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Traces the history of the social sciences in Canada from 1870 to the present day. Argues that in order to contribute to the world's body of knowledge, Canadian social scientists need to be effectively linked at the national level and also to be in closer contact with the international scientific community. To do this there is a primary need for adequate funding for the training of social science researchers. (AM)

Partisan polarization in legislators' roll call voting is well established. In this article, we examine whether partisan and ideological differentiation extends to legislators' agendas (i.e., the issue content of the bills and resolutions they introduce and cosponsor). Our analyses, focusing on the 101st-110th Congresses, reveal that differentiation occurs both across and within parties (e.g., Democrats and Republicans tend to pursue different issues in their legislative activity, as do moderate and more ideologically extreme copartisans), but that these differences are not typically large in magnitude and did not increase between the late 1980s and late 2000s. These findings suggest that the dynamics of polarization differ for roll call voting and agenda activities in ways that have important implications for our assessments of its consequences. In particular, they highlight that the polarization that has occurred is less a result of differing priorities between Democrats and Republicans and more a function of different preferences on those priority issues. This differentiation may bubble up in part from the true preferences of the rank-and-file, but it is also likely a function of the polarized choices that are presented to them on roll call votes. . Adapted from the source document.

Social scientists have observed a sharp rise in affective polar­ization in many societies, particularly the United States. Since it is widely agreed that this poses a threat to democracy, finding solutions to this predicament is essential. One prominent proposal to depolarize the electorate holds that citizens need to exercise their capacities for empathy with the political opposition. However, defenders of the empathy response to affective polarization have yet to fully specify the range of mechanisms through which empathy can counteract polarization. Recent proposals focus on empathy's role in finding common ground and humanizing others. Drawing on the wider empathy literature, we identify several additional ways empathy might counter affective polarization. We show that the resultant account has important implications for the sorts of empathetic engagement with cross-partisans that is likely to reduce polarization. Our aim is to contribute to a deeper understanding of the potential of different kinds of empathetic engagement to counter polarization as well as the limits of empathy as a response to polarization.