Search

Admiration and resentment of America are deeply rooted in the political traditions of the United States' nearest neighbors. As in other parts of the world, resentment has been on the rise in recent years. This paper distinguishes in its first part between critical opinion, skepticism, and prejudice on the one hand, and different types of anti-Americanism on the other. In the paper's next two parts, these general categories are confronted with data from Canada and Mexico and the dramatically different historical trajectories in the evolution of anti-Americanism in these two countries. In the fourth and final section, the paper seeks to identify commonalities, if any, in these radically different political settings. The expected finding is that even in close proximity to the United States, we find a plurality of different types of anti-Americanisms, a condition that characterizes world politics more generally. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Efforts to operationalize democracy at the national level have occupied a central place in the discipline since the 1960s, and have resulted in a cumulative body of literature and in a variety of datasets of increasing rigor and geographic and temporal coverage. Attempts to measure democracy at the subnational level are much more recent and inchoate, cover only a few countries and periods, and, critically, are not comparable across nations. After reviewing the state of the subject at the national level and the existing (objective) national subnational indices, this paper proposes six versions of an objective Subnational Democracy Index that can be calculated on the basis of (typically available) electoral and institutional data. Because of their modest data demands, the proposed indices can easily be applied to very different national and temporal contexts, thus permitting comparisons of subnational regimes across countries. The measures are pilot-tested on the first-level subnational units of five federations (Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, and the United States) and of one unitary country (Uruguay). The ultimate goal of this line of research is to produce cross-sectional--time-series datasets of subnational democracy with broad geographic and temporal coverage similar to those existing for national regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the richness of extant studies on the use of party cues as information short-cuts, there is a significant limitation: since most studies focus predominantly on the two main parties in the United States, we do not know whether and to what extent other party labels are used as heuristic devices. This paper seeks to address this limitation by expanding the geographical span of our understanding of the effect of party cues. Our principal focus is the degree to which different party labels, across different institutional contexts, influence how individuals form and express opinions on a range of political issues. We also investigate the moderating influence of partisanship and issue complexity. We present a set of results from an experimental study conducted in three countries: the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Our findings show that the influence of party cues on the expression of opinions varies greatly when one moves beyond the two major parties in the United States. The results vary by party and country, there is some evidence that partisanship influences whether or not cues are used, and there is mixed evidence about the role of issue complexity in the usefulness of party cues. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article considers the role of civil society in the future of governance in North America. Opposition to the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico brings to fore the need to recognize civil society. Currently, civil society actors from these three countries demand for the inclusion of equity, sustainable development, and democracy in any schemes that seek to deepen governance in North America. Civil society can be valuable contributors to governance-building in North America.