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Political Actors (political + actor)
Selected AbstractsThe impact of state governance structures on management and performance of public organizations: A study of higher education institutionsJOURNAL OF POLICY ANALYSIS AND MANAGEMENT, Issue 1 2004Jack H. Knott Legislative statutes are passed by political majorities which support structures that insulate the implementing agency from its political opponents over time. Political actors also respond to different constituencies. Depending on the broad or narrow base of these constituencies, actors favor different kinds of governance structures. We apply this theoretical framework to the question of whether the state governance structures of boards of higher education affect the way university managers allocate resources, develop sources of revenue, and promote research and undergraduate education. Over the past two decades state governments have given considerable attention to state governance issues, resulting in many universities operating in a more regulated setting today. This paper develops a classification of higher education structures and shows the effects of differences in these structures on university management and performance using a data set that covers the period from 1987 to 1998. The analysis suggests that, for most of the measures, productivity and resources are higher at universities with a statewide board that is more decentralized and has fewer regulatory powers. © 2004 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. [source] Do Participants and Observers Assess Intentions Differently During Bargaining and Conflict?AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 4 2009Eric S. Dickson Political actors in conflict settings are often uncertain about their counterparts' intentions. This article explores the psychology of how intentions are assessed using a novel experimental design that randomly assigns subjects to one of three roles,"proposer,""recipient," or "observer." Recipients and observers are given identical noisy information about proposers' actions, and make postplay assessments of proposers' intentions that are rewarded based on accuracy. A first experiment explores a context of ambiguity, while a second experiment explores a context of uncertainty. The results suggest that actors' perceptions can sometimes be directly affected by the set of strategic alternatives they possess. When signals about proposer behavior appear "negative," recipients' assessments of proposers' intentions are more negative than observers' assessments if recipients have the ability to respond to the proposer's action,but not if recipients lack this ability. The ability to respond to proposer behavior appears to cause recipients to make more negative inferences about the proposer than circumstances warrant. Interestingly, recipients' and observers' assessments are indistinguishable when signals about proposer behavior instead appear "positive." [source] A President for the European Union: A New Actor in Town?,JCMS: JOURNAL OF COMMON MARKET STUDIES, Issue 2 2007SPYROS BLAVOUKOS In the post-Constitution EU, the rotating Presidency would be replaced by a hybrid system combining a rotating component with the establishment of a permanent President for the European Council. Using a principal-agent framework, we look at the supply and demand for formal leadership in the new system, accounting for the substantial institutional change in the format of the Presidency. We then examine the President's effectiveness and efficiency and discuss whether the President, as a new institutional actor, has the potential to evolve into an autonomous political actor in the EU. Our analysis suggests a discernible though by no means unconditional strengthening of the President's potential for an autonomous political role in the new EU institutional architecture. [source] Writing the "Show,Me" Standards: Teacher Professionalism and Political Control in U.S. State Curriculum PolicyCURRICULUM INQUIRY, Issue 3 2002Margaret Placier This qualitative case study analyzes the process of writing academic standards in one U.S. state, Missouri. The researchers took a critical pragmatic approach, which entailed close examination of the intentions and interactions of various participants in the writing process (teachers, politicians, business leaders, the public), in order to understand the text that was finally produced. School reform legislation delegated responsibility for writing the standards to a teacher work group, but the teachers found that their "professional" status and their intention to write standards that reflected a "constructivist" view of knowledge would meet with opposition. Politicians, who held different assumptions about the audience, organization, and content of the standards, exercised their greater power to control the outcome of the process. As the researchers analyzed public records and documents generated during the writing process, they constructed a chronological narrative detailing points of tension among political actors. From the narrative, they identified four conflicts that significantly influenced the final wording of the standards. They argue that as a consequence of these conflicts, Missouri's standards are characterized by a dichotomous view of content and process; bland, seemingly value,neutral language; and lack of specificity. Such conflicts and outcomes are not limited to this context. A comparative, international perspective shows that they seem to occur when groups in societies marked by political conflicts over education attempt to codify what "all students should know." [source] Participation and/or/versus sustainability?ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY AND GOVERNANCE, Issue 4 2005Austria, Tensions between procedural, substantive goals in Two Local Agenda 21 processes in Sweden Abstract Local Agenda 21 (LA21) is committed to two types of goal: procedural goals substantiated primarily in the requirement to encourage greater participation in local decision making and substantive goals predominantly attached to the call for a sustainable development. In this article, we report on the LA21 processes of two communities, Helsingborg, Sweden, and Vienna, Austria. We analyse what kind of normative tension the two communities have experienced by concurrently striving for democracy and sustainability. We also discuss what impact the two LA21 processes have on local governance structures and what potentials for more fundamental system changes they hold. Our analysis shows that the challenge of actually reconciling possibly conflicting goals is far from easy. In Helsingborg, the apparent harmony of goals has been achieved partly by falling back on political rhetoric, partly by interpreting the two goals in a narrow way, i.e. sustainability policy has been reduced to environmental issues and citizen participation has been equated with ,paternalistic' consultation. The Viennese LA21 process has managed to implement the two goals in a more comprehensive way, but this has come at the cost of being marginalized by the central political actors. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. [source] How political parties frame European integrationEUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL RESEARCH, Issue 4 2010MARC HELBLING This article analyses how political parties frame European integration, and gauges the consistency of their argumentation. Over the course of investigation, one can see how actors' positions are justified, and how the European Union is perceived (i.e., what forces give rise to Euroscepticism and Europeanism). It is argued here that the parties' framing of issues depends on the interests they traditionally defend at the national level, their general positions on European integration, and whether or not they belong to the established political actors in their respective countries. The coding approach enables the relation of frames to actors and positions, moving beyond the techniques employed by existing studies that analyse the media presentation of European integration. Sophisticated frame categorisations are provided to capture the complex structure of argumentation, going beyond a simple dichotomy of economic and cultural frames. Relying on a large and original media dataset covering the period 2004,2006, six Western European countries are investigated. [source] Defending democracy: Reactions to political extremism in inter,war EuropeEUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL RESEARCH, Issue 4 2001GIOVANNI CAPOCCIA While the strategies of political actors and institutions have been largely analyzed with reference to cases of democratic breakdown, democratic survival has often been viewed as a consequence of socio,economic and cultural ,preconditions'. The analysis of successful reactions to strong extremist challenges in three cases of democratic survival (Czechoslovakia, Finland and Belgium in the inter,war period) against the background of two cases of breakdown in the same historical context (Italy and the Weimar Republic) is a useful complement to this view. The analysis of the selected cases shows how a stable coalition of democratic forces can effectively protect the democratic system from dangerous extremist attacks by pursuing both repressive and inclusive strategies. [source] The European Charter of Fundamental Rights A Changed Political Opportunity Structure and its Normative ConsequencesEUROPEAN LAW JOURNAL, Issue 2 2001Christoph Engel The European Community is about to enlarge its de facto constitution by a fundamental rights charter. It is intended to become legally binding, at least in the long run. If it is, it will profoundly change the political opportunity structure between the Community and its Member States, among the Member States, among the organs of the Community and in relation to outside political actors. When assessing the new opportunities, one has to keep in mind the weak democratic legitimation of European policy making and its multi-level character. The article sketches the foreseeable effects and draws consequences from these insights for the dogmatics of the new fundamental rights, their relation to (other) primary Community law and to other fundamental rights codes. It ends with a view to open flanks that cannot be closed by the dogmatics of the freedoms themselves, but call for an appropriate design of the institutional framework. [source] Cross-National Transfer of Policy Ideas: Agencification in Britain and JapanGOVERNANCE, Issue 2 2004Koichi Nakano This study seeks to contribute to the policy transfer literature through a comparison of the British "Next Steps" initiative of agencification (i.e., organizational separation of policy implementation from policy formulation in central departments) and the Japanese reform that officially proclaimed to be inspired by the British example. In addition to confirming the crucial role played by domestic structural constraints in producing variant outputs in different countries, this article also shows that the transfer of policy ideas can be a highly proactive political process in which political actors in the learning country interpret and define both problems and solution as they "borrow" from another country. [source] The Council: An Institutional Chameleon?GOVERNANCE, Issue 3 2002Helen Wallace Council reform is a topic that has become a key issue in the wider discussion about reshaping the institutions of the European Union. This article explores five different images of the Council: as a partner of the Commission; as a club of governments; as a venue for competition and bargaining between governments and other political actors; as an arena for networked governance; and as a consortium for developing "transgovernmental" collaboration. It is conventional to examine the Council as both executive and legislative in character. More interesting, perhaps, is its evolving practice as a forum for experimentation. [source] Finnish Higher Education Expansion and Regional PolicyHIGHER EDUCATION QUARTERLY, Issue 4 2010Toni Saarivirta This paper concentrates on the expansion of Finnish higher education between the 1960s and 1970s, exposes its background in the light of the policy decisions that were made, compares the unique features of this expansion with those of certain other countries, discusses the impact of the controlled ,top down' governance of higher education policy, and describes the Finnish higher education system today. The paper argues that the driving forces behind universal mass higher education were, on the one hand, changes in the structure of society, and on the other hand, individual demand for education but also increased need for skills in production processes. This was the case in Finland as well but the Finnish higher education expansion was also characterised by regionalism. The actual location of universities in the era of expansion was a function of local political actors who were able to have an influence on ruling political parties. [source] New Perspectives on Female SuffrageHISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 1 2005Sarah A. Buck By focusing on the history and historiography of Mexican women's acquisition of the right to vote between the 1920s and 1950s, this article uses Mexico as a case study to point to broader trends in scholarship on female suffrage. The author argues that the symbolic or representational value (the meaning) of women voting has carried more weight historically than how women actually voted (the act of female voting). Nonetheless, women's presumed effect on elections, through the act of voting, has shaped the rhetoric and history of female suffrage. By examining female suffrage through the lens of gender politics and gender history, one can see how and why often problematic, and even fallacious images, meanings, or symbols of women as inept political actors have been constructed. [source] Changing Definitions of Risk and Responsibility in French Political ScandalsJOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY, Issue 3 2002Violaine Roussel In the 1990s in France, a large number of political scandals developed and many political actors were prosecuted. This process of making politicians responsible related, in particular, to the rise of ,new risks' regarding public health and security. In this paper, I analyse the diffusion and the crystallization of discourses linking public risk and political responsibility. First, I point to some of the social and cognitive bases in which the recent uses of the notions of risk and responsibility are rooted. Second, I focus on the mechanisms through which the notions were mobilized and invested with new definitions in the course of the scandal hearings. Third, I explore some of the effects of the changes which occurred during the 1990s: new perception frames in terms of risk and responsibility are consolidated and are progressively appropriated by social actors located in various professional spheres. [source] Marketing political soap: a political marketing view of selling candidates like soap, of electioneering as a ritual, and of electoral military analogiesJOURNAL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS, Issue 2 2003Alex Marland Abstract This paper examines three common political expressions and ideas from a marketing perspective. First, the origins of the ,selling candidates like soap' expression are traced and it is argued that, rather than being ,sold' like a product, candidates are instead ,marketed' like a service provider such as a real estate agent. Traditional campaign rituals have a legitimate marketing function if electors, and not just political actors, are meaningfully incorporated and military analogies in elections have increasing relevance given the classic military strategy used by commercial marketers. Together, these examples suggest that the application of marketing to politics may require the rethinking of ingrained electoral jargon and concepts. Copyright © 2003 Henry Stewart Publications [source] Defining a Democracy: Reforming the Laws on Women's Rights in Chile, 1990,2002LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY, Issue 3 2005Merike H. Blofield Liesl Haas ABSTRACT This article evaluates 38 bills seeking to expand women's rights in Chile and finds that the successful ones often originated with the Executive National Women's Ministry (SERNAM), did not threaten existing definitions of gender roles, and did not require economic redistribution. These factors (plus the considerable influence of the Catholic Church) correlate in important ways, and tend to constrain political actors in ways not apparent from an examination of institutional roles or ideological identity alone. In particular, the Chilean left's strategic response to this complex web of interactions has enabled it to gain greater legislative influence on these issues over time. [source] Comparing the Power of Korean and American Presidents: An Institutional PerspectivePACIFIC FOCUS, Issue 1 2004Jaechun Kim Many observers of Korean politics have worried that the Korean president has wielded lopsided leverage over other political actors and institutions. By comparing "constitutional" and "para-constitutional" features of the Korean and American political systems, this paper assesses the reasons that the Korean presidency has enjoyed overwhelming advantage. Assessment of constitutionally prescribed presidential powers,both legislative and non-legislative,indicates that, compared to the American president, the Korean counterpart possesses strong leverage over the legislature. This paper also suggests that such para-constitutional features of the Korean political system such as 'winner-take-all" and the ,plebiscitary' nature of the Korean presidential elections and strong party discipline have worked to the advantage of the Korean president. Although no analysis of the political system will be complete without the examination of "contextual" and "ecological" factors indigenous to that system, "institutional" analysis of this paper suggests that Korean politics may move toward a more advanced stage of democracy through adjusting some of the basic institutional arrangements of the country. [source] Norms, Interests and Institutional ChangePOLITICAL STUDIES, Issue 4 2005Dionyssis G. Dimitrakopoulos This paper provides a norms-based account of institutional change. It compares two cases of attempted change, one successful and one unsuccessful. The argument advanced is that norm-based change occurs when the norms are congruent with the perceived interests of the actors who have the power to take on the decision. Norms affect the process of institutional change not only by providing legitimacy to some forms of political action, but also by shaping the actors' perception of their interests as well their strategies. It is argued that norms, in that sense, help political actors combine Max Weber's zweckrational (goal-orientated) and wertrational (value-orientated) categories of behaviour. Empirical evidence drawn from the context of the evolving European Union supports this argument. [source] Traditions of Australian governancePUBLIC ADMINISTRATION, Issue 1 2003John Wanna Australia's traditions of governance tend to be pragmatic and to blend different ideologies. Its traditions are less dependent on political party ideologies, and more on competing conceptions of the significant problems and the way that they should be addressed. In this article we identify five principal traditions, namely: settler,state developmentalism; civilizing capitalism; the development of a social,liberal constitutional tradition; traditions of federalism; and the exclusiveness/ inclusiveness of the state and society. These traditions have been robust and have developed over time. We show how political actors operating from within this plurality of traditions have understood the public sector and how their understandings have led to changes in the way the public sector is structured. [source] Dancing the Foreign Aid Appropriations Dance: Recurring Themes in the Modern CongressesPUBLIC BUDGETING AND FINANCE, Issue 2 2000Lewis G. Irwin In studying changes and continuities in the Congress since the early 1960s, a persistent set of "rules of the game' in the foreign aid appropriations process emerged from the analysis. These rules shape both the foreign aid appropriations process as well as the nature of the relationship between the executive and legislative branches on this issue. Utilizing involved actor accounts and detailed, descriptive case studies of the passage of foreign aid appropriations laws in the early 1960s and 1990s, I argue here that the foreign aid appropriations process is a routinely choreographed political production with important recurring continuities in the modern era. I describe and analyze recurring features of the foreign aid appropriations process that constrain or benefit the various political actors interested in thwarting, advancing, or using the aid program. Furthermore, I argue that from the legislative actors' perspective, the underlying continuities that define the legislative process trump the changes to the process in perceived importance, and that the actors view people, rather than procedure, as the most important determinant of success or failure. [source] How Predictive Appeals Affect Policy OpinionsAMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 2 2009Jennifer Jerit When political actors debate the merits of a public policy, they often focus on the consequences of a bill or legislative proposal, with supporters and opponents making stark but contradictory predictions about the future. Building upon the framing literature, I examine how rhetoric about a policy's consequences influences public opinion. I show that predictive appeals work largely by altering people's beliefs about the impact of a policy. Following in the tradition of recent framing research, this article also examines how opinions are influenced when people are exposed to opposing predictions. The analysis focuses on two strategies that are common in real-world debates,the direct rebuttal (in which an initial appeal is challenged by a statement making the opposite prediction) and the alternate frame (which counters an initial appeal by shifting the focus to some other consequence). There are important differences in the effectiveness of these two strategies,a finding that has implications for the study of competitive framing and the policymaking process more generally. [source] Treating Words as Data with Error: Uncertainty in Text Statements of Policy PositionsAMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 2 2009Kenneth Benoit Political text offers extraordinary potential as a source of information about the policy positions of political actors. Despite recent advances in computational text analysis, human interpretative coding of text remains an important source of text-based data, ultimately required to validate more automatic techniques. The profession's main source of cross-national, time-series data on party policy positions comes from the human interpretative coding of party manifestos by the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP). Despite widespread use of these data, the uncertainty associated with each point estimate has never been available, undermining the value of the dataset as a scientific resource. We propose a remedy. First, we characterize processes by which CMP data are generated. These include inherently stochastic processes of text authorship, as well as of the parsing and coding of observed text by humans. Second, we simulate these error-generating processes by bootstrapping analyses of coded quasi-sentences. This allows us to estimate precise levels of nonsystematic error for every category and scale reported by the CMP for its entire set of 3,000-plus manifestos. Using our estimates of these errors, we show how to correct biased inferences, in recent prominently published work, derived from statistical analyses of error-contaminated CMP data. [source] The Struggle over Employee Benefits: The Role of Labor in Influencing Modern Health PolicyTHE MILBANK QUARTERLY, Issue 1 2003David Rosner Health care policy has often been described as the work of political actors seeking to benefit the larger community or a particular group of individuals. In 20th-century America, those actors worked in a historical context shaped by demographic and political pressures created during a period of rapid industrial change. Whereas scholars have placed the emergence of European social welfare in such a larger frame, their analysis of movements for health insurance in the United States has largely ignored the need for a frame. If anything, their studies have focused on the lack of a radical political working-class movement in this country as an explanation for the absence of national or compulsory health insurance. Indeed, this absence has dominated analyses of the failure of health policy reform in this country, which generally ignore even these passing historical allusions to the role of class in shaping health policy. Explanations of why health care reform failed during the Clinton administration cited the lack of coverage for millions of Americans but rarely alluded to the active role of labor or other working-class groups in shaping the existing health care system. After organized labor failed to institute national health insurance in the mid-twentieth century, its influence on health care policy diminished even further. This article proposes an alternative interpretation of the development of health care policy in the United States, by examining the association of health policy with the relationships between employers and employees. The social welfare and health insurance systems that resulted were a direct outcome of the pressures brought by organized and unorganized labor movements. The greater dependency created by industrial and demographic changes, conflicts between labor and capital over the political meaning of disease and accidents, and attempts by the political system to mitigate the impending social crisis all helped determine new health policy options. [source] Making War on Terror?THE MODERN LAW REVIEW, Issue 6 2006Global Lessons from Northern Ireland In place of the simple modelling employed in anti-terrorist legal discourse, this article posits an interactive model of the relationship between the state and violent political actors, exploring law's role in both the repression and mobilisation of challengers. Drawing on social movement theory, it hypothesises a process of ,legally implicated mobilisation' which takes account both of law's presence and its partial absence in ,legal grey zones' during violent conflict, and it suggests how law may impact upon key elements of the mobilisation process. The hypothesis is applied to qualitative data from Northern Ireland on violent challengers. The data point to the importance of ,messaging' about law in the state of exception, supporting claims that law can have a ,damping' effect on violent conflict. The relationship between repression and violence is partly symbiotic, and in the global ,war on terror,' prisoner-abuse may have a mobilising effect on violent challengers. [source] Taking young people as political actors seriously: opening the borders of political geographyAREA, Issue 2 2010Tracey Skelton This article challenges the absence of young people from Political Geography. It shows how in many parts of the world young people are in an in-between space politically and legally. This article suggests that the geographically divergent liminal positioning of young people within political,legal structures and institutional practices is what makes them extremely interesting political subjects. I argue for a deconstruction of the generally accepted binary of capital P Politics and lower case p politics. Using an illustration from a non-Western geography, I argue that young people can do more than act politically in the interstices of this binary; they can in fact meld and blend both elements. Taking young people seriously may well create new definitions of the political and demonstrate other ways of conceptualising geopolitics and political geographies. [source] The Problematic Relation between Direct Democracy and Accountability in Latin America: Evidence from the Bolivian CaseBULLETIN OF LATIN AMERICAN RESEARCH, Issue 1 2008ANITA BREUER During the wave of constitutional reforms, which started in the late 1980s, Institutions of Direct Democracy (IDD) have been incorporated into most Latin American constitutions, and over the past fifteen years, an increased use of these instruments by Latin American governments has been observed. This article deals with two questions related to this phenomenon: (1) what motivated the adoption and use of these institutions; and (2) what consequences can be expected with regard to democratic accountability in the region? To answer these questions, first, a classification of IDD is developed. In this, special attention is paid to the ability of the various types of IDD to introduce accountability into the representative structures of presidential systems. This classification is subsequently applied to analyse constitutional frameworks and direct democratic experience in the region. The findings suggest that the rise of IDD in Latin America was mainly induced by executive-legislative conflict and has done little to foster accountability. Finally, therefore, a detailed account of the specific constellation that led to the adoption of IDD in Bolivia is analysed in order to illustrate under which circumstances political actors choose to adopt and employ these tools. [source] Explaining the Politics of Recognition of Ethnic Diversity and Indigenous Peoples' Rights in Oaxaca, MexicoBULLETIN OF LATIN AMERICAN RESEARCH, Issue 4 2004Alejandro Anaya Muñoz A ,politics of recognition', a process of political reform intended to recognise formally cultural diversity and indigenous peoples' rights , has developed in Mexico, both at the federal and at the state levels, since the early 1990s. The case of the state of Oaxaca stands out in this respect , the local constitution and nearly a dozen secondary laws were reformed during the 1990s, resulting in the conformation of the most comprehensive multicultural framework in Mexico. In this article, I attempt to explain the emergence and the particular development of Oaxaca's unique politics of recognition. Following an explanatory framework proposed by Donna Lee Van Cott, I conclude that the recognition agenda emerged in Oaxaca as legitimacy and governability was put under strain. In addition, I conclude that the (by Mexican standards) rapid and broad fashion in which it developed can be explained on the bases of the severity of the threats to governability and of the capacity of indigenous actors to influence the decision-making process and form alliances with key political actors , i.e. the state governors. [source] Better to shop than to vote?BUSINESS ETHICS: A EUROPEAN REVIEW, Issue 3 2001Noreena Hertz This paper begins by reflecting on the current generalised political apathy signalled by low voter turnout and falling party membership. It would appear that people are exercising political choices not at the ballot box but by means of consumer activism. Corporations respond to consumer pressure in a way that governments do not, and are gradually assuming the role of global political actors. But this is a dangerous state of affairs for several reasons. In the first place, social welfare can never be the core activity of corporations. Corporate social motives are commercial, and there is a danger that their social policy decisions will be driven by the logic of the market place rather than social need. Recession, for instance, will curtail their social responsiveness, as will decisions to relocate. It is also the case that partnerships between governments and corporates run the risk of removing checks on the growth and abuse of corporate power. And finally, what price does society have to pay for the growth of corporate benevolence? [source] Symbolic politics in environmental regulation: corporate strategic responsesBUSINESS STRATEGY AND THE ENVIRONMENT, Issue 4 2003Dirk Matten Though not entirely new in political science in general, the concept of symbolic politics (SP) currently meets a vivid reception in law and economics. Yet little attention has been paid to SP from a business perspective. Elements of SP are found in nearly all fields of environmental legislation, and the paper will focus on those empirical examples that have a particular effect on markets, the competitive situation of businesses and corporate strategies in general. The consequences of SP for companies are analysed from two different perspectives. First, business will be seen as an addressee of SP. Specific corporate consequences and reactions are discussed. Second, corporations can be regarded as users of SP, as they assume increasingly a role as political actors themselves. This results from certain developments in environmental regulation as well as from the fact that globalization increasingly weakens national governments and their political power, while at the same time corporate actors assume more influence and responsibility. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. [source] Litigation in Canadian referendum politicsCANADIAN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION/ADMINISTRATION PUBLIQUE DU CANADA, Issue 3 2003Gregory Tardi The Canada-wide referendum on the Charlottetown Constitutional Accord in 1992, the Quebec sovereignty referendum in 1995, and the British Columbia referendum on aboriginal treaty negotiations in 2002 are the most interesting and the most significant examples. The core issue in each case was determining the political direction a government or a jurisdiction should follow. In each of these instances, interested citizens representing a segment of public opinion sought court injunctions to stop the vote. The focus of this article is the use of the courts on the political process. In each of the three cases, the applications for injunction were denied and the referendum proceeded. Nevertheless, the legal proceedings highlighted the increasing impact of law in politics under the Charter, as well as the greater willingness of political actors to use litigation to achieve political goals. These trends point out lessons for democracy that public administrators ought not ignore. Sommaire: Au cows de la demière dénnie, divers governments au Canada ont organisé des référendums pour déterminer leurs options concemant des questions faisant l'objet de séneuses controversies. Le référendum Canadian de 1992 sur l Accord constitutional de Charlottetown, le référendum de 1995 sur la souverainets du Québec et le refbrendurn qui s'est tenu en 2002 en Colombie-Britan-nique sur les négociations des droits issus de traités des Autochtones sont les référendums les plus intéressants et les plus marquants. Dans chaque cas, le point essential consistait à determiner l'orientation politique que le gouvemement ou une juridiction devrait adopter. Dans chacun de ces examples, des citoyens concernés représentant un segment de l'opinion publique ont tenté d'empêcher la tenue du vote en solicitant des injunctions auprès des tribunaux. Le present article porte sur le recours à des moyens légaux pour influer sur le processus politique. Dans chacun des trois cas, les demandes d'injonctions ont été refusées et le réféerendum a eu lieu. Néanmoins, les actions en justice ont souligné l'impact grandissant du juridique dam le domaine des politiques, sous l'influence de la Charte, et une plus grande acceptance de la part des responsables politiques à recourir à des litiges pour atteindre des objectifs politiques. Ces tendances soulignent pour la démocratie des leçons que les administrateurs publics ne devraient pas ignorer. [source] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||