For institutions as well as for people, turning 50 invites reflection on what's gone before and what's to come. This special 50th anniversary issue looks at Canadian political science and the profession—past and present—from a number of perspectives and explores ways in which they might or should change.

Theories of toleration maintain that people sometimes have good reasons not to act on their convictions, however strong. Theories of latitude maintain that one should doubt the strength of one's convictions. While toleration has often been taken to be foundational for the liberal tradition, another view (made fully explicit by Brian Barry's Justice as Impartiality) is that we should look, rather, to the idea of latitude, as exemplified in late seventeenth-century Anglican writings. Taking these writings as its initial point of reference, the article maintains that toleration, rather than latitude, should be seen as foundational for the liberal tradition, which is better understood in terms of what one person owes to another than in terms of the relative validity of their beliefs.

In this address, I argue that the organizational and ideational evolution of political science is closely interconnected with Canada’s history and unequal social relations since Confederation. This is because organized political science in Canada was really at heart a national venture. As a consequence, in order to understand the ideas animating early political scientists we have to consider Canada’s foundational status as a settler colony in the North American space, with a privileged place in the British Empire. This perspective may also help to highlight the distinct features of the colonial present which are giving rise to multiple sites of knowledge production-or multiple knowledges.

It is with great pleasure that we present this special issue showcasing contemporary feminist political research, theories and practices in Canada. In an era characterized by global movements and numerous transformations that range from the economic to the environmental, the political to the cultural, from macro- through to micro-scales, including complex debates about the fluidity of gender, and where “backlash” against the symbols and agents of past feminist activism is rife, this special issue queries where do we find feminism(s) today? The responses to this question, as well as to the interrogation of the place of gender in the discipline of political science more generally, are undoubtedly diverse and contested. The collective efforts contained in this special issue feature a mere taste of the rich range of thought-provoking recent scholarship on feminisms. And even with this necessarily condensed portrayal (the articles in this issue are shorter than is normally the case to allow for more work to be featured), the special issue is ground-breaking in that it marks the first time the Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique has dedicated an entire issue to topics of gender and feminisms.

The liberal justification for censorship equates the harm in hate speech with the sort of tangible injury that would justify state intervention under J.S. Mill's harm principle. Recently, Jeremy Waldron has suggested that the real harm perpetuated by hate speech is less tangible, taking it to be a variety of moral pollution which undermines both the public good of inclusiveness and the minority's assurance of personal dignity. This paper scrutinizes Waldron's conception of the harm in hate speech, arguing that it lacks the specificity and gravity Mill's principle requires in order to justify censorship. The paper also questions the categorical distinction between hate speech and speech that is “merely offensive,” arguing that Waldron's reasons for censoring the one also apply to the other. The result is a censorship regime that liberals ought not to accept.

We evaluate the Canadian parliamentary hearings on The Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act to determine whether respectful and fair deliberation occurred. Our focus is on the content, tone, and nature of each question posed by committee members in hearings in both chambers. We find that, on the whole, the vast majority of questions met this baseline but that committee members were biased toward witnesses in agreement with their position and against witnesses in opposition to it. In addition to our substantive findings, we contribute methodological insights, including a coding scheme, for this kind of qualitative text analysis.

This article offers one possible answer to the question “What is the future of feminist political science?” by outlining and defending an expansionist agenda that is centred on challenging the male-female binary that has been upheld and replicated in the discipline to date. Such an approach draws heavily on the insights of intersectional analyses, transgender, queer and gender-fluid articulations of identity and requires that the field of political science investigate the varied and complex gendered experiences of “men.” Overall, this article argues that such as expansionist agenda is key to responding to the interrelated challenges presented by the perceived “crisis” of feminism and the ongoing “masculinity” of the discipline of political science.

L'équipe éditoriale de la Revue canadienne de science politique/Canadian Journal of Political Science (ci-après, la Revue) vous propose pour son cinquantième anniversaire trois textes publiés en français qui jettent un regard critique sur son passé et son avenir et qui retracent aussi, plus généralement, les enjeux inhérents à la production et à la diffusion de travaux en science politique dans la langue française. Nous vous proposons également trois essais critiques qui portent sur différents thèmes de recherche abordés dans les pages de la Revue depuis sa création en 1968.

We provide the first wide-scale analysis of the factors that influence voter turnout in Canadian local elections. Drawing on original data from 300 municipal elections conducted from 2004 to 2014, we use ordinary least squares regression with panel-corrected standard errors for time series cross-sections to test explanatory hypotheses related to differences in institutional design, the social-spatial context of these elections, and local competitiveness. Our results show that, although institutional and sociospatial factors influence local turnout, the competitiveness of elections exercises the greatest influence on local electoral participation.

The debate surrounding the transformative potential of gender mainstreaming has revived concerns of co-optation of equality work and resistance first expressed by early feminist public administration scholars. In this article, we explore how gender analysts exercised their agency and carved out spaces within the bureaucracy to articulate and advance a gender focus in policy work. Employing discursive, institutional and relational strategies, gender analysts simultaneously used and pushed back against hierarchical bureaucratic discourses as they operationalized Gender-Based Analysis Plus (GBA+) in the federal public bureaucracy. These micro-level acts of resistance, on their own, do not lead to social transformation. However, by creating spaces for feminist knowledge and activism within the state, these local strategies can contribute to the broader feminist agenda.

This article offers a new reading of Lord Durham's recommendations concerning municipal institutions, included in the last section of his famous report. By placing the document in the context of the debates raised by the constitutional and administrative reforms conducted in Britain during the 1830s, it shows that its author understood autonomous municipalities as essential components of a modern mixed government. Such language was then employed by reformist Whigs in order to justify the policies which they thought were necessary to strengthen the country's political institutions by adapting them to changing social circumstances. The analysis presented here challenges the interpretation provided by most contemporary commentators on the report. Many of them have concluded that Lord Durham's understanding of local institutions is based on a liberal conception of political life, found in the writings of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. These studies tend to reduce early British liberalism to philosophical radicalism. They seek to demonstrate that liberals wish to deprive local communities of their political autonomy by integrating their institutions into the juridical structure of a highly centralized State. By focusing on the rhetoric used by Lord Durham to write his report, this article allows us to appreciate the heterogeneity of the definition of the municipality developed by liberalism.

With the Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique now in its fiftieth year, as the founding English coeditor, I'm pleased to be able to reminisce about its first days.

The paper uses the concept of path dependence to explain the challenges and complexities of institutional adaptation at the subnational level. The notion of path dependence is rooted in the well-established research tradition of historical institutionalism, one of the variants of neoinstitutionalism. The academic literature on the new institutionalism, however, has tended to focus on the national level of analysis. But there is a growing recognition of cities and regions as the main engines of socioeconomic change in the current age of seismic global economic perturbation. Their historic and current significance has thus made them arguably more organic units of governance than modern states or supranational regimes. The discussion focuses on the Niagara region in Canada to illustrate the institutional infrastructure of governance underpinning the economic landscape of city-regions and the challenges of reform that such local regions face in an age of unprecedented global socioeconomic change.

Using official electoral results from provincial elections since 1973, we evaluate the incumbency effect in Quebec by measuring the impact of a combination of characteristics related to candidates and political parties. We verify whether the presence of an incumbent candidate is necessary to ensure that the incumbent party benefits from an electoral advantage. We also compare the magnitude of the incumbency effect between governing and opposition parties. Making use of parametric multivariate statistical tools, we conclude that political parties benefit from an electoral advantage in Quebec. Except for ministers who make a small difference, simple Members of the National Assembly (MNAs) do not improve their electoral performance, while in some cases new candidates with incumbent parties perform better.

This article examines how the changing environment faced by and context within the Canadian feminist movement is reflected in the beliefs and strategies of recruits to the movement at a given point in time. The framework for the investigation is Whittier's generational approach (1997) that posits that different political generations—defined as cohorts of recruits who join a social movement during distinctive periods of protest—introduce change to its collective identity given the formative experiences faced by each generation. Using an original large sample data set, I provide evidence that the changes experienced by the Canadian feminist movement from the 1980s onwards are reflected in noticeable shifts in the collective identity and activist strategies of subsequent waves of feminist recruits. The findings suggest that further research into cohort recruitment and replacement is essential for understanding the forces at play in shaping the contemporary Canadian feminist movement.

This article surveys the first five decades of the Journal/Revue, with particular emphasis on patterns of change and continuity. The article presents a quantitative analysis of the articles published in the Journal/Revue, looking at, among other things, the balance of articles published in English and in French, the proportion of articles authored by women, the location and institutional affiliation of authors and the subject matter of published articles. Significant continuities emerge from the data, such as the predominance of Canadian-based authors writing on aspects of Canadian politics and the dominance of authors from large research-intensive universities. Yet change is also evident, for example in the number of women publishing in the Journal/Revue and in the emergence of articles in subfields not found in the Journal/Revue’s earlier days, most notably Aboriginal politics, gender and politics, and race and ethnicity.

This paper aims to contribute to discussions around alliances and collaborations between feminisms. It analyses relations between movements in the development of indigenous women's organizational autonomy in Mexico. It seeks to understand how the struggle for autonomy involved a redefinition of the forms of collaboration by indigenous women in the consolidation of their movement. An intersectional perspective is proposed to better understand how power relations affect the organizing processes of social movements, as well as how organizations and individuals respond to and challenge them. I argue here that the redefinition of collaborations and alliances has been a key determinant in the organizing capacity of indigenous women to position themselves as autonomous political actors. From the analysis of two specific cases, this paper poses broader questions regarding representation and autonomy that may be applied towards a reflection of our feminist practices and discourses of solidarity.

Drawing upon Walter Benjamin's “principle of montage,” this article excavates the political salience of what is referred to herein as the residential school system's “pan-territorial ideal.” The pan-territorial ideal materialized in 1930 with the opening of the Shubenacadie Residential School in the Maritimes, the system's final frontier. It was envisioned, forged and secured, in part, with the overt understanding that so called Indian education could be used as a vector of violence to control Indigenous peoples and their lands. This history clashes with dominant narratives that interpret residential school system violence as the product of mismanagement and neglect. From the early days of Confederation to its almost full legal autonomy from Britain in the early twentieth century and beyond, the Dominion's pursuit of the pan-territorial vision involved the selective harnessing of the residential school system as a field of state-sanctioned force to quell Indigenous resistance. In this, residential school violence cannot be reduced to a deviation from the norm. In crucial respects, it was an inherent feature of the system and Canadian modern statehood itself.

Drawing on the CPSA's archival records, this article explores the origins of CPSA and the patterns of representation in its founding decades. We focus on the pre-World War II years, when disciplinary boundaries were fluid and scholars sought to shift policy discussion from moral reform to reform guided by science and professionalism. The CPSA's founding vision aspired to engage “typical citizens” in discussion of current issues. Despite the ambitious vision, a much narrower range of citizens participated. The CPSA's powerful melding of academic, corporate, state and political elites, in turn, shaped the CPSA's reflections on the development of the Canadian state and public policy. This historical legacy encourages us to reflect on the contemporary challenges of fostering independent scholarship on public issues.

Election studies must optimize on sample size, cost and data quality. The 2015 Canadian Election Study was the first CES to employ a full mixed-mode design, aiming to take advantage of the opportunities of each mode while preserving enough commonality to compare them. This paper examines the phone interviews conducted by ISR-York and the online questionnaires from panellists purchased from a sample provider. We compare data quality and representativeness. We conduct a comprehensive comparison of the distributions of responses across modes and a comparative analysis of inferences about voting. We find that the cost/power advantages of the online mode will likely make it the mode of choice for subsequent election studies.