Suchergebnisse

Establishing the Rules of the Game: Election Laws in Democracies,
Louis Massicotte, André Blais and Antoine Yoshinaka, Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2004, pp. 191Whatever one may think of the 2000 American presidential election, it
did have one salutary effect: it drew worldwide attention to the
importance of fair and impartially applied election laws. The authors of
this work needed no such wake-up call; André Blais and Louis
Massicotte enjoy a well-deserved international reputation for expertise in
this arcane field. But it is likely that their new book, a compendium and
analysis of election laws in 63 countries, will attract wider notice
because of recent events in the United States. Unfortunately (though
understandably), the extreme decentralization and complexity of American
election laws prevented the authors from including the U.S. in their
comparative database. Happily, the remaining countries in the sample offer
more than enough food for thought. The field of election law has been
sadly neglected by political scientists and legal scholars (outside the
United States); if interest in the topic continues to grow over the coming
years, this book should help to nurture a flourishing academic debate.

AbstractThis article summarizes the cartel model of party structure and tests it against the experience of the Canadian party system in the 1990s. Four claims are evaluated: that the three dominant parties in the House of Commons before 1993 colluded to exclude new parties; that they used state subsidies in their own interest; that the 1993 election result was a backlash against the cartel parties; and that Canadian parties are adopting new leadership selection methods in order to allow their leaders greater autonomy. The article concludes that the first two claims are valid while the latter two are not, and discusses some of the implications of these findings for Canadian parties and for the cartel model itself.

Ch. 1. Introduction to Canada at 150: Building a free and democratic society -- Ch. 2. Constitutionalism -- Ch. 3. The rule of law -- Ch. 4. Federalism and patriation -- Ch. 5. Democracy -- Ch. 6. Respect for minority rights -- Ch. 7. Indigenous Canadians and the honour of the Crown -- Ch. 8. Looking ahead.