Browsing by Author "Henriques, Karl A."

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Open Access
Constitutionalizing and Legislating Parity Democracy: The Cases of France and Belgium
(Saskatchewan Institute of Public Policy, 2008-05) Praud, Jocelyne; Henriques, Karl A.
This paper examines how and why France and Belgium came to modify their respective constitutions and pass parity laws. The first section analyses French and Belgian women’s acquisition and exercise of political rights and, in particular, their right of eligibility. Statistics concerning women’s presence in both the lower and upper houses (France’s National Assembly and Senate and Belgium’s Chamber of Deputies and Senate) are used to assess the extent to which they have been able to exercise their right of eligibility. The second section focuses on the involvement of French and Belgian women’s movements and parties in the introduction of gender parity reforms, and the third section examines the involvement of French and Belgian executive and legislative elites in the adoption of constitutional reforms. Overall, it appears that in France, the women’s movement played the key role in the introduction of parity reforms whereas in Belgium, both the women’s movement and political parties did. Further, although in both countries top executive and legislative elites from the left and the right were actively involved in the ratification of constitutional reforms, their involvement appears to have been more collaborative in Belgium than in France.
Open Access
This “New Europe”: Historic Policy Opportunities for Canada
(Saskatchewan Institute of Public Policy, 2005-01) Henriques, Karl A.
Along with the rest of the world, Canadians today are living yet again through history-making and often unpredictable times. In only the past 15 years, we have experienced such dramatic events as the sudden end of the Cold War, with its division of the world into two binary ideological camps, the fragmentation of the world’s second superpower – the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics – and the convergence of United States as the world’s hyperpuissance; China’s embrace of elements of a market economy and emergence as a formidable economic presence; the first major terrorist attack on the continental US, and the consequential dramatic awakening to the uncertainty of terrorism and its sources as the principal security threat to even the most highly developed liberal democratic systems.