Regions, Regionalism and Regional Differences in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract. This article contests the concepts of “region” and “regionalism” in Canadian political science. There is widespread agreement among observers of politics in Canada that the country is divided in politically consequential ways along regional lines. There is little agreement, however, about what causes these regional divisions or, indeed, about where the lines of regional division should be drawn. As a result, rival explanations for regional differences in Canada are commonly tested against different evidence arising from different definitions of region. This article argues that “region” should be conceptualized in generalizable terms as the physical space that surrounds an individual, and that “regionalism” should be conceptualized as an affective attachment to the people, places and institutions within a geographic area. Regionalism, from this perspective, is a concept that plays an important role in driving regional differences in opinion differences rather than simply describing these differences. The article applies this argument to a study of regional differences in Canadian opinions about government involvement in the economy. The empirical analysis points to the need for the development of concepts that can be generalized across explanations and levels of analysis. Even on the single issue analyzed here, regional differences appeared to have different causes in different regions, and these different causes seemed to operate at different levels of analysis. Résumé. Cet article questionne le bien-fondé des concepts de “région” et de “régionalisme” tels qu'utilisés dans la littérature en science politique au Canada . La plupart des politologues s'entendent pour souligner l'importance des clivages régionaux dans la politique canadienne. Par contre, on s'entend moins sur l'identification des sources de ces divisions régionales, ainsi que sur la délimitation de ces différentes régions. Par conséquent, les études scientifiques des facteurs possibles qui sous-tendent les clivages régionaux sont souvent difficile a comparé puisqu'elles utilisent différentes définitions du concept de “région”. Cet article défend l'idée que le concept de “région” devrait être limité à décrire l'espace physique où se situe un individu. Par ailleurs le concept de “régionalisme” devrait inclure l'idée d'un attachement affectif aux personnes, endroits et institutions d'un emplacement géographique donné. Le régionalisme, dans cette perspective, doit être compris comme une cause des clivages régionaux, et non comme une simple description de ces différences. Cet article propose l'utilisation de cette distinction conceptuelle à une étude des différences régionales quant à l'opinion publique sur le rôle que devrait avoir le gouvernement dans l'économie. L'analyse empirique démontre l'importance de développer des concepts qui peuvent être généralisés au point de s'appliquer à différentes explications et niveaux d'analyse. Si on se fie au seul enjeu étudié dans cet article, les clivages régionaux semblent avoir différentes causes dans chacune des régions, et ces causes semblent opérer à différents niveaux d'analyse.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 |
| 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 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".