The future of western Canada: economic,social, and political

Abstract. Western Canada is generally regarded as consisting of the three prairie provinces and British Columbia. It is a region that is very sensitive to technological and economic trends. Regional social and political adjustments result from these trends, and since Canada is a federation the political decisions are divided between the federal government and each of the four constituent provinces. This leads to frictions between the governments, especially with regard to energy policies, natural resource use, transportation costs, and the location of secondary industries. The economy of western Canada is mainly extractive, and the products are subject to many price and output fluctuations which are very difficult to control by public policies. Nevertheless, the region has experienced substantial economic growth since the thirties at a rate comparable to that of all Canada, and the region should continue to grow at least in pace with Canada in future decades, with the highest growth rates in Alberta and British Columbia. Much will depend upon the continuation of a high level of investment financed in large part by external savings, involving much foreign ownership. Urbanization has proceeded rapidly in western Canada, accompanied by many social adjustments. The public sector has expanded markedly, and further relative growth is envisaged. Throughout the years the region has sent large contingents of opposition members to Ottawa, regardless of the party in power. This alienation is greatest in Alberta and least in Manitoba. Separation is alive in the region, patricularly in Alberta, where much larger petroleum revenues would be obtainable if separation occurred. Federal-provincial tensions involving western Canada will intensify in the future, calling for continuous negotiations and constitutional jurisdictional judgements. Sommaire. On considère généralement que les trois provinces des Prairies et la Colombie-britannique constituent l'Ouest du Canada. C'est une région très sensible aux mouvements technologiques et économiques. Les ajustements régionaux - sociaux et économiques - sont le résultat de ces tendances, et comme le Canada est une fédération, les décisions politiques se trouvent partagées entre le gouvernenient fédéral et chacune des quatre provinces de l'Ouest. Ceci donne lieu à des frictions entre gouvernements, surtout lorsqu'il s'agit des politiques énergétiques, de l'usage des ressources naturelles, des coûlts de transport et de l'emplacement des industries secondaires. L'économie de l'Ouest du Canada est surtout extractive et ses produits sont sujets à toutes sortes de fluctuations de prix et d'apports que les politiques publiques ont beaucoup de peine à réglementer. La région a connu, cependant, une croissance économique significative depuis les années 30, à un taux comparable à celui de tout le Canada et la région devrait continuer à croître au moins au même rythme que le reste du Canada dans les décennies à venir, avec les taux de croissance les plus élevés en Alberta et en Colombie-britannique. Cela dépendra beaucoup de la continuation du volume élevé d'investissements, financés en grande partie par de l'épargne provenant de l'extérieur de la province et avec une grande participation étrangère. L'urbanisation a été rapide dans l'Ouest du Canada, ce qui a demandé de nombreux ajustements sociaux. Le secteur public a connu une grande expansion et l'on s'attend encore à une croissance relative. Au cours des années, la région a envoyéà Ottawa des contingents importants de députés de l'opposition, quel qu'ait été le parti au pouvoir. C'est en Alberta que l'aliénation est la plus grande, alors qu'elle est à son minimùm au Manitoba. Le séparatisme existe dans la région, en particulier en Alberta où il serait possible d'augmenter considérablement les revenus provenant du pétrole si la Province était indépendante. Les tensions fédérales-provinciales concernant l'Ouest du Canada ne feront qu'augmenter à l'avenir, ce qui exigera des négociations continues et des jugements constitutionnels sur des questions de juridiction.     

Situational factors and police use of force across micro-time intervals: A video systematic social observation and panel regression analysis

The current study analyzes police use of force as a series of time-bound transactions between officers, civilians, and bystanders. The research begins with a systematic social observation of use-of-force events recorded on police body-worn cameras in Newark, New Jersey. Researchers measure the occurrence and time stamps for numerous participant physical and verbal behaviors. Data are converted into a longitudinal panel format measuring all observed behaviors in 5-second intervals. Panel logistic regression models estimate the effect of each behavior on use of force in immediate and subsequent temporal periods. Findings indicate certain variables influence use of force at a distinct point in time, whereas others exert influence on use of force across multiple time periods. The most influential variables relate to authority maintenance theoretical constructs. This finding supports prior perspectives arguing that police use of force largely results from officer attempts to maintain constant authority over civilians during face-to-face encounters. Nonetheless, a range of additional variables reflecting procedural justice, civilian resistance, and bystander presence significantly affect when police use force during civilian encounters. Results provide nuance to theoretical frameworks considering use of force as resulting from the interplay between officer and civilian actions and reactions.     

Evaluation of canine training aids containment for homemade explosive and components by headspace analysis and canine testing

While canines are most commonly trained to detect traditional explosives, such as nitroaromatics and smokeless powders, homemade explosives (HMEs), such as fuel–oxidizer mixtures, are arguably a greater threat. As such, it is imperative that canines are sufficiently trained in the detection of such HMEs. The training aid delivery device (TADD) is a primary containment device that has been used to house HMEs and HME components for canine detection training purposes. This research assesses the odor release from HME components, ammonium nitrate (AN), urea nitrate (UN), and potassium chlorate (PC), housed in TADDs. Canine odor recognition tests (ORTs) were used with analytical data to determine the detectability of TADDs containing AN, UN, or PC. Headspace analysis by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) with solid-phase microextraction (SPME) or online cryotrapping were used to measure ammonia or chlorine, as well as other unwanted odorants, emanating from bulk AN, UN, and PC in TADDs over 28 weeks. The analytical data showed variation in the amount of ammonia and chlorine over time, with ammonia from AN and UN decreasing slowly over time and the abundance of chlorine from PC TADDs dependent on the frequency of exposure to ambient air. Even with these variations in odor abundance, canines previously trained to detect bulk explosive HME components were able to detect all three targets in glass and plastic TADDs for at least 18 months after loading. Detection proficiency ranged from 64% to 100% and was not found to be dependent on either age of material.     

How Disgust Influences Health Purity Attitudes

Food and health regulations are increasingly being pushed onto the political agenda, with rising concerns about genetically modified foods, obesity rates, and vaccination. Public beliefs and attitudes on these issues often conflict with the scientific evidence, yet we know relatively little about what influences opinion on these issues. The public lacks clear partisan cues, and many food and health attitudes cut across the ideological spectrum. We argue that these issues represent new ‘purity’ attitudes that are driven by the emotion of disgust. Across three studies, both by measuring individuals’ trait disgust sensitivity and experimentally inducing an emotional state of disgust, we demonstrate the impact of disgust on food and health policy attitudes. Our results show that greater sensitivity to disgust is associated with support for organic foods, opposition to genetically modified foods, and anti-vaccination beliefs. However, we find only limited evidence that experimentally manipulated disgust affects attitudes toward genetically modified and organic foods. Overall, our results demonstrate that disgust plays an important role in attitudes regarding public health and broadens our understanding of purity attitudes.     

Turning Out Unlikely Voters? A Field Experiment in the Top-Two Primary

Those who turn out in American primary elections are a small and unrepresentative subset of the population. Why do citizens forgo participation in nominating contests yet vote in general elections? We argue that limited contact lowers participation in primary elections. We present results from a randomized field experiment with near 150,000 letters in California’s 2014 primary. Each letter went to one of the four million Californians who had participated in recent general elections but not in primaries. We find that a single letter increased turnout by 0.5 points from a base rate of 9.3 percent. This increase is more than twice the average effect calculated in a recent meta-analysis and represents a proportional increase of 5.4 percent. Our experiment shows that registrants who typically abstain from primaries—and who are thus often ignored by campaigns—can be effectively mobilized.     

Leadership Experiences Within Civil Organizations and Candidacy in Public Elections: Causal Evidence from a Quasi-Experimental Approach

Standing as a candidate in public elections has been characterized as the ultimate act of political participation. We test the hypothesis that acquiring office within civil organizations increases the probability of becoming a candidate in public elections. In order to take self-selection problems into account, we provide quasi-experimental evidence using election discontinuities, in which we compare the likelihood of being nominated for public office between closely ranked winners and losers in Swedish student union (SU) elections. Our original data cover 5,000 SU candidates and register data on their candidacies in public elections (1991–2010). The analysis provides support to the hypothesis: Students elected to SU councils were about 34 percent (6 percentage points) more likely to become a candidate in a public election than SU council candidates who were not elected. The causal impact is fairly stable over time. The analysis makes important contributions to two interrelated bodies of literature: First, it provides political recruitment literature with causal evidence that acquiring leadership experiences at arenas outside of representative democratic institutions facilitate entry into election processes. Second, it provides strong evidence to an increasingly contested issue within political participation research by showing that certain organizational activities increase individuals’ political involvement.     

Trusting the State,Trusting Each Other? The Effect of Institutional Trust on Social Trust

Trust in state institutions is a prominent explanation of social trust. However, previous—mainly cross-sectional—analyses provide limited causal evidence regarding the relationship between institutional trust and social trust and it is thus essentially unknown whether an observed relationship reflects reverse causality (social trust forming institutional trust), or both forms of trust reflecting deep-seated dispositions (common confounding). Against the backdrop of the shortcomings of previous cross-sectional analyses, this paper utilizes two Danish panel surveys containing measures of both types of trust for the same individuals surveyed at multiple points in time over a long time-span (up to 18 years) to address the potentially reverse and/or spurious relationship. Using individual fixed effects and cross-lagged panel models, the results provide strong evidence of trust in state institutions exercising a causal impact on social trust, whereas the evidence for a reverse relationship is limited.     

How Ideology Fuels Affective Polarization

Scholars have reached mixed conclusions about the implications of increased political polarization for citizen decision-making. In this paper, we argue that citizens respond to ideological divergence with heightened affective polarization. Using a survey experiment conducted with a nationally representative sample of U.S. citizens, we find that increased ideological differences between political figures produce increasingly polarized affective evaluations, and that these differences are especially large among respondents with stronger ideological commitments and higher levels of political interest. We provide further support for these findings in an observational study of citizens’ evaluations of the U.S. Senators from their state. We also find that the polarizing effects of ideological differences can be largely mitigated with biographical information about the public officials, which suggests that the pernicious consequences of ideological polarization can be overcome by focusing on matters other than political disagreement.     

Are Group Cues Necessary? How Anger Makes Ethnocentrism Among Whites a Stronger Predictor of Racial and Immigration Policy Opinions

Research shows that group conflict sets ethnocentric thinking into motion. However, when group threat is not salient, can ethnocentrism still influence people’s political decision-making? In this paper, I argue that anger, unrelated to racial and ethnic groups, can activate the attitudes of ethnocentric whites and those that score low in ethnocentrism thereby causing these attitudes to be a stronger predictor of racial and immigration policy opinions. Using an adult national experiment over two waves, I induced several emotions to elicit anger, fear, or relaxation (unrelated to racial or ethnic groups). The experimental findings show that anger increases opposition to racial and immigration policies among whites that score high in ethnocentrism and enhances support for these policies among those that score low in ethnocentrism. Using data from the American National Election Study cumulative file, I find a similar non-racial/ethnic anger effect. The survey findings also demonstrate that non-racial/ethnic fear increases opposition to immigration among whites that don’t have strong out-group attitudes.