Reconsidering the Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform Phenomena: Castoriadis and Radical Citizen Democracy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The British Columbia and Ontario Citizens’ Assemblies on Electoral Reform have justifiably generated much discussion on the part of political theorists, who see in these phenomena the actualization of certain deliberative democratic principles that have traditionally not been able to be affirmed within increasingly corporatized political orders. These phenomena, it is argued, give a form to a relatively new model of representation which emphasizes not the reproduction of an already existent popular will, but rather the critical construction of a potential political will under institutional conditions allowing for adequate knowledge acquisition. It will be argued, however, that such readings are in the final instance limited from a democratic standpoint to the degree that politics is still primarily considered in terms of political competency and rationality. Rather than interpret Citizens’ Assemblies (CAs) as manifestations of a new mode of representation, the article will attempt to read them through the radical democratic prism articulated by Cornelius Castoriadis, emphasizing the CAs’ possible deployment in a germinal project of autonomy which gives an expression to the non-determinate drives of social-historical individuals and communities. The possibility of the CAs contributing to a rejuvenation of the democratic experience is to be located in their shifting of the terms of democracy away from issues of representation and rationality, and toward those of creativity and imagination.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".