If Men Were Angels...: Should the Checks & Balances System Include Electoral Reform Juries?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Electoral Fundamentalism is the belief that unfettered competition for voter support among candidates for an elected office is adequate to maximize social welfare. It is analogous to Market Fundamentalism, the belief that unfettered competition for customers among private companies is adequate to maximize social welfare. Mixed Democracy, in contrast, is the belief that the quality of democracy can only be maximized if competition among “vertical agents” (such as candidates for an elected office) is managed by “horizontal agents” (officials from other branches of government). The Framers of the U.S. Constitution designed a system of mixed democracy: vertical and horizontal accountability mixed together. But they designed their system of horizontal accountability, popularly known as the “checks and balances system,” to enhance democracy writ large, not small; specifically, they generally granted elected representatives wide latitude to design the institutions and rules setting the terms for their own re-election - as long as they didn’t interfere with the powers of other branches of government. To rectify this type of type of omission in current systems of horizontal accountability, the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Ontario each held a “Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform” in the mid-2000s. These randomly selected public bodies are only one type of a larger class of randomly selected public bodies called “electoral reform juries,” which can be categorized along a continuum from low- to high-cost formats, including the citizen assembly jury as an intermediate-cost format. More institutional creativity is needed to realize the full democratic potential of such public bodies. The external elected official bias and member self-selection bias associated with the the citizen assembly format are not intrinsic to electoral reform juries but only their particular implementations to date.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.013 | 0.039 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.022 | 0.005 |
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".