Canada and the United States both have populations in which racial and ethnic minorities, substate national societies, native peoples and majority groups coexist. In this article, I contrast the United States and Canada, focusing on their contrasting political cultures, models of federation, legal nation-building mechanisms and so forth, in order to evaluate these states’ potential for accommodating minority nations. First, I analyze how Canada’s multicultural and multinational political culture has encouraged the recognition of substate national societies through a decentralized model of federalism. By contrast, in the United States, the multiple traditions that have influenced U.S. political culture have encouraged the development of a territorial conception of federalism, which is less hospitable to the claims for recognition of stateless nations in the United States. Second, I show that both the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the U.S. Bill of Rights had a homogenizing, pan-national and majority nation-building effect. Third, I show that antidiscrimination constitutional provisions and federal statutes in the United States and Canada are ill-suited to address their stateless nations’ claims. In the United States, with its territorial conception of federalism, substate national societies are in an especially unfavorable position to have their claims for recognition addressed. In Canada, on the other hand, the Canadian model of federation may provide avenues for addressing the constitutional aspirations of substate demoi, even if at times there are tensions with individual-rights approaches.

Since independence, the University of Khartoum and later, higher education as a whole, was a site of political struggle in Sudan. Critical to this was the issue of “university independence,” a value widely held by Sudanese elites, which successive regimes attempted to restrict. Relying on Sudanese national security reports, oral histories of student activism, and British diplomatic reporting, the paper charts the struggle over university associative life in Sudan from independence through to the ouster of President Ja’afar Al Nimeiri. It argues that the May Regime used restrictions on university life as a means of hampering political activity, yet faced serious pushback from students, faculty, and administrators who shared values of university independence. It was only when threats to the state’s security and legitimacy outside the university gates took place that the regime was able to successfully restrict university associative life. These efforts set the stage for further repression under the Ingaz regime (1989–2019).

This article uses the idea of “fugitive science” to show how early twentieth-century writers and editors in colonial Freetown, Sierra Leone, repurposed eugenic ideas in their efforts to reform the British Empire. In the pages of West Africa’s most widely read newspaper, the Sierra Leone Weekly News, West African authors and editors reinterpreted eugenics to articulate political claims indirectly in the absence of substantive political power. They reworked transatlantic medical texts to cast local conditions of infant mortality as evidence of African racial degeneration under colonial rule in order to expose the contradictions of the ideology of sexual paternalism legitimizing imperial administration. These commentaries weaponized eugenics to frame polygyny as evidence of African paternal authority and political legitimacy. Some of these contributors transformed such sexualized discourse into organized politics when they formed the National Congress of British West Africa, which carried these claims into its 1920 meeting with the League of Nations.

This article explores how Chilean business elites remember the Unidad Popular (UP) government (1970–1973) and how these memories shape their current political culture. Drawing on interviews, it distinguishes between two generational groups: those who experienced the UP as adults and those who lived through it as children or adolescents or did not live it firsthand. The study examines how memories of political confrontations and commodity shortages form a conservative collective narrative that resists systemic reform. These recollections often legitimize the 1973 military coup and the subsequent neoliberal transformations. The research shows that personal experiences, as well as narratives passed down through generations, contribute to the construction of a political culture among economic elites that privileges stability over change. By analyzing these memory dynamics, the article underscores the importance of elite historical consciousness in shaping their vision of Chile’s political present and its possible future.

Bureaucratic agencies hold enormous power to affect citizens’ lives through agency rulemaking. These rules hold the force of law, though the officials writing them do not serve in elected positions. Resulting concerns about bureaucratic policymaking have given rise to prolific literature on political control by executives and legislatures seeking to limit the opportunity for moral hazard. I contend that other factors may restrain rulemaking that do not arise directly from other government institutions. Specifically, I assess whether and how state political culture checks bureaucratic power by affecting the number and content of regulatory proposals. Using a large dataset containing the nearly 200,000 proposed regulations from agencies in every US state over a 10-year period, I test the degree to which states with varying cultures utilize bureaucratic rulemaking. I then evaluate whether culture impacts the topics covered by regulation using a subset of six states representing each cultural type. Findings suggest that agencies in traditionalistic states issue fewer regulations than those in moralistic or individualistic states, but proposed rules in individualistic states cover a broader range of policy areas. These results deepen our understanding of the factors influencing regulatory politics, expanding the universe of bureaucratic control beyond government institutions to the broader environment.

This study proposes an integrative typology of popular support for democracy by combining acceptance of democracy, rejection of authoritarianism, and understanding of democracy. Applying the typology to waves 5 (2005–2008) and 7 (2017–2022) of the World Values Survey, the study reassesses the cultural legitimacy of democracy across 30 countries in five regions. Empirically, it reveals that public support for democracy has significantly weakened over the last two decades, especially in non-Western countries. Analytically, it shows that additional qualifications for democratic citizenship demonstrate relations between citizens’ support for democracy and the level of liberal democracy, partially confirming the congruence thesis of political culture. Substantially, these results suggest that democratic backsliding and authoritarian change are more severe and rapid in non-Western countries than in Western democracies.

This paper focuses on what from a global perspective must be seen as one of the most significant social movements during the post-war era: the transnational anti-apartheid movement. This movement lasted for more than three decades, from late 1950s to 1994, had a presence on all continents, and can be seen to be part of the construction of a global political culture during the Cold War. The paper argues that the history of the anti-apartheid struggle provides an important historical case for the analysis of present-day global politics—especially in so far that movement organizations, action forms, and networks that were formed and developed in the anti-apartheid struggle are present in the contemporary context of the mobilization of a global civil society in relation to neoliberal globalization and supra-national political institutions such as the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank.

This study explores the determinants of the low level of civic engagement in Ukraine. Applying the methodological framework of analytical sociology, we consider different social mechanisms that explain the weakness of the Ukrainian third sector. First, we discuss how the political system and economic performance of the country have shaped beliefs, values, and motives of people by creating the context for their actions. Second, we focus on different aspects of people’s experiences during the Soviet times to formulate a number of hypotheses concerning unwillingness of citizens to join CSOs. Analyzing the survey data of the years 2010 (beginning of Viktor Yanukovych’s presidency) and 2014 (survey conducted right after the “Euromaidan”), we argue that some specific features of Homo Sovieticus, such as passivity, absence of political identification, and reliance on informal networks negatively affect the propensity of people to participate in CSOs. These effects are complemented by disappointment with the post-Soviet transformation and low subjective social status. Based on the results of analyses, we formulate suggestions concerning possible ways of fostering the development of civil society in Ukraine.

The Viewpoint Alberta Consolidated Dataset is a novel resource for understanding political attitudes and behaviours in Alberta which includes over 10,000 interviews across nine waves in 5 years. The Viewpoint dataset combines both cross-sectional and longitudinal (panel) data on Albertans’ attitudes towards political parties, federalism, democracy, social movements, energy transitions, media and a range of issue areas. We demonstrate some of these potential applications in this note. To our knowledge, this dataset is the largest and most comprehensive dataset of political attitudes in a single province that has ever been publicly released. This matters because we know much less about provincial politics than national politics in Canada, despite many of the most interesting and important political developments taking place at the provincial level. Furthermore, by following the same respondents over multiple periods of time, we can develop a much greater understanding of individual-level changes across a range of key issue domains

The early 1970s was a tumultuous time for abortion law and policy in North Dakota where the defeat of an abortion liberalization initiative in 1972 was quickly followed by Roe v. Wade in 1973. The resulting political and cultural circumstances strongly favored the North Dakota Right to Life Association, which saw much of its agenda passed by the legislature with overwhelming bipartisan support. This study uses a political culture perspective to examine the development of North Dakota abortion law and policy in the years after Roe. It illustrates how the state legislature, interest groups, the bureaucracy, and the courts reacted to a series of disruptions in abortion policy. The resulting policies made abortion a continuing source of tension within North Dakota politics.