Abstract Parliamentary committees are critical venues of legislative work. Yet women, already underrepresented in most legislatures, are often further marginalized within these powerful substructures. This note examines women’s representation in the Canadian House of Commons’ 24 standing committees, 2006–2025, using an original dataset capturing committee membership and leadership across six Parliaments and four major parties. Our analyses reveal women’s representation as committee members and leaders generally tracks their presence in the House of Commons but gender segregation remains entrenched. Women are overrepresented on “feminine”-coded committees and underrepresented on “masculine”-coded committees. Women are also less likely to hold leadership roles, particularly on “masculine”-coded committees. Contrary to expectations from comparative research, we find limited partisan variation. Shaped by opaque party processes, committee assignments reflect and reproduce gendered institutional logics that privilege men and masculine policy domains, even amid rising descriptive representation.
Abstract This article examines MPs’ departures from the House of Commons through a gendered lens. We ask two research questions: (1) whether, and in what ways, toxicity and harassment contribute to politicians’ decisions to leave elected office, and (2) whether these dynamics are gendered and, to the extent the data allow, raced. Using a mixed-method approach, we analyze legislative turnover data, novel exit interview data and resignation statements from retired MPs. Our results indicate that toxicity and harassment are part of the decision matrix for elected officials who are considering their political future, particularly for women and racialized MPs. The article contributes to gender and politics scholarship by offering empirical evidence of the relationship between harassment and political dropouts in Canada for the first time.
Abstract How does ideological diversity within electoral districts shape voter turnout? We argue that participation is highest at moderate levels of ideological heterogeneity: limited disagreement can make political differences more salient and consequential, while extensive disagreement can generate ambiguity and discourage participation. Using data from 31,246 respondents during the 2015 Canadian federal election and positions on 37 policy issues, we examine this relationship at both the individual and district levels. We find a significant inverted-U relationship between individuals’ ideological distance from their district mean and their likelihood of voting, net of electoral competitiveness and campaign mobilization. District-level turnout exhibits a substantively similar, though statistically less clear, pattern. A cross-level interaction further shows that the individual-level relationship varies with district ideological heterogeneity. These findings demonstrate that turnout is shaped not simply by individual preferences or electoral competition, but by the ideological context in which voters are embedded.
Abstract It appears that in Quebec, liberal values are associated with support for restricting minority religious symbols, while in Canada outside of Quebec, the opposite is true (Turgeon et al., 2019). Turgeon et al. (2019) explain this in terms of Quebec’s distinct strain of liberalism. However, there is an alternative explanation: that different social groups—i.e., political parties—mobilize liberal values in different ways in Quebec as compared to the rest of Canada, and that social group members—i.e., party identifiers—adopt their group’s, or party’s, cues. We repeat Turgeon’s (2019) original study with new data but also include a measure of partisan identity to clarify whether liberal values or partisan attachments explain differences between preferences for restricting minority symbols in Quebec and the rest of Canada. We find that identification with a Quebec nationalist party explains the relationship between liberal values and support for restricting minority symbols in Quebec in our dataset.
Based on the work that proposes the existence of a political divide between Ecology and Productivism, we analyze how the main political parties have been talking about the environment in two Canadian provinces (Quebec and British Columbia) during provincial elections since the 1960s. The detailed study of the electoral platforms of political parties allows us to make two main contributions to the literature: 1) to propose a continuum of positions that account for differentiated political projects associated with objectives and beliefs toward the non-human; and 2) to show the heuristic value of thinking about the existence of such a cleavage, separated from the cleavage of post-materialist values and its backlash, in order to understand the place of ecological issues in the politics of the provinces in Canada.
