Electoral Politics and The Canadian Supreme Court

Although a regime politics approach is implicit in some scholarship on court power in Canada (Morton and Knopff 2000), the empirical study of judicial decision making in that country has been largely limited to behavioralist (Ostberg and Wetstein 2007; Songer 2008), strategic (Manfredi 2004; Radmilovic 2010) and historical-interpretive institutionalist accounts (Macfarlane 2013). This paper will examine the influence of electoral and regime politics on the judicial role in Canada to further contextualize the political and policy-making power of the Supreme Court of Canada in the post-1982 (or Charter of Rights) era.