L'arrêt Morgentaler et l'article 7 de la Charte canadienne des droits et libertés

The author provides a critical analysis of the recent Supreme Court judgment in the Morgentaler case. Focussing on an examination of the main question addressed to the Court, that is the compliance of Criminal Code Section 251 with the Canadian Charter, he examines the various motives that led the judges to declare Section 251 unconstitutional. While underlining various weaknesses in the judges' reasoning, he criticizes Section 7 as being too wide and a source of future confusion

State mandatory collective bargaining laws can mean public employees are more likely to participate in politics.

In many states, Republican Governors have moved to end collective bargaining rights for public employees, with the aim of curtailing their ability to mobilize politically. In new research covering 34 states with mandatory collective bargaining laws, Patrick Flavin and Michael T. Hartney find that these laws can have a large effect on the likelihood that public employees will participate in politics. They say that with the rise of new laws to prevent collective bargaining for state employees, the membership and influence of labor unions is likely to decline

Replication data for: When Government Subsidizes Its Own: Collective Bargaining Laws as Agents of Political Mobilization

Government policies can activate a political constituency not only by providing material resources to, or altering the interpretive experiences of, individual citizens, but also by directly subsidizing established interest groups. We argue that state laws mandating collective bargaining for public employees provided organizational subsidies to public sector labor unions that lowered the costs of mobilizing their members to political action. Exploiting variation in the timing of laws across the states and using data on the political participation of public school teachers from 1956 to 2004, we find that the enactment of a mandatory bargaining law significantly boosted subsequent political participation among teachers. We also identify increased contact from organized groups seeking to mobilize teachers as a likely mechanism that explains this finding. These results have important implications for the current debate over collective bargaining rights and for our understanding of policy feedback, political parties and interest groups, and the bureaucracy

Replication Data for: Racial Inequality in Democratic Accountability: Evidence from Retrospective Voting in Local Elections

One important and, to date, overlooked component of democratic accountability is the extent to which it might exacerbate existing societal inequalities if the outcomes for some groups of citizens are prioritized over others when voters evaluate governmental performance. We analyze a decade of California school board elections and find evidence that voters reward or punish incumbent board members based on the achievement of white students in their district while outcomes for African American and Hispanic students receive comparatively little attention. We then examine public opinion data on the racial education achievement gap and report results from an original list experiment of California school board members that finds approximately 40% of incumbents detect no electoral pressure to address poor academic outcomes among racial minority students. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for several scholarly literatures including retrospective voting, racial inequality in political influence, intergovernmental policymaking, and education politics