Bibliographic record
Abstract
Marjorie Castle and Ray Taras. Democracy in Poland. Second Edition. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002. xx, 291 pp. Tables. Figures. Notes. Selected Bibliography. Index. $85.00, cloth. $30.00, paper.Democracy in Poland is more than an updated second edition of the earlier Consolidating Democracy in Poland (1995) by Ray Taras, where the author systematically applied a sophisticated conceptual crisis, choice and change framework derived from Almond, Flanagan and Mundt (1973). This conceptual and theoretical focus, for better or worse, is lacking in Democracy in Poland, which is distinguished by a clearly empiricist bent with its typical advantages and disadvantages. Unburdened by theoretical concerns, the authors provide a richly textured interpretation of Polish post-communist politics as revolving around a cultural-historical axis pitting ex-communists against ex-Solidarity opposition-in Poland conceptualized as left and right respectively. Taras and Castle, deriving their framework from Elster et al. (Institutional Design in Post-Communist Societies, 1998), recognize that this identity-based axis is dysfunctional and volatile, leading to avoidance of compromise (p. 152) and resulting in a sharp disjuncture between politics of the government and the politics of the street (p. 254). Consequently, they hope that the long-term evolution of Polish politics will be towards more interest-based cleavages, allowing for an effective representation of the material interests of the less fortunate (p. 254). This judgment, which seems to represent a consensus in the literature, is open to question as one can claim that identity-based cleavages have prevented potential anti-economic reform coalitions based on interest from coalescing in Poland and other post-communists polities. However, as a result of the book's focus on the particular, this and other conceptual and comparative issues are not addressed.The book shines in its extensive treatment of the (ex-communist) Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) and the path that led the ex-communists from roundtable talks and a near political disappearance in 1989 to their domination of the Polish political scene by the 2001 parliamentary elections. Castle and Taras provide an insightful interpretation of the SLD's success as, paradoxically, a function of a dialectical interplay between the party's vulnerabilities (liability to de-communization and relatively narrow core clientele) and assets (material and organizational) that allowed it to become a pragmatic electoral machine. The paradoxical conclusion one can derive from this interpretation is that by pushing de-communization, the Polish anti-communist right stimulated among the ex-communists a siege mentality that was essential to their unity and success. The authors consequently assert that only when the historical-cultural cleavage between former communists and former opposition becomes less relevant, the SLD may lose hold on its captive clientele (p. …
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.004 |
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".