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This paper examines public opinion towards the restriction or expansion of immigration in Canada, using data from the 2000 Canadian Election Study (CES). The paper is largely modeled on Citrin, et al (1997)’s "Public Opinion Towards Immigration Reform: The Role of Economic Motivations," although we make a methodological improvement that increases both the confidence of our results and our understanding of what drives not only opposition to immigration, but also for more immigration. In addition, we find that the variables explaining restrictionist opinions in the United States do not hold cross-nationally. Our methodological improvement is simple. Rather than using an ordered probit, we choose to use a multinomial logit. Because our three choices are exhaustive, we do not have to consider the irrelevance of independent alternatives. Thus, we can harness the principal advantage of the multinomial logit; namely, the independent measurement of the effect of each variable on each outcome. The model we use includes approximately 1200 respondents. Our initial results find that both personal and national economic evaluations are the principal factors causing opposition to immigration. This last significant result contradicts the American findings of Citrin et al. according to which personal economic circumstances play little role in opinion formation. In addition to challenging their main finding in regards to restriction, we generate a number of new findings on the factors influencing support for increased immigration. Most importantly, we demonstrate that these factors are not entirely symmetrical with the factors influencing support for decrease in immigration levels. Indeed, we find that national economic evaluations have much effect on support for decreased immigration, whereas it does not bear on support for increased immigration. Therefore our results demonstrate the value of employing a multinomial logit instead of an ordered probit in understanding public opinion towards immigration expansion or restriction. Moreover, the differences in significance of predictor variables between support for increase and decrease demonstrates that there can be various simultaneous processes at work in opinion formation on a single issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines attitudes toward policies intended to enhance the political rights and representation of indigenous populations. The analysis is based on a parallel set of questions about the under-representation and the expansion of rights for minority groups that were asked of populations in three countries. Election studies administered in Australia, Canada and New Zealand asked respondents a series of questions regarding support for government assistance for aborigines, self-government, and guaranteed representation. We examine several explanations for variations in the support of majority populations for these policies. Specifically, we examine how perceptions of threat, values such as post-materialism and personal identity structure preferences for the expansion of rights. The paper ends with a discussion of the implications of the results for building support for expansion of political rights for indigenes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the differences between freshmen members of the United States House of Representatives and the Canadian House of Commons elected between 1968 and 1996. The analysis focuses on the demographic and political differences between the two groups in an effort to better understand the members elected to both institutions. Do American and Canadian voters look for the same characteristics in representatives? Are women more likely to serve in one legislative body over another? In addressing these questions the paper builds on the ideas of Moncrief, Squire and Jewell on who runs for the legislature, John Hibbing’s theory of congressional careers, Malcolmson and Myers characteristics of members of the House of Commons and Clarke, Kornberg, and Stewart’s survey analysis of Canadian opinions of the legislature. A simple statistical model is employed to demonstrate the differences and similarities between freshmen members in both legislatures. This analysis shows that while there are fundamental differences between the behavior and expectations of members of Congress and members of the House of Commons, there are also striking similarities between the types of members that are selected to serve in the lower houses of the legislature. This analysis then concludes by examining the number of terms served by freshmen members in relation to their experience and demographic characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My study examines the conditions under which middle power states, such as Canada, the Netherlands, and Norway, may exercise effective leadership in the realm of human security. I hypothesize that a middle power-led human security initiative is more likely to be successful if the initiative does not threaten the fundamental principles of the superpower. My paper demonstrates that although it is possible for a human security initiative to overcome American opposition that is based on political or military interests, an initiative will be less likely to succeed if it challenges the core principles of the United States. I test the hypothesis by conducting a qualitative analysis of four cases of human security initiatives where the middle powers have played leadership roles. The cases include the endeavor to create a United Nations rapid deployment peacekeeping force, which led to the formation of the Standby High Readiness Brigade for United Nations Operations (SHIRBRIG) in 1996; the campaign to ban anti-personnel landmines, which resulted in the 1997 Ottawa Convention; the struggle to establish the International Criminal Court, which came into existence in 2002; and the unsuccessful attempt to regulate the legal trade in small arms and light weapons. The United States has taken different positions on these issues. The U.S. approved of the idea of a standby UN rapid response force, but did not participate in the establishment of SHIRBRIG. Washington objected to the Ottawa Convention on the basis of a conflict with U.S. military interests, and opposed the International Criminal Court due to the influence of certain groups in the American foreign policy establishment. Finally, the U.S. rejected the adoption of restrictions on the licit small arms trade due to a clash with an American principle protected by the U.S. Constitution: the right to bear arms. By illustrating that smaller states can assume leadership on global security, my paper counters the trend in international security studies of focusing almost exclusively on great power leadership, a tendency which has been reinforced by the decades-long predominance of the realist approach to international relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public policy scholars are increasingly incorporating the notion of ?venue shopping? into their analyses of policy change. Venue shopping refers to the activities of advocacy groups and policymakers who seek out a decision setting where they can air their grievances with current policy and present alternative policy proposals. Studies of venue shopping recognize that advocacy coalitions who are intent on changing policy will ‘shop? around for a favorable venue, whether it is a court or a congressional committee, that is receptive to their claims about the nature of a policy problem and its solution. Such activities can lead to dramatic changes in policy if a new policy image is adopted and a new set of institutions achieves some control over an issue. Venue shopping is an integral part of the policy process, and at the heart of many political strategies. But the practice of venue shopping is often more complex than some studies suggest, and an oversimplified portrayal of venue shopping runs the risk of overstating the opportunities for and frequency of policy change. This paper supports the general theory of venue shopping but presents a more complicated analysis of its practice than most empirical studies to date. I focus in particular on the motivations of advocacy groups who may, or may not, search for alternative policy venues. The paper begins with a general discussion of venue shopping and its relationship to policy change. I then review several assumptions implicit in theories of venue shopping, and raise questions about some aspects of them. The final part of the paper presents evidence from a case study of forest policy advocacy in Canada to illustrate the complexity of venue shopping strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I draw the link between three developments in advanced Western democracies: the decline in voter turnout, the decline in political knowledge and attention to politics, and the depoliticization of youth. After summarizing what we know of these phenomena, I then, using both comparative and Canadian data in particular, investigate the extent to which the first two can be understood as outcomes of third. If, as I try to show, this is significantly the case, it places challenges on policy makers and political scientists alike, challenges I address in the conclusion of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although indigenous peoples constitute one of the most socially, economically, and politically marginalized groups in the world, few quantitative social scientists have studied public attitudes toward this ethnicity in Canada or the world. We are not sure, for example, whether mass-level views toward First Nations are caused by the same factors that determine Canadians' opinions toward immigrants or Visible Minorities in general. To help answer this question, the paper investigates why ordinary British Columbians decided 1. to vote in; and 2. to vote "yes" on the controversial 2002 Aboriginal Treaty Negotiations Referendum. I first set the Referendum in the electoral and negotiation dynamics of the time by relying on archival research and personal interviews with such key figures as Premier Gordon Campbell, Attorney General Geoff Plant, and leading First Nations Treaty Negotiators. The essay next examines the theoretical literature on attitudes toward ethnic minorities in the abstract, which suggests that support for the measure might have been rooted in economic self-interest (e.g., income, occupation, employment status, and region), identity politics (e.g., ethnic, religious, or gender identification), education, partisanship, or age. To evaluate these hypotheses, the paper examines data from the April 2002 BC Reid Express Poll as well as official census and voting results. Cross-tabulations of the Reid Poll and Gary King-method, R x C ecological analysis of the election statistics indicate that identity politics, regional selfinterest, and education primarily motivated British Columbians' responses to the 2002 Aboriginal Treaty Negotiations Referendum. Purely individual economic circumstances, on the other hand, do not seem to have played a role. More broadly, these findings suggest that the roots of non-indigenous Canadians' views on First Nations are similar to the determinants of attitudes toward minorities in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with consistency of opinions of youth in Belgium, Canada and Romania. The arguments of the paper are that youth display consistency of their preferences on issues like diversity, role of state on the market and homosexual marriages and these are affected by political interest and time spent on television, internet or watching, listening or reading news. The study employs three levels of complexity of consistency: consistency of issues within the same issue dimension, ideological consistency, and ideological consistency that resists the test of time in order to discover instances in which youth is consistent with their preferences. The conclusions of this study is that youth display a higher than expected consistency of issues in all three countries. Ideological consistency tests reveal that Canadian and Romanian youth have consistent preferences with what left and right means in their respective polity. Longitudinal survey of preferences of youth in Romania does not reveal changes in consistency. The issues on which Romanian youth express preferences in a panel study are not linked with their left-right self placement. The study did find a minuscule effect of internet and television on consistency. However the effects dissipated for ideological consistency. Hypotheses were tested using a comparative survey of Romanian, Canadian and Belgian youth ages 15 to 16 from 2006, a panel survey of Romanian youth from 2006 and 2009. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and promote economic development, many jurisdictions are reforming their electricity sectors with new policies designed to promote clean energy In Canada, the two most active jurisdictions in this regard are Ontario and British Columbia. Both provinces embarked on aggressive sustainable energy (especially electricity) policy initiatives in the 2000s that have become intensely politicized. This paper will compare these two provincial policies to develop insights into Canadian provincial politics on significant environmental and nature resource issues and energy policy dynamics more generally. For each province, we briefly describe the electricity system and how it is governed in terms of relations between public and private operators, the role of regulatory commissions and their relationship to the parliamentary system in place. We then describe and compare the policy shifts during the 2000s and early 2010s, focusing on efforts to promote renewable electricity and the policy instruments used to do so. We also address the dynamics of the political backlash that occurred in both provinces, and how the party in power responded to those criticisms. The main purpose of this paper is to reveal the similarities and differences in the two provinces' energy policies, but we will also offer some explanations for those patterns. The institutional structure of energy governance in Canada gives cabinet governments a significant amount of latitude to enact and implement ambitious policies. The particular manifestation of governance structures, policy objectives and policy instruments will vary depending on factors specific to the provincial context. The increased costs of low-carbon energy policies are proving to be a significant political issue, but the extent to which they will frustrate the achievement of larger policy objectives is not yet clear. In both provinces, highly ambitious clean energy policies have experienced considerable implementation challenges and political resistance. Despite the adjustments that have been made to address these difficulties, the fundamentals of the policy shifts are still in place. These cases reveal that when motivated, leader-centered parliamentary governments can create meaningful policy change to promote energy sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This year's theme of representation poses an interesting set of challenges for health researchers. For example, it is very difficult to find any organized participants in health politics and policy-making who do not claim to speak for and represent the best interests of patients. Perversely, those who likely have the best normative claim and the greatest resources available to represent patients (elected officials) do not seem all that interested in the job, in spite of their regular claims that they do in fact fulfill this role. While there are many ways in which the term patient representation can be understood, this paper will look at the question in the following terms. First patients are defined as those members of the population who use and anticipate having to using health services in a given jurisdiction. Second, patient representation is understood to mean speaking on behalf of patients to ensure that their concerns (as a collective population) over how, where and in what quantities services are provided are represented within health decision-making structures. The paper will argue that this unwillingness to represent patients that is demonstrated by elected officials is a by-product of efforts to design organizational structures for financing and managing care that allow them to avoid blame for the inability of health systems to satisfy all demands for care. Evidence to support this argument is found by looking at the path that health reform has taken in the three countries Tuohy identified as ideal cases for her typology for health systems: Canada (collegial governance), The UK (hierarchical governance) and the US (market governance). In Canada and the UK politicians deliberately adopted organizational and financial reforms that reduced their ability to represent the interests of patients in debates regarding how, where and in what quantity services would be delivered. Meanwhile in the US, lawmakers chose reform options that will undoubtedly expand the population able to afford care but which simultaneously did little to replace the control exercised by market based organizations over how and where service will be provided to most Americans. Where new regulation is required federal and state elected officials have put many of the most important decisions in the hands of arms-length agencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper about dominant party regimes in Canada and Australia is presented which is prepared for presentation at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, in Seattle, Washington, from September 1-4, 2011. The paper discusses topics including the claim that single-party dominance is less frequent in the Anglo-Saxon world and the rise and fall of dominant party regimes.

What is our understanding of the relationship between democracy and income inequality in the Western Hemisphere? This paper specifies a nonlinear relationship between democracy and income inequality in multivariate non-linear models across different regions and time points of the Western Hemisphere as well as the hemisphere based on a common literature (Acemoglu and Robinson 2006, Barro 1999, Boix 2003, Burkhart 1997, Houle 2009). While the literature has rigorously tested these relationships within Latin America (Huber et al. 2006), there has not been a similar test of all of the Western Hemispheric countries, including the industrialized economies of Canada and the United States. This paper will utilize the best extant income inequality measure, the Solt (2009) corrections to the UNU-WIDER project. This comparative exercise should be instructive in both a modeling sense and a better understanding of consequences of using income inequality measures across hemispheric subregions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how public policy is shaped by and shapes constructed notions of childhood and childhood sexuality in the regulation of young people's sexuality in Canada. I use the framework developed by Helen Ingram and Anne Schneider (Ingram and Schneider 1993; 2005; Schneider and Ingram 1997; 2005.; 2008) who argue that the state, through public policy, may solidify, perpetuate or change socially constructed groups, the identities of which have become so entrenched that they are thought of as 'natural'. Often, they argue, state actors through public policy not only reinforce the limits of political participation of target groups but also engage in a degenerative form of policy-making in which the manipulation of identities is used for political gain. In the case of dependents, while the rhetoric may express great concern for their welfare, they are not granted the freedom of responsibility and decision-making. The paper explores the chldren as a target population in the regulation of sexuality in several historic periods of the twentieth century including the recent debates and political process that resulted in the raising of the age of sexual consent to sixteen in Canada in 2008 and demonstrates that the constructed notion of childhood and childhood sexuality results in a targeted population of young people as dependents. As is often the case and demonstrated in this paper, there is no direct causal link between the proposed regulation of the targeted group and the ostensible purpose of the legislation which is to protect young people from sexual predators. Nevertheless, this constructed identity becomes of prime importance to political actors in persuading, influencing and bringing about concrete policy outcomes. At the same time the policy perpetuates 'natural' notions of childhood and childhood sexuality reinforcing dependent status on young people that enhances vulnerability, curtails responsibility and leaves them politically undermined. In the most recent period the manipulation of symbolic identities of children and youth for political purposes may fit the definition of a degenerative form of policy-making by the Conservative government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Never waste a good crisis! This has become the mantra of politicians and civic leaders facing fallout of the recent financial crisis. It declares that crisis can prove fertile ground for positive change, opportunity can spring from ruin, and that infrastructure, processes and institutions can be rebuilt. Financial downturns affect municipalities and regional economies especially acutely. This paper investigates the responses of metropolitan regions to crisis and its effect on collective action to the "opportunities" of crisis. To what degree does a common challenge provoke or strengthen collective action and cooperation between governments in metropolitan regions? To what extent, and under what conditions, does it exacerbate tensions and increase fragmentation? To answer these questions this paper explores the experiences of three city regions - Toronto, Canada; Frankfurt, Germany; and Detroit, USA - in previous recessions as well as the current downturn. These cases exhibit different patterns of regional and local responses and an analysis of these experiences will inform a hypothesis about the effects of crisis on cooperation and metropolitan governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares the impact of court decisions on policy-making for three different, ethically contentious policy issues: abortion, assisted reproduction and euthanasia. Past research on abortion emphasised how, in Canada, court decisions contributed to medicalise the issue by framing it as a question of equal access to health care (explain effect). This paper investigates to what extent courts have impacted policy-making on other life and death issues in similar or different ways as has been the case for abortion. Have courts in the case of assisted reproduction and euthanasia also sustained a medicalized frame, or to the contrary, have courts validated other competing policy frames? As the comparison reveals court decisions have contributed to define all three policy issues as a matter of health, health care and medical autonomy; a problem definition promoted by different actors, in particular physicians, patient organizations, and state actors. Defining abortion, euthanasia and assisted reproduction as a health issue reflects the influential position of the medical profession, but - more importantly - opens the possibility to initiate policy change, as the comparative analysis argues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the electoral presence of women at the federal, provincial and municipal levels of government. Contrary to "the higher, the fewer" thesis - a dominant strain in the women and politics literature - this paper suggests that female legislators are present in roughly equivalent proportions across all three levels of government in Canada. The data presented here cast doubt on the notion of a municipal advantage for women and, unlike prior analyses which have tended to focus on a limited number of provinces, a distinct time period, or a select group of larger urban centres, this paper includes all provinces and territories, rural, urban and metropolitan municipalities, as well as a longitudinal dataset. The findings suggest considerable variation in women's electoral presence with female legislators sometimes finding greater electoral success at the federal and provincial levels than at the municipal level, but the proportion of women at any level of government rarely ever exceeding 25% of all elected officials. The paper thus challenges a persuasive theme in the literature on women in politics. It suggests that the notion of a municipal advantage serves to conceal the extent of women's electoral under-representation and the persistent barriers that women continue to face in the electoral arena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper about contemporary Canadian feminists is presented which is prepared for presentation at the annual meetings of the American Political Science Association from September 3-6, 2009 in Toronto, Ontario. The paper discusses topics including the role of feminist movement in Canadian society, the findings of the 2008 Young Feminist in Canada Survey, and feminist identification in the post-feminist era.

Scholarship abounds on the importance of the city-region in the global economy, national and regional prosperity, the socio-economic implications of territorial rescaling and state restructuring, different forms of collaborative arrangements. But little is known about the implications of their emergence in a multilevel governance context, or their capacity to function as effective, legitimate, and robust policy actors. This paper begins to address the large question of what determines the governance capacity of city-regions. It focuses on sources of horizontal capacity as a function of the strength of intermunicipal partnerships. Intermunicipal cooperation is a form of regional governance that unites the participatory concept of regional governance with functional flexibility of cooperative networks. Research suggests a variety of determinants of the strength of intermunicipal partnerships from rational choice to institutional perspectives. This paper acknowledges the contribution of these approaches to understanding intermunicipal dynamics, but argues that none of the sets of variables presented to date can alone explain observed variations in the strength and capacity of city-regional partnerships. Instead the paper presents an alternative theoretical framework that reimagines and combines existing approaches, and introduces the concept of civic capital as a critical determinant of governance capacity. This theoretical framework is applied across three issues areas related to regional economic development in the Toronto (Canada) and Frankfurt Rhein Main (Germany) city-regions. These cases demonstrate that in the absence of an overarching formal regional level of government the capacity to function as a regional actor - to formulate, articulate, and act on shared interests - rather than simply exist as a functional space will vary significantly across cases and issue areas. The cases also suggest a link between civic capital and the strength of intermunicipal partnerships, and therefore horizontal governance capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper about national identity and welfare state is presented which is prepared for presentation at the American Political Science Association Conference, in Toronto, Ontario, on September 2-6, 2009. The paper discusses topics including increase in inequality found in a recent OECD study, the role of national identity in sustaining support for the welfare state in Canada, and nationalism.

This paper presents a comparative policy analysis of lesbian and gay rights in Canada and the U.S., seeking to explain why public policies in this area have diverged so significantly in recent years. Drawing on the historical institutionalist approach, the paper argues that political institutional differences between Canada and the U.S. provide a more powerful explanation of cross-national policy divergence than political cultural or societally-based explanations. In particular, legacies of previous policies combined with differences in the core institutions of the state as well as differences in constitutional rules and norms help explain policy divergence in this area. The paper pays particular attention to the role of courts in relation to other political institutions. Courts have played a critically important role in lesbian and gay rights struggles in Canada and the U.S.; however, in Canada, the courts have been less constrained by other political institutions and this difference helps explain their greater policy impact in Canada compared to the U.S. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) Project is the largest, most extensive data-collection effort to date on the field of international relations. It systematically and empirically analyzes relationships among pedagogy, scholarship, and international policy. In this paper we draw from two of the three major TRIP data sources to describe trends in the discipline of international relations over the past 27 years (1980-2006). First, we employ a new journal article database that covers every article published in the 12 leading journals in the field. The article is the unit of analysis and we categorize each article in terms of 26 distinct variables,including methodology, epistemology, issue area, substantive focus, author's gender, paradigm advanced, region under study, and many others. We include the codebook for the TRIP journal article database in the Appendix to this paper. Second, we analyze results from two surveys of international relations faculty. The first survey was conducted in 2004 and covered all faculty at U.S. colleges and universities who teach or do research in the field of international relations. The second survey was conducted in 2006 and covered both U.S. and Canadian IR faculty members, although we report only U.S. responses in this paper. The journal article database allows us to track changes in the type of research published in the field,2 while the surveys are primarily useful as contemporary snapshots that document the opinions and practices of IR scholars in terms of their views of the discipline, their research, their teaching practices, and their opinions on contemporary policy issues. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most analyses of electoral support of third parties consider the correlates of this support at election time. Existing explanations of support for smaller third parties focus on voter distrust of/alienation from major parties, lack of/declining identification with a major party and the strategic calculations voters who fail to vote sincerely. The focus on election time support of third parties can mask theoretically interesting and important dynamics that may characterize trends in support for such parties between elections. This paper develops a dynamic model of electoral support for the New Democratic Party (NDP): a small, ideological third party in Canada. Espousing a social democratic ethos, the NDP serves as a classic example of a small, ideologically-committed third party.The analysis considers the extent to which two types of factors explain trends in electoral support for the NDP: economic conditions and strategic calculations. The economic voting literature finds that incumbent support is influenced by economic conditions in a reward-punishment fashion. While deteriorating economic conditions may undermine incumbent support, it may also be the case that these same conditions strengthen support for small, non-governing parties such as the NDP. In particular, because the NDP is a left-wing party, it is expected that support will be prominently influenced by changes in the unemployment rate. Secondly, a variation of the strategic vote theorem is considered. Specifically, the hypothesis is that NDP support is a function of time elapsed from the previous federal election and expected time to the next federal election. As a result, it is expected that NDP support will be greatest at the projected midpoint between federal elections because the costs of expressing a sincere electoral preference are lowest at this point.The proposed paper develops a time series analysis using quarterly economic and vote intention data from 1977-2001. Results indicate support for both of the central propositions of the paper. Findings will be discussed in light of contributions to comparatively understanding electoral support for third parties. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early studies of Canadian partisanship argued that the concept of partisan identification, as understood in the U.S., does not apply to the study of Canada. This began a debate about whether partisan identification in Canada was similar to the type of attachment held by Americans. Throughout this debate, the role of political parties in influencing the nature of their partisans has been only modestly studied. Other than arguing that weak partisanship is the result of institutional arrangements or the brokerage style of the parties, studies of partisanship have not considered whether the nature of the identification varies between the parties. In other words, do some parties encourage American-style partisanship and others something else? The connection between parties and partisans is of particular interest given the changes that occurred in the Canadian party system since 1993. Not only do the current parties vary in age, reputation and focus, but they also differ in terms of their ideological intensity. This paper addresses the characteristics of partisanship in the various parties of the Canadian party system since 1993. Is Canadian partisanship uniform, or does it vary by party? Are certain partisans more loyal, more intense, and more stable? Do these characteristics vary systematically by party? This paper tackles these questions using data from the Canadian Election Studies of 1988-2006. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attitudes about sovereignty among Quebec youth are well known, particularly in light of the movement's appeal to idealistic values and as an affirmation of the Québécois identity. It is assumed that those who support sovereignty must hold some negative opinion about the federalist structure; after all, they do aspire to break away from Canada. But that has not been adequately validated. The paper explores attitudes about federalism by reporting results from a survey of Quebec youth (18 to 34 years old) conducted in early 2006. The paper shows that when asked to indicate federalism's main disadvantage, respondents provided a wide range of answers with no structured or coherent pattern. The main reason for this attitudinal dispersion is a lack of need to consider attributes of federalism. This explains why the highest level of dispersion is found among: those least attached to Canada, who may regard the Canadian federalism system as remote to their personal lives; francophones, for whom sovereignty is a semi-default position that requires little justification and little thought; and those least exposed to news media, who are least susceptible to any mainstreaming effects. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This paper analyzes policies to raise the age of retirement in the period from 1995 to 2005 in three industrialized countries: Canada, Germany and South Korea. Over the next five decades, the populations of advanced industrialized countries are expected to age. As a result, governments are confronted with important policy challenges: how to provide income security, and how to cover large increases in pension spending. Retirement age increases are one of the key policy responses to these challenges, since raising the average pension age by only 2 or 3 years would enable governments to finance most of the costs of population aging. In this paper, we will analyze cross-national differences in governmental policies designed to raise the age of retirement, such as increases in statutory retirement ages, reductions of the generosity of benefits or closure of the pathways to early retirement. In order to explain differences among Canada, Germany and South Korea, we focus on the roles of the state, market and the family in pension provision and on the role of pension policy legacies. The three countries differ significantly along these dimensions: in Canada, the market plays a key role, in Germany, the state, and in South Korea, the family. In addition, they differ with regards to eligibility conditions, benefit levels and the existence of pathways to early retirement. We argue that these differences significantly conditioned the policy choices that governments made. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Inglehart and Norris (2003) have argued that a process of gender realignment is pushing men to the right and women to the left. This paper uses data from the 2006 Canadian election study to assess their argument that the "modern gender gap" is rooted in cultural differences between women and men rather than in structural and situational differences. While there is some evidence that public sector employment and higher education help to explain why women are more likely than men to vote for the NDP, their impact is offset by religiosity. Women tend to be more religious than men and this helps to explain why many women remain attracted to the Conservatives. The most important factors in explaining why men are more likely than women to vote for the right-wing party and women are more likely than men to vote for the left-wing party are clearly cultural. Women are more skeptical than men of market-based arguments, less ready to embrace closer ties with the US, and more liberal when it comes to social mores and alternative lifestyles. The paper ends with a discussion of the implications of gendered patterns of voting for electoral politics in Canada. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the game-theoretical dominant player concept and power indices, this paper introduces a re-conceptualization of single-party dominance that we consider to be more intuitive and less dependent on ad hoc criteria than standard operationalizations of the phenomenon. This operational definition is then used in the presentation of a few descriptive inferences on the incidence and nature of single-party dominance in the subnational jurisdictions of four federally organized parliamentary democracies, namely, Canada, Australia, Germany and Austria. The paper also reviews extant hypotheses on the rise and fall of dominant party regimes and discusses their plausability against the backdrop of our cases. We conclude that there are few, if any, individually necessary or sufficient causes of single-party dominance. Instead, nationally and perhaps even regionally specific configurations of factors seem to account for the rise and fall of dominant party regimes - a finding that underlines the necessity of further multi-method research on the topic. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the predominant mode of interpretation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as a species of civil religion. The Charter is simultaneously a document for human rights and for national unity, and this paper examines ways that the former have been used to construct the latter. Specifically, the Charter has come to be seen as expressing a society that realizes itself progressively in historical time, toward increased respect for human rights and individuality. In order to do this, the Supreme Court has articulated what it deems a specific Canadian "way of life" summarized by what is often referred to as the "expressive" or "autonomous" self. This self conceives itself as pure potential and freely creates its identity and obligations; it is ahistorical and unencumbered by traditions or demands by community. It is the expression of postmodernism. This paper focuses on court cases where identity claims by traditional religious communities conflict with this new "autonomous" self, and shows how, even when the Supreme Court decides in favor of traditional religious communities, its justifications are based on the language of the "autonomous" self, which undermines theunique contributions such groups provide to a pluralistic civil society. Canadian unity, therefore, is bought by a construction of an "autonomous" self that paradoxically recognizes no claims of community and makes its own claim for self-divinization in a postmodern mode. ..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]

The last years have witnessed the development of a great body of literature about judicial independence. One of the most interesting and provocative theoretical arguments has been put forward by Helmke in the 'Strategic Defection' Theory. In a series of papers and conferences, and particularly in her influential book Courts under Constraints, Helmke develops a rational choice approach to the problem of judicial independence in unstable regimes. She theorized that Justices of the Argentinean Supreme Court shaped their decisions in cases involving the government, depending on the underlying political environment. She claimed that, under some specific conditions, justices decided against the incumbents because of constraints faced vis-à-vis the incoming government. In our paper, we seek to develop the foundations of a cross-country study of the Strategic Defection theory. After outlining the basics of Helmke's theory we examine a series of problems confronting the development of a thorough cross national test, including how to define "regime change", defection from authoritarian versus democratic regimes, problems of information and measurement, the 'inter-temporal conflict of interest', identifying the key issues for the incoming government, the problem of determining whether judges' votes express their sincere preferences rather than strategic concerns, and whether the assumption of a strong executive may be generalized to all relevant cases. We seek to test Justices' votes in National High Courts with judicial review jurisdiction in countries with a documented history of political instability. After developing an approach for a broad cross national study, we provide a preliminary analysis of decision making in the Philippines, Venezuela, South Africa, and Canada. All of these countries (except Canada) experienced some kind of regime change that has been previously documented and analyzed. Canada is included as a control to examine the level of support for the government in a stable democracy. The preliminary results provide some support for strategic defection theory in South Africa, but the case of the Philippines does not appear to be consistent with strategic defection theory. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existence of economic effects on the vote is a commonplace, but the stability of the effect across space and time is not. Particularly intriguing is the possibility that a major effect of campaigns is to prime the economy, and so increase its salience as election day approaches. The body of evidence for this claim is small, only weakly specified, and is already controverted. The paper approaches this question by examing the ten rolling cross-sectional election surveys conducted in Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand and the United States since 1988. The basic approach centres on an examination of over-time changes in the impact of economic retrospections on vote choice over the course of each election, The theoretical stakes in the analysis are considerable. Economic priming is presented as a case in point for elections as mainly enlightening events, so the paper will assess the generality of the enlightenment claim. Microfoundations for economic voting remain understudied in general, a shortfall that this paper addresses by introducing real time. This attention to over-time dynamics combined with the variety in electoral settings should also help elucidate the institutional conditions for economic voting. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper represents an initial effort to model the evolution of party systems, to account for stability and change in party systems actors and policy space. It employs both a simple simulation and a game theoretic heuristic to generate a series of hypotheses about party systems stability. The paper focuses on the distribution of voter preferences, the level of strategic voting, and the degree of party competition as important determinants of party systems change in established parliamentary systems, while controlling for variation in electoral institutions. Evidence from a longitudinal case study on Canada and a time series, cross-national (TSCS) data set support some of the hypotheses derived from the game theoretic heuristic. Rules for a more complicated simulation are presented, which, when programmed, will help evaluate the validity of the hypotheses in more complex party systems. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neighboring states with high levels of interaction but disparate public policies encounter new challenges with regard to marriage recognition, provision of spousal benefits and proper resolution of child custody and intimate partner abuse issues. Canadian progress toward legalizing same-sex marriage begs the question of whether the U.S. government will stand against same-sex marriage when its nearest neighbor appears close to declaring it an important means of eliminating institutionalized inequality and systemic shortfalls confronting lesbian, bisexual, gay and transgender (LBGT) families. The U.S. Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, allowing states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages performed outside of their jurisdiction. Some see this as a move to ban same-sex marriage as well as a disregard of the equal rights afforded all U.S. citizens by the U.S. Constitution. Their opponents support the law as a marriage preservation effort, protecting a time-honored social institution and so-called traditional American family structure. International media fanfare and public protests have since elevated the issue, and a smattering of U.S. state courts have been called to rule on the validity of same-sex marriages taking place within their territory. In June 2003, Ontario, Canada became the first North American jurisdiction to fully legalize same-sex marriage. One month later, Canadian Parliament considered legislation to legalize same-sex marriage federally. The proposed law extends marriage rights and subsequent spousal benefits to same-sex couples. The law?s proponents argue that such recognition is in accordance with the rights and protections mandated within the Canadian Charter of Rights which must be allotted every Canadian citizen. The bill was referred to the Canadian Supreme Court for opinion where it has been deliberated for nearly a year. A final decision is expected in fall 2004. This paper highlights Canada?s progress toward legalizing same-sex marriage and implementing anti-discrimination laws that protect LBGT individuals and their families. I summarize relevant Canadian legislation and systematically examine the characteristics of the Canadian Parliament members that voted on identical same-sex marriage legislation in 1999 and 2003. I analyze their general demographic characteristics and those of their constituencies to determine if same-sex marriage support and opposition can be linked to individual factors other than political party allegiance in different time periods. The long-term goal of this research is to determine if the political will to legalize same-sex marriage can be predicted by factors other than one?s declared political party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early 1990s, under a conservative administration, Canadian government policy on violence against women for the first time incorporated language and analyses developed by radical feminists. Indeed, by 1994 the Canadian government was one of the most responsive democratic governments in the world when it came to the issue of violence against women (Weldon, 2002). In the late 1990s, however, the progress in policy development on violence abruptly stopped, and indicators from the beginning of this decade suggest that rates of violence against women may have started to increase in severity. In this paper, I first describe these changes in government policy towards violence against women, and then seek to explain the reasons for these shifts. I argue that the weakening of government policy on violence against women was a product of international economic pressures interacting with domestic backlash against women?s movement gains of the 1980s and early 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue that liberal multicultural interpretations of ?culture? are conceptually limiting in analyzing identity/difference issues. ?Culture? is used to refer to only some identities specifically by limiting analysis to ethnicity, nationhood, and linguistic difference. This is done without addressing other modes of difference or intersections of multiple differences. Such a conception has contributed to constructing and reinstituting cultures as essentialized objects that are Othered. To develop an alternative to dominant liberal multicultural interpretations of ?culture?, I employ semiotics from anthropology and cultural studies because these disciplines emphasize cultural activity rather than culture-as-object. Drawing from these disciplines and through a case study on the Canadian Aboriginal Women?s Roundtable Report on Gender Equality, I explore the implications of making an analytical shift from ?culture? as bounded object to ?cultural? as contested process. Through the case study I illustrate that the shift to ?cultural? creates opportunities to address intersectional identities and arrangements of power in ways that liberal multicultural interpretations of the culture-concept can not. ?Cultural?, I argue, moves analysis beyond ways to manage and include Othered cultures to locating the production of cultural identities and cultural relations in contexts of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the political representation of ethnic minorities in France, Denmark and Canada. Drawing from these cases, it proposes a general model for comparing levels of ethnic minority representation. Three sets of factors ? citizenship regimes, institutional features and interest constellations ? interact to shape the political opportunity structure for ethnic minority representation. These factors vary across and within countries, to produce different levels of ethnic minority representation from one country to another, and important local differences within each country. The three factors also influence the electoral strategies of individual ethnic candidates, and determine the style and substance of ethnic representation in each country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Nature and Extent of Attitudinal Decision Making in the Supreme Court of Canada According to the most prominent proponents of the Attitudinal Model, justices on the United States Supreme Court decide cases based solely on their political preferences and ideology. Justices are free to vote their personal preferences because of a set of institutional features that are not found on other courts in the United States. The implication of their argument is that justices on other courts that share these same institutional features should also be free to vote their attitudinal preferences in all cases. The focus of the paper is whether the Attitudinal Model, as explicated by Schubert (1965), and Segal and Spaeth (1993) provides a sufficient explanation of the voting behavior of judges on the Supreme Court of Canada; a court that shares all of the institutional features argued to support attitudinal voting. To test this theory, we focus on the decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada between 1984 and 2002, the period since the docket of that court reflected the emergence of the new issues stimulated by the Charter of Rights. We investigate the impact of judicial attitudes using three methods: factor analysis of votes in criminal and economic cases during the most extended natural court during the Charter period, an investigation of the relationship between newspaper assessments of ideology and judicial voting in three issue areas during the entire Charter period, and an analysis of the relationship between judicial attributes used as surrogates for judicial attitudes and the career voting patterns of justices serving since the adoption of the Charter. All three methods provide independent confirmation of the view that the political preferences of the justices have a substantial impact on their voting choices [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]

There has been a notable secular decline in turnout in Canada in recent elections, but there has been little research to date on the partisan consequences of that decline. In this paper, we simulate various turnout rates in the 1997 Canadian national election in Quebec and the rest of Canada based on probabilities derived from multinomial logit estimates. In Quebec, higher turnout is associated with greater support for the Bloc Quebecois and weaker support for the Liberals. In the rest of Canada, higher turnout is associated with greater support for the Liberals and weaker support for Reform. Support for the NDP and the Progressive Conservatives is not significantly affected across broad ranges in turnout rates. We interpret these results as support for the conventional wisdom of turnout’s effects on partisan outcomes, and believe that our methodology offers the opportunity to investigate the probable effect of turnout on partisan outcomes in a variety of electoral contexts where survey data are available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent release of US and Canadian census data has sparked interest among politicians, journalists, and researchers in imigrant dispersal outside major urban centers. This paper analyzes how collective meaning is constructed in media accounts of census information. We argue that the 2001 Canadian census has been used to construct an understanding of immigration that assumes federal intervention in immigrants’ settlement patterns; peresentationsof the 2000 US census construct immigration settlement as the outcome of choices made by individual immigrants and as local policy problems. In each country the construction of immigration dispersal omits alternative interpretations of its causes and effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses data from the Canadian Election Studies to analyze the evolution of gender gaps in vote choice since 1965. It shows that a ‘modern gender gap’ has emerged in Canada, not because women have been moving to the left, but because women have been less likely than men to move away from the left. It then goes on to determine whether the changing nature of the gender gap in NDP voting can be explained by structural and situational changes in women’s–and men’s–lives. It concludes that these changes can provide only a very partial explanation of the process of gender realignment in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the main criticisms levelled against attempts to use cultural and religious identity as a reason, to be balanced with other reasons, to protect a particular practice or tradition from laws that otherwise restrict it. I defend the public consideration of identity claims especially in cases that require accommodation. In contrast, identity-based arguments are of only limited value in advancing the case for self-determination. The argument is illustrated using Aboriginal cases heard by the Supreme Court of Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We know remarkably little about how immigrants generally feel about the political institutions of the host-country, and we know even less about whether experiences with repressive and non-democratic countries (NDCs) affect immigrants’ orientations towards a new host-country. Using the Canadian case, this paper provides a clearer understanding of how immigrants feel about the new host-regime and what are the underpinnings of immigrants’ regime support. The evidence is that immigrants from NDCs exhibit overwhelming confidence in the political institutions of the Canadian host-country, much more than the local Canadian-born population. We call this overwhelming confidence in political institutions on the part of immigrants from NDCs, a honeymoon effect. The honeymoon effect appears to reflect both an abundance of ‘specific’ and ‘diffuse’ support. First, the abundance of ‘specific’ support appears to flow from the fact that immigrants from NDCs and people born in Canada are evaluating differently the performance of Canadian institutions. Immigrants from NDCs express more satisfaction with the performance of Canadian institutions than people born in Canada, and these more positive evaluations lead them to have greater confidence in the political institutions. Secondly, the analysis shows that immigrants from NDCs exhibit higher levels of confidence than people born in Canada even after controlling for evaluations of institutional performance. This suggests that upon arrival in Canada immigrants from NDCs bring with them a ‘reservoir’ of diffuse support that is independent of how well, or poorly, the regime performs. [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]

While the causes of declining political trust have been investigated extensively in the literature, much less empirical effort has been devoted to the study of its political consequences. This paper focuses on the decline of trust in Canada during the period 1984-1993, and on its effect on Canadian voting behavior. We build upon Hetherington’s (1999) work to explore the impact of political trust on the vote and on abstention in a multiparty electoral context. Multinominal logit estimations are performed using individual-level survey data from three Canadian federal elections. While distrust is shown to significantly affect electoral participation, thus acting as an alienating factor, the results indicate that decreasing trust acts more as a motivation to support third-party alternatives. The study further demonstrates that in a multiple party setting, "old-line" major parties electorally suffer from declining political trust, but some third parties benefit more from this phenomenon than others. In particular, the transition from a three- to a five-party system in the 1993 Canadian election and the Reform Party’s efforts to attract support from distrustful voters seem to have eroded the New Democrats? role as a vehicle of distrust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deciding how to finance multiple levels of government is a challenging task for all political systems. Federal states, in addition, have a constitutional contract to divide financial accountability across national and subnational governments. In comparison with unitary states, federal states are arguably more committed to fiscal decentralization precisely because of this constitutional contract. Nevertheless, a wide variation in the extent of fiscal centralization is observed even among developed federal states. This paper explores the political economy of fiscal centralization in six developed federal states, Australia, Canada, Austria, Germany, the United States, and Belgium, from 1961 through 1995. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from a national survey of Canadians, this paper assesses the relationship between specific and diffuse support for the Supreme Court of Canada using structural equation models. Our purpose is twofold: to consider the optimal conceptualization of survey items currently used in the literature to measure specific and diffuse support, and to assess the effects of modeling modifications on estimates of the relationship between the two. On both counts, our findings are at odds with recent comparative research: reconceptualizing survey items and repositioning them in structural models produces a marked attenuation of the relationship between specific and diffuse support. Finally, the incorporation of additional variables important in the Canadian context underscores the utility of our reconfigured model of high court support. [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]