Related Papers
Canadian Journal of Political Science
Ideology and Institutions in North America
1993 •
Robert Finbow
The orthodox view that Canada's ideological tradition is more supportive of an active state cannot explain earlier innovations in social and labour policy in the United States. A neo-pluralist and neo-institutionalist synthesis is used to contrast these nations. Organic ideologies of labour, agrarian, business and professional groups reveal no consistent national differences in support for state action. Initial state interventions were similar and limited. But institutional development occurred in different contexts, producing more effective executive leadership in Canada. American policy was constrained by the Congress, with its opportunities for blocking, and by inadequate executive power. Frustration with inaction plus greater social well-being reduced demands in the US for state action. Canada's institutions allowed more creative policy and fostered greater support for state action, especially where the weak economy exacted costs on social groups. But constitutional chan...
Class vs. Special Interest: Labor, Power, and Politics in the United States and Canada in the Twentieth Century
Barry Eidlin
Why are US labor unions so weak? Union decline has had important consequences for politics, inequality, and social policy. Common explanations cite employment shifts, public opinion, labor laws, and differences in working class culture and organization. But comparing the United States with Canada challenges those explanations. After following US unionization rates for decades, Canadian rates diverged in the 1960s, and are now nearly three times higher. This divergence was due to different processes of working class political incorporation. In the United States, labor was incorporated as an interest group into a labor regime governed by a pluralist idea. In Canada, labor was incorporated as a class representative into a labor regime governed by a class idea. This led to a relatively stronger Canadian labor regime that better held employers in check and protected workers’ collective bargaining rights. As a result, union density stabilized in Canada while plummeting in the United States.
Canadian Journal of Sociology
Thomas, Mark P., Leah F. Vosko, Carlo Fanelli, and Olena Lyubchenko (eds.)., Change and Continuity: Canadian Political Economy in the New Millennium
2020 •
Trevor Harrison
Canadian Journal of Political Science
Relative Autonomy Revisited: The Origins of Canadian Unemployment Insurance
1986 •
Leslie Pal
The concept of “relative autonomy” is now routinely used by Marxist and non-Marxist students of public policy to describe the state's independence from class forces. A rare attempt to use the concept empirically is Carl J. Cuneo's work on Canadian unemployment insurance (UI) in the 1930s. This article argues that Cuneo focusses too narrowly on class struggle, and thus misses important aspects of Canadian UI policy. Relative autonomy must be more broadly conceived in terms of the state's administrative expertise, fiscal capacity, and jurisdictional divisions. It is constituted within, not outside, the state. The article illustrates these internal forces through a re-examination of the evolution of Canadian UI in the 1930s.
“Handmaidens of the Handmaidens:” Pressure Groups, Bureaucracy, and the Redistributive State in Canada, 1962-1972
David Tough
This paper tells the story of the failure of the Guaranteed Annual Income proposal, the key policy recommendation of the Croll committee, The Special Senate Committee on Poverty. The Croll process was the culmination of the federal government's anti-poverty initiative of the 1960s, which was part of a larger process of state reflexivity, a growing self-consciousness on the part of government about government.
irle.berkeley.edu
Access Isn't Everything: State Permeability, Class Capacities, and the Formation of US and Canadian Labor Regimes, 1934-1948
Barry Eidlin
Labour / Le Travail
The Impact of the Postwar Compromise on Canadian Unionism: The Formation of an Auto Worker Local in the 1950s
1995 •
Don Wells
Studies in Political Economy
The Old Reality and the New Reality: Party Politics and Public Policy in British Columbia 1941–1987
1988 •
Michael Howlett
Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue canadienne de sociologie
The Canadian state in comparative perspective
2008 •
David Wolfe
Why Is There No Labor Party in the United States? Political Articulation and the Canadian Comparison, 1932 to 1948 (American Sociological Review 81:3, 2016)
Barry Eidlin
Why is there no labor party in the United States? This question has had deep implications for U.S. politics and social policy. Existing explanations use “reflection” models of parties, whereby parties reflect preexisting cleavages or institutional arrangements. But a comparison with Canada, whose political terrain was supposedly more favorable to labor parties, challenges reflection models. Newly compiled electoral data show that underlying social structures and institutions did not affect labor party support as expected: support was similar in both countries prior to the 1930s, then diverged. To explain this, I propose a modified “articulation” model of parties, emphasizing parties’ role in assembling and naturalizing political coalitions within structural constraints. In both cases, ruling party responses to labor and agrarian unrest during the Great Depression determined which among a range of possible political alliances actually emerged. In the United States, FDR used the crisis to mobilize new constituencies. Rhetorical appeals to the “forgotten man” and policy reforms absorbed some farmer and labor groups into the New Deal coalition and divided and excluded others, undermining labor party support. In Canada, mainstream parties excluded farmer and labor constituencies, leaving room for the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) to organize them into a third-party coalition.
