Testing the Liberal Multiculturalist Hypothesis: Normative Theories and Social Science Evidence WILL KYMLICKA Queen’s University Starting in the 1960s, a number of Western democracies embarked on new experiments in accommodating indigenous peoples, national minor- ities and immigrant groups. Although these “experiments in multicultur- alism” have always been the subject of intense public debate, there was surprisingly little academic attention to them in the 1970s and 1980s. It was only in the 1990s that multiculturalism became a major area of aca- demic inquiry, picked up initially by political theorists. 1 Indeed , for much of the 1990s, the academic literature on multiculturalism was heavily nor- mative, dominated by political philosophers who developed idealized theo- ries of a distinctly liberal–democratic and egalitarian form of multicultural citizenship. These theorists were interested in the question of whether multiculturalism was consistent in principle with their ideal theories of justice—for example, whether multiculturalist claims could be defended from within Rawls’s theory of liberal justice—and attempted to show how familiar liberal–democratic principles of individual freedom and distrib- utive justice could be invoked to give a principled defense of certain mul- ticulturalist claims. These normative philosophical accounts of multiculturalism have proven quite influential, shaping debates on multiculturalism not just within the field of philosophy, but more widely in academia and indeed in public life. A good example is the remarkable international influence of CharlesTaylor’s 1992 essay, “Multiculturalism and the Politics of Rec- ognition,” translated into numerous languages and cited in discussions of multiculturalism from the isolated highlands of Bolivia to the teeming streets of Paris or Tokyo. Acknowledgments: Thanks to Francois Boucher for research help with this article. Will Kymlicka, Department of Philosophy, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON K7L 3N6, kymlicka@queensu.ca. Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue canadienne de science politique 43:2 (June/juin 2010) 257–271 doi:10.10170S0008423910000041 © 2010 Canadian Political Science Association ~l’Association canadienne de science politique! and0et la Société québécoise de science politique