2021 John McMenemy Prize

Winner: Daniel Westlake (Queen’s University) 

Following the Right: Left and Right Parties’ Influence over Multiculturalism, CJPS RCSP 53:1- 2020

Excerpt from jury report: In “Following the Right: Left and Right Parties’ Influence over Multiculturalism”, Daniel Westlake investigates the influence of partisan debate and support for multicultural policies. The author extends and builds upon existing datasets (both spacially and temporally) to create a new dataset spanning the adoption of multicultural policies from 1960-2011 in 21 countries. The central and counterintuitive finding from Westlake’s work is that centre-right party support has a larger impact on multicultural policy adoption than that of centre-left parties. The article makes important theoretical contributions to our understanding of the Canadian and comparative politics literatures.