Is Canada a Westminster or Consensus Democracy? A Brief Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Because of its mix of institutions and practices, the fundamental nature of the government of Canada is a problematic case for scholars. A reconsideration of the Canadian polity needs to be undertaken because of events over the past quarter century, such as the development of executive federalism; the repatriation of a revised Constitution from the supervision of the United Kingdom over the objections of Quebec; the rejection of the constitutional settlements in the Meech Lake Accord (1990) and the Charlottetown Accord (1992); increased attention to the claims of Aboriginal peoples; increased movements for relaxing party discipline in Parliament and for a more proportional electoral system; increased controversy over the use of judicial review in interpreting the Charter of Rights and Freedoms; and, above all, the ongoing problem of national unity, especially stemming from the Quebec separatist movement.An earlier version of this paper was presented at a conference of the Association of Canadian Studies, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Thanks to Arend Lijphart for data and comments.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".