SACU at centenary: theory and practice of democratising regionalism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Southern African Customs Union (SACU) agreement signed in 2002 purported to change the predominance of South African power within the institution to give other member states greater representation, thus increasing the democratic credibility of SACU. This article explores changes to decision-making procedures in SACU resulting from the 2002 Agreement and considers the extent to which the institution has thereby democratised. The paper considers the meaning of democracy in the context of supranational regional institutions before reviewing the history of SACU in terms of decision-making processes and power relations between member states. The paper argues that while democratisation of institutions implies greater legitimacy and thus longevity, the historical trajectory of SACU means that moves towards democratisation have served rather to destabilise the institution, notwithstanding the incomplete implementation of recommended democratisation measures.
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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 | 0.028 | 0.028 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.093 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
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".