M. GALLAGHER and P. MITCHELL (eds), The Politics of ElectoralSystems, Oxford University Press, 2005, xxvi + 662 pp., £75, ISBN 0 19 925756 6.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In his review of elections in Canada, John Courtney (2004) identified ‘five pillars’ of the system: the franchise, electoral districting, voter registration, election management and the voting system.1 He concluded that all was well there with the first four of these, but noted ‘formidable criticisms’ of the fifth—although he was not prepared to commit himself to a proposal for electoral reform, which he considered had to be set firmly in the context of democratic theory. Theory is rarely called upon by (non-academic) advocates for and against electoral reform, however: to them, pragmatic self-interest is the determining influence on their attitudes to electoral system design and change (as illustrated by the reforms of the Italian system pushed through by Berlusconi’s government in October 2005, from which his party/alliance will almost certainly be the major beneficiary). Berlusconi’s coalition lost the April 2006, general election by a very small margin. They accept the importance of the electoral system as an influence on the structure of political life in a country, and so believe that change—according to their point of view—could have either positive or negative effects on the nature and quality of governance. Is that belief sustained by available evidence? Given that a wide variety of electoral systems is used around the world, it should be possible to address that question and reach some, at least tentative, conclusions about the relationships between electoral systems and democratic practice.
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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.046 | 0.028 |
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".