Mediating between state and citizens: the significance of the informal politics of third-party representation in the global south
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article argues that we should take more seriously the role of intermediaries in relationships between states and citizens in the global south. More specifically it holds that the practice of mediation, the third party representation of citizens to states and vice versa, is a widespread and important political practice in this context. Largely distinct from the contentious politics and popular mobilisation of social movements, mediation is more a politics of negotiation and bargaining by representatives. Developed as an emergent analysis from multiple case studies, mediation is a broad concept that includes practices that at other times might be described as lobbying, clientelism and coercion, but that we conceptualise in terms of claiming legitimacy to speak for the poor and marginalised, and theorise in terms of a democratic deficit between formal political institutions and these groups. In addition to identifying different kinds of mediators, the article categorises mediation in terms of the orientation and nature of various mediatory practices. Lastly, the article identifies at least three explanations for mediation including the endurance of pre-democratic political relations and practices, new forms of social exclusion in post-colonial democracies and the erosion of state authority brought about by neo-liberal policies and globalisation.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
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; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
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".