Christopher Alcantara

Despite a persistent gender gap in political donations—where men donate more than women—recent Canadian research suggests this gap can reverse when financial resources are equalized and donors consider provincial parties. Building on this insight, we investigate the mechanisms driving gendered donation behavior using a pre-registered survey experiment. By manipulating financial resources and issue salience in a federal system, we assess donations to Canadian federal and provincial parties. Our findings show that, with equalized resources, women are more likely to donate to provincial parties when issues and jurisdictions are not primed. However, when issue salience is highlighted beforehand, women’s donation behavior aligns more closely with men’s. These results suggest that the gender gap in political donations may be shaped not only by material constraints but also by institutional context and access to political information at the time of decision-making.

The concept of and desire for well-being economies are rising in prevalence as traditional business paradigms are questioned and alternative framings are being sought. Indigenous peoples, their economies, and their approach to business can provide a rich source of learning to enable and help facilitate a transition to economies of well-being. As Indigenous peoples are emerging from their colonial pasts, they are becoming more empowered to make investment choices, use business models, and form partnerships grounded in their worldviews, which are often well aligned with a well-being economy. In this paper, we note some of the obstacles Indigenous economies have faced and outline success stories where Indigenous tribes/communities/peoples have created business opportunities that are underpinned by their worldviews and are thriving commercially. We then describe a conceptual framework for how Indigenous peoples could support a broader transition to economies of well-being. Indigenous worldviews can provide a way for ‘reimagining’ the economy. Growing the self-determination of Indigenous peoples provides greater opportunities to create ‘reimagined business models’ that align with a reimagined economy and Indigenous worldviews, and thus helps demonstrate ways to start a transition toward economies of well-being. The findings, insights, and conclusions outlined in this paper were drawn from a convened workshop and subsequent dialogue of 24 Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States of America.

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples marked a pivotal moment, signalling an emerging global consensus on the recognition and protection of Indigenous peoples’ inherent rights. In its wake, settler states such as Australia and New Zealand adopted a reconciliatory turn, enacting policies to advance the political, economic and cultural interests of Indigenous communities. However, recent political developments – including Australia’s 2023 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Voice Referendum and New Zealand’s 2023 General Election – have triggered a reconciliatory U-turn, with Australians rejecting pro-Aboriginal constitutional reforms and New Zealand electing a coalition government that has begun to dismantle pro-Māori policies. This article introduces the concept of ‘reconciliatory backsliding’ to theorize such reversals and offers an analytical framework for examining its emergence. Using New Zealand as an illustrative case study, we invite scholars to apply and refine this framework to advance research in this newly emerging and critical area.

Does the political knowledge gender gap extend to knowledge about federalism, an institutional arrangement that increases the cognitive demand on voter knowledge? We answer this question by drawing upon data from three national surveys administered in Canada between 2020 and 2022. We find evidence of a gap between men and women in terms of their knowledge of the distribution of authority across the three orders of government. Across four of our knowledge items, the gender gap favouring men gets smaller as the issues vary from the federal to provincial to municipal level. Knowledge about national defence and sewage/water, however, do not fit this pattern. These results suggest future research should examine whether the gendered knowledge gap with respect to federalism can be explained by which levels of government have responsibility over areas of jurisdiction that have a strong effect on or are used by women on a daily basis.

Existing research on public opinion towards Indigenous peoples tends to focus on the extent to which citizens hold racist and anti-Indigenous attitudes. In contrast, few empirical studies have examined the extent to which citizens support reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. Drawing on data from the 2021 Canadian Election Study (CES), we construct a novel Indigenous reconciliation scale to measure non-Indigenous support for policies that seek to address the historical and ongoing legacies of residential schools. We then compare this scale to existing measures of Indigenous resentment before investigating the effects of several individual-level determinants related to attitudes, elite cues, and policy preferences on support for Indigenous reconciliation policies. Our findings shed light on the ongoing efforts in settler countries in North and South America and Australasia to decolonize their settler institutions and to create new and renewed relationships with Indigenous communities in those countries.

This paper examines policy convergence in Indigenous-local agreements in Canada using a dataset of 192 agreements collected between 2010 and 2014. It explores whether these agreements, which facilitate service sharing, contracting, and relationship formation, exhibit similarities across Indigenous communities, and whether these similarities are being driven by geographic location, proximity, or cultural similarity. Using word embeddings analysis, we find that culture is the strongest predictor of semantic similarity, with geographic location within the same province and proximity having much smaller effects.

Anglo settler states like Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States were built through the dispossession of Indigenous lands and through the disruption of Indigenous political, social and economic systems. Over time, however, Indigenous nations have challenged the unjust foundations of these states, forcing settler states to respond with repression but also with accommodation, especially in the face of successful Indigenous mobilization. Yet even during these moments, state actors have resisted changes to state sovereignty, sometimes by creating new institutions that seem responsive, but which simply reinforce the status quo. To make sense of these moments, we introduce the concept of “decoy politics” and develop a theory for why states might turn to decoy politics, with a particular focus on Canada. Our findings suggest decoy politics may help explain why reconciliation with Indigenous nations remains difficult despite seemingly genuine attempts at meaningful institutional and policy change.

In Westminster parliamentary democracies like Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, research has found that cabinet composition is driven mainly by longstanding norms and practices that privilege older, white males with certain educational and political experiences. Do these trends apply at the subnational level where the demographic make‐up can be quite different? To answer this question, we draw upon an original dataset of all members of the legislative assembly and cabinet in three Canadian territories from 1979 to 2022. These territories are unique given that Indigenous communities loom large in their governments and societies. Using an event history model, we find that territorial cabinets very much reflect the demographic make up of their legislatures, similar to what occurs at the federal level. We also observe important differences between the territories, which suggest that the influence of Westminster structures and norms are likely mediated by factors unique to each territory.

Researchers frequently rely on expert surveys to acquire information about political ideology and political parties, which they then use to explore a range of political phenomena such as proximity voting and satisfaction with democracy. Yet it is unclear whether experts and citizens place the parties similarly, which may have important implications for studies that rely on expert data. To what extent do citizens share expert views regarding political party placements? Using original data from Canada, we use multidimensional scaling techniques to examine and compare the responses of academic and journalist experts against a random sample of Canadians to a range of party placement questions. Our results suggest there is considerable variation between citizens and experts, and among specific subgroups of the general population. These findings have important implications for studies of party competition, voting behavior, and government responsiveness.