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In the world today there is a large gap between the number of states that could easily obtain the military power of nuclear weapons and the number of states that actually choose that power. Curiously, a number of states that sought that power at one time or another have abandoned it. Yet, in other states, the quest for nuclear weapons continues. What causes this variance in behavior?Scholars generally rely on one of three explanatory models to address this question. The security model argues that states develop nuclear weapons when they find them useful to bolster their own security and deter external threats. The domestic model finds that states develop nuclear weapons if it strengthens the regime internally to do so. Finally, the normative model suggests that a desire to reinforce positive aspects of a states identity will lead it to pursue nuclear develop or adhere to a prohibition against nuclear weapons. This paper evaluates the relative weight of these three explanatory models in the decision-making process of three very early nuclear-capable states. This paper codes the justifications made by political leaders in Great Britain, Canada, and Australia in the 1950s and 1960s. The purpose of this analysis is to determine the relative weight of three distinct and competing explanations for nuclear acquisition, and to suggest a means of evaluating additional cases nuclear and potential nuclear states. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently introduced bills of rights in parliamentary jurisdictions such as Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Australia differ from the more court-centred approach associated with the American Bill of Rights in the following two respects. First, with the exception of Canada, judicial review is distinguished from judicial supremacy. While these parliamentary jurisdictions now recognize judicial rights review as a legitimate component of constitutionalism, they also formally acknowledge the legitimacy of political dissent from judicial rulings. Second, these bills of rights promote non-judicial rights-review, which is manifested in new procedures and incentives for the systematic review of proposed legislation prior to, and potentially independent of, judicial review. This paper focuses on this second point of difference: non-judicial rights review. This concept embraces the following ideas: i) rights protection does not rest primarily on judicial remedies to redress infringements that have already occurred, but is heavily dependent upon incentives and procedures to reduce the incident of rights abuses from actually occurring; and ii) political decisions to proceed with legislation are made only after having confronted their implications for protected rights. The above ideas represent a significantly different understanding of the function of a bill of rights than in more conventional approaches. They also have the potential to broaden the perspectives undertaken when making judgments about how rights appropriately guide and constrain state actions. This paper asks the following questions. How is political behaviour affected by the institutionalisation of new incentives and obligations for rights-based evaluations of legislative proposals? Do cabinet and parliament consciously reflect on the rights-dimension of proposed legislation and, if so, how does this affect political deliberation? Does political rights review contribute to the legalization of legislative decision-making? The jurisdictional focus will be on the United Kingdom, although the constraints and challenges arising there are relevant for other parliamentary jurisdictions with variations on this model. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large and growing body of research demonstrates a correspondence between public opinion and policy behavior. Almost all of this research has focused on the US, however. Do similar patterns obtain in other countries? Or is the US unique? This paper represents one step towards answering these questions. We extend previous research on the dynamics of spending preferences and budgetary policy in the US, using comparable longitudinal measures of public preferences and government spending in the US, UK, and Canada. The nature and magnitude of opinion-policy connections vary across both policy functions and countries. We explore this variance here, and suggest several possible explanations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper problematizes the path dependency approach. Unlike the accounts of neo-institutionalists and power theorists where causal arrows run from the state and dominant interests or from structural determinants, our explanation features more complex forms of political, strategic and symbolic interaction. Our approach combines insights gleaned from the public policy paradigm shift literature with feminist inspired analyses of the state and social movement organizing. We outline the Canadian and British governments’ politicization of new problems (e.g., social inclusion, child poverty) and the policy innovations and new institutions that go with them. In our view, this takes place in a Third Way context and reflects the materialization of a new "social investment state." However, we argue that a wider range of political players than is commonly acknowledged has helped to promote and even produce these new developments. Thus, we examine the increasing reliance on different actors and discourses to legitimate such measures. These diverse actors, through their multiple socio-political interactions, are implicated in what we identify as a child-centred strategy of welfare reform. Taken together, all this amounts to much more than states behaving as usual and may add up to a markedly different citizenship regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalization’s onset inspired predictions about convergence of diverse capitalist economies to American-style liberalism (Kurzer 1994; Frieden & Rogowski 1996). Even dissenters (Garrett 1998; Boix 1998; Hall & Soskice 2001; Kitschelt, Lange, Marks & Stephens 1999), who insisted on the persistence of different capitalist models, agreed on liberalism’s comparative advantages: fewer regulations, less particularistic policy-making, and swift asset redeployment. Rather than inspiring hands-off government, however, increased international competition has often been accompanied by industry-specific tax cuts and credits, subsidies, and import relief. Neither the convergence school nor its critics, can explain when and why the liberal market economies (LMEs) in the UK, US, and Canada stray from laissez-faire. This paper argues that political institutions explain divergence among LMEs. My argument is that the key variable distinguishing between the UK and US is the weakness of party discipline in the United States and its strong presence in the UK. The most important distinction in scholarly work, by contrast, has been between majoritarianism and proportional representation electoral systems (Rogowski 1987). Political party discipline influences politicians? incentives to adopt universalistic versus particularistic policies toward business in the aggregate, as well as policies regarding specific sectors. The policy result of weak party discipline is different from the result of federalism. In systems with weak party discipline, businesses can invest in particular favors from individual legislators. In federal systems, by contrast, the only industrial particularism is inter-state bids for mobile industries capable of making credible exit threats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines homogeneity and heterogeneity in preferences for public policy, across income and education levels and party identification, and across policy domains in the US, UK and Canada. Do preferences differ across segments of the public at particular points in time? What about over time - do we observe a uniform swing across different groups (parallel publics), or does the flow of opinion differ across party, income, and education? Our data on public preferences for government spending show cross-sectional heterogeneity across sub-aggregates, but very high levels of over-time homogeneity in trends across subgroups. The structure of preference change across subgroups is fairly similar; most notably, thermostatic responsiveness to policy holds generally across the subgroups. This is especially true for broad domestic aggregates of opinion and policy. There still are some differences in feedback, particularly across education levels, as the highly educated are significantly more responsive to spending change over time. People with low and middling levels of education still do change their preferences for spending in response to what policymakers do, just to a lesser extent, at least in certain policy domains. This fits with the large and growing literature that demonstrates real differences owing to information levels. There also are significant differences across partisan subgroupings in various domains. The implications of these findings are considered in the concluding section. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Hegemonic Preservation Thesis advances three related but distinguishable claims in relation to the political vectors behind the genesis of "new constitutionalist" Bill of Rights instruments. First, that such projects are forwarded by neoliberals and other conservative forces with a view to entrenching their status quo interests through, in particular, instantiating an atomistic, freedom-of-contract understanding of individual-state relations. Secondly, that crucial support is forthcoming from the judicial elite who see such a project as enhancing their power and prestige. Thirdly, that reform occurs when hegemonic political incumbents see their position eroded by "peripheral" groups and, therefore, purposively desire to bind the hands of Parliament and the Executive. Via an examination of the genesis of the constitutional Charter of Rights (1982) in Canada and the weaker, statutory Human Rights Act (1998) in the UK, this paper points out a number of important discrepancies between the empirics and the HPT in relation to all three but especially the first dimension. First, at the social level, is demonstrated that of these two projects were forwarded not by neoliberal and other conservative forces but was rather by a "cultural left" constituency of civil libertarians and social equality seekers probably given added saliency as a result of the "postmaterialist" (Inglehart, 1990) and transnational developments of the modern era. Especially in the more autochthonous case of Canada, the locus of rights protected reflects these origins as demonstrated most vividly in the complete absence of a right to property within the Charter. Secondly, regarding the judicial elite, that although these actors were supportive prior to the enactment of the Human Rights Act in the UK, such support was notably absent in Canada prior to the Charter. Nevertheless, counter intuitively, it was Canadian case which exhibited the more radical change. In relation the third dimension the HPT correctly argues that the timing and extent of change relates to an elite political as much as a social dynamic. Nevertheless, in only one of these cases (Canada) is this even tangentially related to a hegemonic political actor (the Liberal Party) facing a threat (in the form of Quebec nationalism) to it continued power. In fact, in the case of the UK it was any prospect of Labour losing power but rather its negative experience during a long nonincumbency under the allegedly authoritarian rule of Margaret Thatcher (1979-1990) which provided a crucial "aversive" trigger for the Party's new attitude to the Bill of Rights question. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the globalizing economy, knowledge generation can catalyze local, regional, and national economic development. Governments everywhere face pressures to adapt to this new environment, and universities are recognized as strategic resources. This paper assesses changes in the ideas and actions of stakeholders concerning the role of universities in the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Canada, and Australia, focusing on universities operating in a dynamic sub-region in each country. Attention is given to how different levels of government promote or inhibit innovative actions by universities and the organizations they partner with to commercialize research. Efforts to create regional knowledge economies effectively linked to the global marketplace are shown to have generated a range of tensions and dilemmas. The findings presented here highlight themes likely to feature in future debates over policy design and governance arrangements for universities and other strategic public and quasi-public organizations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the politics of judicial retirement in Canada and Great Britain. It formulates a theory of judicial retirement for judges sitting on the courts of last resort in the countries. It estimates models of judicial retirement that incorporates personal, institutional and political factors to analyze the determinants of judicial retirements for judges appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada, and the Judicial Committee of the House of Lords.

To what degree can legal systems in democracies incorporate different legal traditions? Democracy requires toleration and extends participation rights to everyone, which allows the introduction of new interests into the system. Does democratic pluralism extend to the legal realm, or does this put at risk a consensus of fundamental values that makes democratic politics possible? Some members of Muslim populations in Western democracies like Canada and the United Kingdom have argued that the state should extend legitimacy to legal practices based on Islamic law. These demands are often couched in terms of religious freedom and the democratic rights of minorities, and proposals commonly focus on providing voluntary contractual or mediation arrangements that would be based on a community-sanctioned body of Islamic law. As enforcement of such contracts would fall to the state, these proposals raise the thorny question of the state's proper role in endorsing legal forms that originate outside the democratic system. I argue that, while these proposals do present some danger of fragmentation to democratic systems, they are also likely to provide an arena in which democratic norms are brought to bear upon traditional and religious law, with possibly important reformatory outcomes. This issue has become important as immigration to the West has led to some Muslim communities that do not entirely assimilate within democratic societies, but that increasingly use the logic of democratic politics to perpetuate cultural, if not political, separateness. This paper will evaluate the extent to which democratic legal systems can successfully accommodate such demands. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]