Questioning the use of ‘local democracy’ as a discursive strategy for political mobilization in Los Angeles, Montreal and Toronto
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Between 1997 and 2002, homeowners in various parts of Los Angeles sought to secede from the City. At the same time, in Toronto, the province of Ontario forced the amalgamation of six municipalities forming a new megacity of 2.4 million. Residents mobilized for several months. In 2000, the province of Quebec forced the merger of 28 local municipalities in Montreal, forming a new city of 1.8 million. Angst came mostly from suburban Anglophone municipalities, where it was felt mergers would affect linguistic privileges. In the three cases, but stemming from different positions on the Left‐Right political spectrum, social actors claimed more local autonomy ‘in the name of local democracy’. Comparing these cases where institutional reforms and claims for local autonomy captured the political agenda, the article asks whether the use of ‘local democracy’ as a legitimizing tool for territorial claims may point to the emergence of a new generalized discursive strategy. Comparing variations in interpretations, and locating them in their respective local political cultures and in relation to the political positioning of claiming groups, highlights the processes by which socio‐political movements mobilize residents to their cause while avoiding accusations of NIMBYism. In the end, the article questions the moral tone attached to the expression ‘local democracy’.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".