Explaining Canada–US Differences in Attitudes Toward Crime and Justice: An Empirical Test of S.M. Lipset’s Account

ABSTRACT

Despite cultural similarities between Canada and the United States, some observers contend that significant differences remain in attitudes and values between the two countries. For example, Lipset has observed that “efforts to distinguish Canada and the United States almost invariably point to the greater respect for law and order and those who uphold it north of the border”. Lipset’s argument is that Canadian values are based on the nation’s founding principles of “Peace, Order and Good Government” while American values stem from the country’s revolutionary origins and are based on the values of “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” We test Lipset’s observations, and those of some of his critics, using parallel surveys administered to university students in two institutions on either side of the Canada–US border. This is a very demanding test of his arguments so the supportive evidence we uncover for his arguments is significant.

KEYWORDS:

• Canada–US cultural differences
• attitudes toward law
• guns and justice
• borderlands theory
• S.M. Lipset
• Canada–US borderlands

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank our discussant at the 23rd Biennial Conference of the Association for Canadian Studies in the United States, Dr Loleen Berdahl of the University of Saskatchewan, for her constructive suggestions. Helpful suggestions were also received from the two anonymous reviewers for this journal. Any errors remain the responsibility of the authors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. André Siegfried (1937, 285) argued that “A businessman in Toronto or in any of the little Ontario towns is an American, even if he happens to be of ‘Loyalist’ descent and is devoutly and passionately British in sentiment; and his culture can hardly be distinguished from that of an American citizen.”

2. To avoid overtaxing the generosity of colleagues who allowed us to take up a portion of their class time to implement the survey, we eschewed the use of open-ended questions.

3. Since our respondents were not selected by a process of random sampling, strictly speaking significance tests cannot be relied upon in the conventional way to indicate the probability of observing a difference of the magnitude observed in our data if there were no relationship observable in the general population. Instead, we report levels of significance as a supplemental indicator of the statistical robustness of the differences we observe, and we are interested in patterns in the difference of means even when they don’t reach conventional levels of statistical significance.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nick Baxter-Moore

Dr Nick Baxter-Moore is an associate professor of Communication, Popular Culture, and Film, and an associate dean of Social Sciences, at Brock University in St. Catharines, ON.

Munroe Eagles

Dr Munroe Eagles is director of the Canadian Studies Academic Program and a professor of Political Science at the University at Buffalo–State University of New York.

Racquel Maxwell

Dupinder Aheer, Racquel Maxwell, Lisa-Anne Pilkey, and Kimmy Samra are or were graduate students in the Joint MA in Canadian–American Studies being offered at Brock and UB.