The government taketh away

Leslie Alexander Pal, R. Kent Weaver

Democratic government is about making choices. Sometimes those choices involve the distribution of benefits. At other times they involve the imposition of some type of lossa program cut, increased taxes, or new regulatory standards. Citizens will resist such impositions if they can, or will try to punish governments at election time. The dynamics of loss imposition are therefore a universal if unpleasant element of democratic governance. Examines the repercussions of unpopular government decisions in Canada and the United States and compares the capacities of the U.S. presidential system and the Canadian Westminster system to impose different types of losses: symbolic losses (gun control and abortion), geographically concentrated losses (military base closings and nuclear waste disposal), geographically dispersed losses (cuts to pensions and to health care), and losses imposed on...