Books in the Diversitas series

This book presents a collection of essays which take secularism/laicite and the regulation of public expressions of religious commitment as their points of departure, exploring the issues these raise within society with a view informing the public debate and reflecting on the nature of citizenship.

This essay offers a guide towards a rethinking of basic political concepts and arguments in the new context of increasingly diverse societies. It focuses on the challenges of the democratic management of cultural diversity, offering deep reflections and several proposals regarding the building of more inclusive, plural and efficient societies.

The book's central idea is that respect for democracy and protection of human rights represent the most potent ways for the advancement and enrichment of cultural, ideological and legal pluralism. The pursuit and accomplishment of such objectives can only be achieved through negotiation that leads to the accommodation and empowerment of minority groups and nations.

This book combines the approaches of political theory and of intellectual history to provide a lucid account of Quebec's contemporary situation within the Canadian federation. Guy Laforest considers that the province of Quebec, and its inhabitants, are exiled within Canada. They are not fully integrated, politically and constitutionally, nor are they leaving the federation, for now and for the foreseeable future. They are in between these two predicaments. Laforest provides insights into the current workings of the Canadian federation, and some of its key figures of the past fifty years, such as Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Rene Levesque, Stephen Harper and Claude Ryan. The book also offers thought-provoking studies of thinkers and intellectuals such as James Tully, Michel Seymour and Andre Burelle. Laforest revisits some key historical documents and events, such as the Durham Report and the 1867 and 1982 constitutional documents. He offers political and constitutional proposals that could contribute to help Quebec moving beyond the current predicament of internal exile.

Nowadays, politics is only one voice among many in the concert of social self-organization. Its function is to articulate the differentiated systems of our societies: it encourages their self-restraint, while at the same time restraining itself. Such a conception obviously threatens the primacy of the nation-state. While it is not necessarily disappearing, it must nevertheless cease to be thought of as a dominant principle of organization, and must assume its place in a system of regulation that proceeds on several levels. Distant from the anarchist or Marxist theories that herald the end of the state as it is from libertarian theories of the minimal state, the book illustrates that it is possible in the contemporary period to go beyond the alternatives of dirigisme and neoliberal spontaneity. However, such a transformation can only prove effective through two conditions: we must first reject the enduring opposition between Right and Left, and second, we must invent an anti-state social democracy that is able in its own right to glean the most it can out of the liberal legacy. This book combines philosophical technicality, clarity and elegance of writing in an attempt to provide politics with meaning again, particularly in an era where discourse about its powerlessness abounds.

Contributed by leading scholars of Quebec Studies, both emerging and established, the 30 essays of this comprehensive collection offer a multidisciplinary survey of the study of diversity in Quebec over space and time. The volume is organized around a variety of themes through which Quebec¿s plural reality is expressed, including conceptual, historical and contemporary approaches, covering a wide range of social and economic cleavages, identity markers, political contestation and, broadly, the lived experiences of Quebecers negotiating difference over time. In an environment increasingly demarcated by conflicts around values and cultural and social practices, this collection hopes to contribute to broadening the spectrum of voices to the current debate, adding an inclusive reflection to a conversation that has only intensified over the last decade. Quebec as a pluri-national and multi-ethnic society has been and remains a great laboratory to study and to test public policies on ethnic diversity. It allows us to identify the tensions and to evaluate the balance between the majority and the minority; and between settler society and indigenous nations, in conceptualizing and finding a normative consensus around the configuration of collective rights. In short, the contributions in this volume seek to illustrate how pluralism has and continues to constitute the lifeblood of belonging in Quebec.

¿Cómo votan los latinoamericanos en las democracias emergentes? Este es el primer libro científico que de forma unificada ofrece la respuesta a dicho interrogante, más sistemática y exhaustiva hasta el día de hoy. Diversos expertos se unen para evaluar la aplicabilidad del marco teórico de The American Voter (también conocido como el Modelo de Michigan). Analizando datos de la encuesta del Barómetro de las Américas (18 países latinoamericanos desde 2008 a 2012), los autores descubrieron que al igual que los votantes de cualquier democracia del mundo, los latinoamericanos responden a fuerzas de largo plazo tales como las clases sociales, los vínculos con partidos políticos y la ideología. Asimismo, prestan atención a factores de corto plazo, como la economía, la inseguridad y la corrupción. El modelo de Michigan, pues, ofrece una poderosa explicación sobre el comportamiento electoral también en América Latina, resultando este libro de gran interés para los lectores que quieran conocer sobre la política y la sociedad latinoamericana y para aquellos que quieran desarrollar una mejor comprensión de cómo votan los ciudadanos en tales latitudes.