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Review of "Making Political Choices: Canada and the United States"
Psephologists are highly familiar with the sociological, social-psychological and rational choice explanations for elector behaviour known as the Columbia school, Michigan school and Rochester school studies. However, these were developed when television was still an emerging medium. Today's political leaders reach us not only in our living rooms, but also at work and while in transit, often with a celebrity treatment that emphasizes personalities. The relationship between media and electors' political knowledge, combined with variances in partisan flexibility, indicates that a new model of voter choice may be overdue. The broad purpose of Making Political Choices is to assess the extent to which American and Canadian electors are influenced by their intuitive sense of whether a political product is in line with their own values.
The Limits of Political Jurisprudence in Canada and the United States
2007
provided crucial guidance for this project. In their own work and teaching, each is a model of intellectual honesty and dedication to scholarship. I thank them for the support they have shown me, and I will continue in my attempts to live up to their example. I would also like to thank the teachers at the University of Toronto-in particular, Richard Day and Clifford Orwin-who first aroused my interest in political science, as well as those at Cornell University-in particular, Nancy Hirschman, Isaac Kramnick, Richard Bensel, and Geoff Waite-who helped guide my education in Ithaca. My largest intellectual debt is owed to my committee chair, Jeremy Rabkin, who provided unflagging encouragement and unfailing patience in overseeing this project. Any virtues that this dissertation exhibits can find their roots in his skilled teaching and guidance; as for its faults, I claim full responsibility. Most of all, I would like to thank my wife, Margaret Kohn, for the kindness and love she has shown me as I have worked on my Ph.D. I would also like to thank Noah and Zachary Hurl-Kohn, who (I hope) are looking forward to spending more time with their father. To Zach, I wish you the best of luck as you continue to work on your own, rather mysterious dissertation. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.
Canada is beginning to slowly embrace an ethic of Indigenous-Settler biculturalism. One model of change is afforded by the development of biculturalism in Aotearoa New Zealand, where recent Indigenous Māori mobilization has created a unique model in the western settler world. This article explores what Canada might learn from the Kiwi experience, focusing on the key identity marker Pākehā, an internalized and contingent settler identity, using Indigenous vocabulary, and reliant on a relationship with Indigenous peoples. This article gauges Pākehā's utility in promoting biculturalism, noting both its progressive qualities and problems in its deployment, including continued inequality, political alienation, and structural discrimination. While Canada has no Pākehā analogue, terms such as settler are being operationalized to develop a larger agenda for reconciliation along the lines recommended by the TRC. However, such terms function best when channeled towards achieving positive concrete goals, rather than acting as rhetorical screens for continued inaction.
2012
The 1972 British Columbia general election marked the end of the twenty-year dominance of the Social Credit Party and Premier W.A.C. Bennett. Dave Barrett led the New Democratic Party to its first majority government ushering in the first Social Democratic government in the province's history. The reversal of Social Credit fortunes in 1972 should not be seen, however, as a rejection of the core values of the Social Credit party, but rather as a crisis of legitimacy faced by the party and its aging leader. As a case study, the 1972 election provides an opportunity to examine the agenda-setting function of media during an election campaign and the effects of declining political legitimacy and trust on voter behaviour.