Ideas and Welfare Reform in Saskatchewan: Entitlement, Workfare or Activation?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Many provinces have enacted substantial reforms of their social assistance regime in the 1990s. However, we know surprisingly little about the ideas that underlie welfare reform in Canada. In particular, few empirical studies have directly examined the ideas of policy actors. This article presents a retrospective case study of a major policy initiative, namely Saskatchewan'sBuilding Independence(BI), and examines its alignment with three paradigms of social assistance. Data come primarily from interviews with policy actors. This study concludes that the policy ideas informing BI align closely with the activation paradigm but also share some similarities with the entitlement and workfare paradigms. The significance of this finding is then discussed in light of three issues: 1) Aboriginal people, 2) the perspective of social assistance clients, and 3) “Third Way” ideology. This article concludes with a research agenda on ideas and policy change.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".