The Unanticipated Consequences of Fewer Politicians: Bill 81, Federalism, and Constituency Party Organization in Ontario
Bibliographic record
Abstract
En Ontario, depuis l’entrée en vigueur de la Loi réduisant le nombre de députés, en 1999, les circonscriptions provinciales et fédérales sont identiques. Cette loi avait pour objectif de permettre de réduire les coûts et d’accroître l’efficacité de l’administration ; mais elle a également eu d’importants effets imprévus sur l’organisation des partis politiques ontariens. Dans cet article, j’examine d’abord l’introduction de la Loi. Je présente ensuite le compte rendu de 60 interviews que j’ai menées avec des responsables d’associations de circonscription de différents partis, dont 7 qui faisaient déjà ce travail avant l’entrée en vigueur de la Loi. En faisant des comparaisons entre les associations de circonscription de l’Ontario et du Nouveau-Brunswick (où les circonscriptions fédérales et provinciales sont différentes), je démontre que l’existence de circonscriptions provinciales et fédérales identiques facilite l’intégration des partis politiques fédéraux et provinciaux et leur coopération dans les circonscriptions, parce que, sur les plans de la géographie et de l’écologie humaine, les contextes sur la base desquels les partis fédéraux et provinciaux se structurent sont alors les mêmes, et parce que le nombre d’intervenants est réduit. On peut donc considérer la Loi réduisant le nombre de députés comme l’exemple d’une loi qui comporte d’importants effets imprévus, et c’est en évaluant la Loi de ce point de vue que je conclus l’étude. The Fewer Politicians Act (FPA), 1999 (Ontario) led to the creation of identical national and provincial electoral constituencies in the province. While the bill was intended by the provincial Conservative government to reduce costs and increase efficiency, the FPA has also had substantial unanticipated consequences for political party organizations in Ontario. I first review the introduction of the FPA and, second, draw on 60 interviews with party constituency association officials, including seven long-term participants with experience prior to the introduction of the FPA, and make a comparison of associations in Ontario and New Brunswick (where boundaries are not identical) to demonstrate that congruent boundaries facilitate integration and cooperation between national and provincial political parties in the constituencies. Congruent riding boundaries do so by merging the geographic and ecological contexts that both national and provincial party organizations structure themselves in response to, and by reducing the number of actors participating in national-provincial cooperation. The FPA can therefore be understood as a case study of legislation containing important unanticipated consequences, and I conclude the article by evaluating the FPA from this perspective.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".