In the 1930s, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council was criticized for allegedly perverting the meaning of the British North America Act and the intentions of its framers. This notion persists, partly because its historiographical basis—the idea that the Fathers of Confederation envisaged a dominant federal government—remains substantially intact. To the Ontario Reformers, however, the Confederation agreement had not established federal dominance. On the contrary, it had implemented the broad claims to local autonomy which Reformers had been advancing ever since the 1820s. And while those claims rested on a legally heterodox conception of colonial constitutional status, the BNA Act gave legal effect to that conception as applied to federal-provincial relations. This allowed Oliver Mowat to do what earlier Reform leaders could not have done: enforce the local claims in court.

Since their victory in the dramatic 1988 Canadian federal election, the governing Progressive Conservatives have suffered a rapid and precipitous decline in public support. Observers have attributed the massive erosion in popularity to the failure of the Meech Lake Accord, the government's insistence on implementing the highly unpopular value-added Goods and Services Tax (GST) and increasing public reservations about the wisdom of the free trade agreement. This article contends that, while these arguments have merit, a more important factor is that many Canadians blame the federal government for the poor state of the national economy and adverse personal economic circumstances. Moreover, negative reactions to the two highly salient economic issues, free trade and the GST, are, in part at least, products of public disapproval of the government's economic performance. The analyses are based on data gathered in national cross-sectional and panel surveys conducted over the 1983–1990 period.

This article examines how Quebec politicians' sex and political party influence the orientation of their opinions through three themes: the evolution of women's social status, actions of the feminist movement in this sense and the idea of female legislators representing women. A questionnaire was sent to the 305 candidates of the New Democratic party of Quebec, the Quebec Liberal party and the Parti québécois in the provincial election of September 25, 1989. The results show that if women and men manifest no differences in their support of the evolution of women's social status and of the feminist movement, women are more inclined than men to support the idea that women politicians should represent the specific interests of women. Of all the above-mentioned parties, the Liberal party resists this idea the most as well as the feminist movement in general.

The article argues that in many Arab countries the political economy of regional petroleum wealth has served to inhibit democratization. In the particular case of Jordan, petrodollar foreign aid and workers' remittances long served as a critical aspect of political stability, supporting regime neo-patrimonialism and blunting pressures for greater participation. Equally, the decline of those revenues in the late 1980s spurred the eventual collapse of the foundations upon which the old economic and political order had been built. With this came the need to negotiate a new social contract, resulting in a far-reaching process of political liberalization and partial democratization after April 1989.

Immanuel Kant remains a figure of enduring interest to students of international politics both for the content of his writings and for the place which those writings have come to occupy within contemporary debates in International Relations theory. But most of the secondary literature does not have a sufficient appreciation of Kant's wider philosophy and hence misunderstands or distorts his theory of international relations. Once this background is more fully appreciated, Kant's analysis becomes largely immune from many of the standard criticisms levelled against it. A reinterpretation of Kant's critique of international politics is important not only for the position which Kant has come to occupy in contemporary debates. It also raises anew fundamental questions about the theoretical and practical adequacy of the Realist theory of international relations which continues to dominate the discipline.

Institutionalized homophobia in England has been intensified over the last decade, linked to concerns about “permissiveness” so prominent within the lower middle classes so courted by the modern Conservative party. However, anti-gay norms have long been embedded in working-class and middle-class cultures, more than in continental European and North American societies. Moralistic crusades against homosexuality have been common in England, and are still reinforced by the police, the courts and especially the tabloid press. Opposition has been roused within Labour party and Liberal/Liberal Democratic circles, but often reluctantly, and framed by a limited form of tolerance.