Dennis Pilon

The Contested Origins of Canadian Democracy

Abstract This article takes up the debate about Canadian democratization, arguing that Canada was not democratic in 1867 and that the various electoral reforms pursued throughout the late nineteenth century were not part of a democratic agenda. Instead, they were the product of competing political elites seeking to stabilize an emerging liberal order—a form of government responsive to the economically privileged—and to do so in a way that would favour their political party. Previous scholars have mischaracterized the creation of this liberal order as a democratic one, either by assuming that democracy was established in 1867, or mistaking what were essentially struggles over property rights for democratic rights. This has led to a misunderstanding of the factors that have contributed to establishing and reproducing Canada’s limited democracy.

Researching Voter Turnout and the Electoral Subaltern: Utilizing “Class” as Identity

Abstract Political scientists struggle to explain why citizen engagement generally, and turnout at elections specifically, keep declining, despite considerable research on this problem. This article explores how attention to class understood as a lived experience might refocus this research in more productive ways. Political scientists are having difficulty accessing nonvoters—the group they need to talk to—because they make too many assumptions about who this group is and how nonvoters understand politics and the world. By contrast, this article argues that “just asking” people about elections and voting is more complicated than it might appear. It adumbrates the many ways in which classed assumptions on the part of researchers interfere with designing research instruments, gaining access to the population under study, and interpreting what the groups are saying with their responses. Finally, the article draws on Gramsci, Bourdieu, and political ethnography to set out possible alternatives to the current approaches.