Bibliographic record
Abstract
Society-centred approaches to federalism help us to explain why multinational federations tend to be more decentralized than mono-national federations. Simply stated, the theory of congruence suggests that federal states with deep societal divisions endure greater centrifugal impulses while federal states with limited societal divisions experience greater centripetal inclinations (Erk 2007; Simeon 2002). In part, the explanation turns on the desire of subnational communities to maintain a greater degree of self-rule by expanding their policy autonomy in various fields (Beland and Lecours 2005). National minorities therefore exert pressure upon the federal institutions and pull power away from the central state into the hands of subnational governments thus generating a higher degree of decentralization that manifests in particular policy sectors. There are two implications that emerge from this argument. First, that policy sectors in a multinational federation should demonstrate greater structural decentralization than those in a mono-national setting. Second, that multinational federations should demonstrate greater internal policy diversity than their mono-national counterparts. My paper sets out to probe the validity of these implications by taking a focused assessment of a specific policy field in two contrasting federations: the elementary and secondary education sector in Canada and the United States. The findings presented here are both unexpected and interesting. First, while education in Canada demonstrates greater decentralization in that the national government plays only a small role in the sector, in the US, the local level exerts greater influence over the policy process, which increases the degree of structural decentralization in the American case. Second, in contrast to our expectations, Canada demonstrates less internal policy variation than the US despite the presence of a powerful subnational Francophone minority. These findings suggest that the impact of societal divisions is not monolithic and that centripetal and centrifugal impulses interact with other variables such as the strategies used by actors to achieve their policy goals and the timing of the introduction of particular policies.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".