Upper Houses and the Problem of Elective Dictatorship
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We live in an elective dictatorship, absolute in theory, if hitherto thought tolerable in practice.These words were used by Lord Hailsham, a veteran Conservative politician in Britain, to describe the reality of government in his country in 1976. The British Parliament, he added, was controlled by a 'government machine' and debate in it was becoming 'a ritual dance, sometimes interspersed with catcalls'.Today, Hailsham's words perhaps carry even greater force, not only in Britain but also in Australia, Canada and New Zealand, three other western democracies that adopted the Westminster parliamentary system. If Australians, Canadians and New Zealanders are, like Britons, living under 'elective dictatorships' then how can their elected, single-party 'government machines' be kept in check? That is the key question examined in this book. Political theorists of the past claimed that the upper houses, or 'houses of review', of bicameral Westminster-style parliaments-Britain's House of Lords, the Australian Senate, the Australian State Legislative Councils-offered a solution because they prevented governments from imposing their will upon their peoples without restraint. That, at least, was the nineteenth-century theory. But what is the twenty-first-century reality?This book contains chapters from twenty-one leading international scholars and politicians on the history, the recent performance and the future of upper houses of parliament in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States.Contributors include:The Hon. Bill Hayden, AC, Former Governor-General of AustraliaProfessor John Uhr, Australian National UniversityProfessor Geoffrey Brennan, Australian National UniversityDr. Meg Russell, Constitution Unit, University College LondonMr. Harry Evans, Clerk of the Australian SenateSenator George Brandis, SCSenator John HoggProfessor Paul G. Thomas, University of ManitobaProfessor David C. Docherty, Wilfrid Laurier UniversityMr. Graeme StarrDr. Bruce Stone, University of Western AustraliaProfessor Brian Costar, Swinburne UniversityDr. Clement Macintyre, University of AdelaideProfessor John Williams, University of AdelaideHon. Justice B.H. McPherson, CBE, Former Judge of Appeal of the Supreme Court of QldDr. Janet Ransley, Griffith UniversityProfessor Gerard Carney, Bond UniversityEmeritus Professor Colin A. Hughes, University of Queensland
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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 | 0.020 | 0.035 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.002 |
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".