Designing Europe: Comparative Lessons from the Federal Experience
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Few dispute that one of the most pressing issues for the future of the Europe is the question of constitutional design. To what extent will unanimity voting in the Council of Ministers replaced by qualified majority voting and how should these votes be distributed by country? Should the European Parliament assume a meaningful policy making role? How should the Commission be reformed? Generally this debate uses the existing and past experience of the European Union as a basis for future reform. Comparisons with other political systems and in particular with those systems that devolve power to states, provinces and regions are rarely attempted. Yet with EMU in place and further deepening of EU responsibilities scheduled, much can be learnt from the experience of other systems and especially established federations. Designing Europe shows how in five cases - the US, Canada, Australia, Germany and Switzerland - the rules established in founding constitutions greatly influenced the ways in which federal-state relations evolved. In some cases, for example Canada, these rules proved inappropriate for the balance of provincial and central power, while in others, such as Switzerland, more favourable institutional rules prevailed. In all cases political parties have played a major role in brokering this balance of central and regional power. And in all cases intergovernmental fiscal relations have been central to the debate. Designing Europe concludes that because, like Switzerland, the EU is both highly decentralised and heterogeneous, super-majoritarian decision rules should apply to EU decision making. In addition further checks on central power should be provided through a carefully coded constitution amendments to which could only be amended via popular approval in member states.
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.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
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 it