The Consensus School, Its Critics, and Welfare Policy: A Study of American Political Discourse
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the debate between the “consensus” school of American politics and its various critics, all participants have shown themselves capable of shedding light on different historical periods or particular political conflicts; and, of course, given the complexity of public discourse, many American political controversies lend themselves to elucidation by more than one of them. This paper's purpose is to suggest yet a further way of interpreting American political discourse, one that carries the capacity to illuminate a kind of discursive structure in American politics that goes undiscerned by both the consensus school and its critics. The paper illustrates this alternative approach by using it to interpret discourse leading up to and following the 1996 welfare reforms. It concludes by suggesting that since welfare debate lends itself well to this interpretation, the question of whether other American political debates might also do so is a worthwhile project for further research.
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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 | 0.020 | 0.032 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".