Matthew Mendelsohn

Measuring national identity and patterns of attachment: Quebec and nationalist mobilization

To develop a better sense of the strength, nature and evolution of Quebecers’ identities and attachments this article examines all publicly available survey research on Quebecers’ identity and attachment collected over the last three decades. I conclude that a French Canadian identity has been gradually replaced by a Québécois identity; that this transformation is far from complete, which represents a serious hurdle for nationalist mobilization; that attachment to Canada remains strong (though weaker than attachment to Quebec); and that Quebecers see themselves as members of two tangled, overlapping national communities: Canadian and Québécois, and have rejected calls from intellectuals and nationalist leaders to choose between these two identities.

Public Brokerage: Constitutional Reform and the Accommodation of Mass Publics

It is widely recognized that the traditional institutions and processes of Canadian politics, such as executive federalism, elite accommodation and brokerage parties have fallen into disrepute with large sections of the Canadian public, and political scientists have noted their failure to resolve long–standing conflicts in the area of constitutional politics. I argue that the reasons why these processes have failed to manage constitutional political conflict have not been properly diagnosed. In particular, Canadian political scientists have not adequately differentiated executive federalism from accommodation and brokerage, often assuming they are contingent on each other (as they are, by definition, in the commonly used expression “elite accommodation”). The pessimism among some Canadian political scientists about Canadas ability to amend the Constitution to the satisfaction of major groups stems in large part from the misplaced assumption that the brokerage and accommodation necessary in Canada require executive federalism. This conventional wisdom suggests that since executive federalism is discredited and has been replaced by a populist requirement for citizen participation, usually through referendums, shuns accomodation in favour of a mojoritarianism which is unable to deal adequately with the problems of a multinational federation like Canada.

The Construction of Electoral Mandates: Media Coverage of Election Results in Canada

Abstract How do the news media help construct election mandates? By interpreting an election victory broadly, the news media can facilitate the implementation of a newly elected governments program. Conversely, the media can constrain a newly elected government by interpreting the election as influenced by factors other than ideology, primarily retrospective evaluations of the outgoing governments performance. Studies of how the media interpret election results have offered only speculation on why the media choose certain narratives while discarding plausible alternatives. Through a systematic examination of six Canadian elections, this article identifies key variables that explain the medias choices. I found that the media tended to confer a mandate when the victorious party focused on its policy intentions during the campaign and when the party was conservative; they tended to confer a “personal mandate” when newly elected leaders were facing their first election. In general, the news media quickly s...

Introduction: Referendum Democracy

Referendums — whether government-sponsored or citizen-initiated — are being used more frequently than ever before in liberal-democratic societies. In jurisdictions with a long history of direct democracy, notably many of the western US states, more questions are being placed on the ballot than in previous decades. In societies where the referendum has been used only sparingly in the past (such as the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Canada), it has now become more common, and pressure from both the public and political leaders for its increased use continues to grow. Still other societies, such as Italy, have joined the US and Switzerland in employing the initiative as a regular mechanism of decision making. It is no longer the case that Switzerland and a number of US states stand as the only exceptions to the traditional model of representative democratic government. The Swiss and American cases remain anomalous, yet other systems have integrated the referendum into their decision-making apparatus to the point that our understanding of what we mean by representative democracy needs to be re-examined.1

Models of Public Brokerage: A Reply to Professors Ajzenstat and Lusztig

I thank the JOURNAL for this opportunity to continue a dialogue on constitutional paralysis in Canada. The disagreements between myself and Janet Ajzenstat and Michael Lusztig underline some of the tensions in Canadian political science and have important implications for how we conceive processes of constitutional change1. Our substantive points of disagreement are: what went wrong during the Charlottetown process and what lessons can be drawn from this? Their own diagnoses focus on public participation in the Charlottetown episode as a threat to the possibility for constitutional change. The lesson that they take from this is that constitutional change is impossible in Canada. I argue that improperly designed venues for public participation created obstacles to success, that alternative procedures could lead to mutual understanding, and that work should be undertaken to elaborate models which include the public in all phases of the process. In this brief response, I address these disagreements and discuss in more detail models of public brokerage. First, however,