Abstract
This chapter compares the democratisation trajectories of two of the oldest and most venerable of the world’s ‘really existing’ democracies—Canada and the United States. It adopts a long run ‘Comparative Political Development’ perspective which places twenty-first-century variations within a broad and configurative context. These two large federal regimes of recent settlement have many crucial structural and cultural features in common, and both belong clearly within the established democracy subset of countries. Yet they also display some very significant contrasts—presidential versus parliamentary; inflected by the legacy of slavery versus anglophone ascendancy over francophones; and much more. The chapter provides a critical re-reading and updating of Lipset, Continental Divide: The Values and Institutions of the United States and Canada, Routledge, 1990 study of these matters and traces the diverging trends of democratic slippage in the USA versus deepening in Canada. Notwithstanding these divergences, it resists the tendency to over-dramatise recent events, or to extrapolate them too far. Both cases belong within the overall TRU framework.
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Whitehead, L. (2022). United States–Canada: The Two Overlapping Democratic Trajectories in North America. In: van Beek, U. (eds) Democracy under Pressure. Challenges to Democracy in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09123-0_7
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