Prime Minister as Moral Crusader: Stephen Harper's Punitive Turn in Social Policy-making
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Stephen Harper has been Canada’s Prime Minister since 2006, heading three Conservative administrations; two minority governments (2006-08, and 2008-11) and one majority government (2011- to the present). Harper’s time in power has spanned periods of economic growth and surplus federal budgets, through a deep economic recession and budget deficits, to a tentative recovery of the Canadian economy and federal program of general fiscal restraint. Throughout this period of shifting economic and political circumstances, Harper, an intensely partisan and disciplined politician, has dominated his cabinet and parliamentary party as well as defined federal social policy and intergovernmental relations in particular ways. Like other Prime Ministers and governments, the Harper era exhibits a mixed pattern of social policy-making. Thus, although there are certain similarities in policies with previous federal administrations led by Liberal Prime Ministers, Harper’s social policy is distinctive as well. This article advances the argument that Harper’s characteristic approach can be understood in terms of an institutional-punitive conception of social policy. This stern approach to federal social policy-making involves the identification of dangerous persons and threatening behaviours, the elaboration of laws and creation of new offences, and the intensification of legal penalties and punishments. What emerges is the role of Prime Minister as moral crusader in a politics of fear, judgement and regulation. Stephen Harper est le premier ministre du Canada depuis 2006, et il a dirige trois administrations conservatrices: deux gouvernements minoritaires de 2006-2008, et de 2008-2011, et un gouvernement majoritaire de 2011 a aujourd’hui. Ces administrations ont connues des periodes de croissance economique et de budgets federaux excedentaires, ainsi qu’une profonde recession economique, pour arriver enfin a une relance incertaine de l’economie canadienne et a un programme general federal de contraintes budgetaires. Harper est un politicien eminemment partisan et tres discipline, et il a domine son cabinet ainsi que son parti parlementaire au cours de cette periode de conditions economiques et politiques changeantes. Il a egalement redefini la politique sociale federale et les relations intergouvernementales de maniere specifique. Comme d’autres premiers ministres et gouvernements auparavant, l’ere de Harper fait montre d’un melange de motifs de politiques et de gestion sociales. Donc, bien qu’il existe de similarites en politiques sociales avec les administrations federales liberales qui l’ont precedee, la politique social de Harper est tres distincte et cet article propose donc que l’approche caracteristique a Harper peut etre definie comme une politique sociale institutionnelle-punitive. Cette approche severe a propos des politiques sociales federales, incorpore un processus d’identification de personnes dangereuses et de omportements menacants, la creation de nouvelle lois et de nouveaux delits pour les controler, et, l’augmentation des sanctions et peines legales. Le role du premier ministre emerge donc comme celui d’un champion de la moralite, aidee par une politique de peur, de jugement et de reglementation. Mots-clefs: politique sociale federales; conservatisme moral; sciences politiques.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".