Les déterminants des politiques provinciales au Canada : Une synthèse des études comparatives

Cet article est un bilan des écrits ayant pour objet l’analyse comparative des politiques publiques dans les dix provinces canadiennes. Le bilan est fait en deux temps. D’abord, nous caractérisons le choix des politiques gouvernementales étudiées (la variable dépendante) en fonction de quatre critères : le secteur d’intervention, le point de vue, le type d’observation et la forme de l’activité gouvernementale. Ensuite, nous regardons plus attentivement le choix des facteurs explicatifs (les variables indépendantes) en nous attardant à la pertinence des arguments donnés par les écoles de la convergence et du « Politics Matters ».This article is a review of the studies on provincial public policies in a comparative perspective. We first caracterise the choice of government policies (the dependent variable) using four criteria: the sector of intervention, the point of view, the type of observation, and the form of government activity. Then we direct our attention to the choice of explanatory factors (the independent variables) looking at the relevance of the arguments presented by two approaches: the "Convergence Approach" and the "Politics Matters Approach"

Supervised scaling of semi-structured interview transcripts to characterize the ideology of a social policy reform

Automated content analysis methods treat ‘‘text as data'' and can therefore analyze efficiently large qualitative databases. Yet, despite their potential, these methods are rarely used to supplement qualitative analysis in small-N designs. We address this gap by replicating the qualitative findings of a case study of a social policy reform using automated content analysis. To characterize the ideology of this reform, we reanalyze the same interview data with Wordscores, using academic publications as reference texts. As expected, the reform's ideology is center/center-right, a result that we validate using content, convergent and discriminant strategies. The validation evidence suggests not only that the ideological positioning of the policy reform is credible, but also that Wordscores' scope of application is greater than expecte