Bibliographic record
Abstract
Democracy is widely accepted today, perhaps as never before, as the most suitable form of government. But what is democracy, and does it always produce good government? There is a tradition in popular thinking and in political science that associates democracy with the existence of competitive elections. This follows the tradition of Schumpeter (1950) and Downs (1957) in public choice. Competitive elections are undoubtedly a necessary condition for democracy. But they are not sufficient for true democracy or for democracy to function reasonably well. For example, the fathers of the American Constitution expressed their fear of factions and of mob sentiments. One problem with competitive elections is that they provide no protection for minorities. A second is that they may not express the long-term interests of the electorate itself, or their attitudes in sober second thought. Yet a third is the well-known Arrow problem of cyclical majorities – perhaps one of the central discoveries of modern public choice. A fourth is the recurring tension between the two principles of government by majority on the one hand and the rule of law on the other. Contemplating the failures of democracy in theory, one early tradition in public choice theorizing was based on the idea that, whatever its failings in theory, democracy works well in practice. This puzzle arose early in public choice theory, and the question, “Why so much stability?” that is, specifically, “Why do democracies appear so much more stable in practice than in theory?
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.534 | 0.332 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; the direct Gemma label and the distilled Codex classifier agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".