around prairie Canada's grain marketing policy illustrates an additional pathway—a value-driven model—to Hall's model of endogenous policy anomalies. It further documents differences across governments in how they resolve contentious policy debates, showing that governments make fewer efforts to supplement their own representational authority with expert and/or popular authority when they enjoy majoritarian support from the affected region than when they do not and when their support for paradigm change is value-driven rather than a response to policy anomalies.

Criminal deportation policy in Canada follows a cyclical rather than a linear or partisan pattern. Based on a case study of Haitian residents deported between 1989 and 2009, I argue that criminal deportation cannot be explained as a stable proportion of the pool of permanent residents, but rather in terms of the political attention it generates. A change-point analysis identified two separate political mobilization phases. During the first phase (1994–1998), the integration of long-term residents is defined as a political issue and is translated into legislation (Bill C-44). The second phase (2003–2005) is a new episode of expansion that reformulated the issue around the concepts of risk and efficiency (Bill C-11). Despite recent legal reforms designed to accelerate removals of foreign criminals (Bills C-43 and C-60), the arrival of the Conservative Party (2006–2009) coincided with a decrease in criminal deportations during the period under review.

This research note tests the hypothesis that lobbying activities in Canada are primarily aimed at the members of the executive branch. It uses the data of the Canadian lobbying registry to measure the number of contacts between lobbyists and public office holders between the summer of 2008 and the summer of 2013. The results indicate that the majority of lobbying activities are aimed at the executive branch. However, it appears that the House of Commons is one of the most popular targets of lobbying activities. In fact, empirical evidence shows that numerous lobbying organizations are engaged in integrated strategies that consider both the legislative and executive institutions.

When it comes to buying military aircraft, what leads states to prefer one supplier over the other? This paper explores this question from the perspective of international relations theory. First we use social network analysis to map out fighter jet transfers during and after the Cold War and examine the extent to which historical structures of international hierarchy shape contemporary supplier-receiver relationships. Next, we use a basic probit model to analyse the origins of fighter jets in the world's air forces today to evaluate the effect of interstate orders of super-ordination and sub-ordination on sourcing patterns. All things being equal, the more a state is embedded in US security and economic hierarchy, the more it is likely to buy American-made fighter jets.

Does national identity necessarily have exclusionary effects when it comes to immigration attitudes or is it possible that some national identities act as inclusive forces? While research in Europe and in the US points to the former, one of the long-standing explanations for Canada's success with immigration has been the central place played by immigration and multiculturalism in its national identity. Using the Canadian case, this research tests the possibility that some national identities might represent an inclusive force. It does so through a nationally representative survey experiment (N = 1500) where respondents' national identity was primed before answering questions on immigration and multiculturalism. The analysis shows that contrary to previous results obtained in the Netherlands, priming Canadian identity does not increase anti-immigration attitudes. A new prime designed to isolate the effect of national identity even decreased these exclusionary attitudes.