Varieties of federalism, institutional legacies, and social policy: Comparing old‐age and unemployment insurance reform in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Béland D, Myles J. Varieties of federalism, institutional legacies, and social policy: Comparing old‐age and unemployment insurance reform in Canada With reference to Canada, this article explores the politics of reform affecting two social insurance programs: Employment Insurance (EI) and the Canada Pension Plan (CPP). Comparing these two large, yet institutionally distinct, social insurance schemes underscores how institutional differences in policy legacies and governance among social programs create distinct obstacles and opportunities for reform in federal countries. Drawing on historical institutionalism and emphasizing the types of federalism and decision making specific to EI and CPP, the article explains key political differences between these two programs. Focusing on reforms enacted in the 1990s, the article explores the institutional obstacles and opportunities for policy change in EI and CPP, which offers insight into how these programs could change in the future. We show that different forms of federal governance pointing to the “varieties of federalism” and, more generally, the institutional and territorial logics embedded in these two programs create different obstacles and opportunities for reform.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".