Three arenas of struggle: A contextual approach to the constituent power of ‘the people’
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Against recent contributions to the debate about the constituent power of the people, the article proposes to reorient the debate by analytically distinguishing three dominant arenas of political struggle – democratic, social and national – in which the vocabulary of ‘the people’ and its constituent power is invoked. The invocation of the ‘will of the people’ and its constituent power in these arenas is associated with different assumptions, risks and implicit ideational trade-offs that must be laid bare. A contextual approach to constituent power counsels caution in dignifying pro-democratic constitutional transformations with the name of ‘the people’. It invites those who theorize constituent power with social struggles in mind to rebalance their attention to constituent power – and devote more attention to imaginaries and strategies that minimize moral hazards implicit in the vocabulary of peoplehood and to maximize the likelihood of the new order’s survival. Finally, a contextual approach rejects the role for constituent power in national struggles, arguing that constitutional theory is incapable of arbitrating between competing assertions of popular sovereignty. In the final part of the paper, I defend the contextual approach against the theoretical interventions currently on offer, and gesture towards its potential in crafting a provincialized constitutional theory.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.055 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".