The Search for Good Government: Understanding the Paradox of Italian Democracy. By Filippo Sabetti. Montreal: McGill–Queens University Press, 2000. 288p. $34.95.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Filippo Sabetti has written an important book, not just for specialists in Italian politics, but also for those more generally interested in comparative politics. Poor government performance has often been associated with the Italian state, so much so that foreign scholars often used Italy as an ideal locale to probe the seminal causes of political pathology. Edward Banfield's (1958) The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, for example, attributed poor political performance to the particular beliefs and attitudes of Italians, to an inadequate moral basis he identified as “amoral familism.” The village Banfield studied, Chiaromonte (which he called Montegrano), soon became a model for “backward societies” in the comparative literature and later was woven into game theoretic concerns, such as the tragedy of the commons and the prisoner's dilemma. Banfield's “culturalist” approach was later refined in Robert Putnam's (1993) Making Democracy Work. Rather than condemning all Italy to pathological status, as Banfield's Montegrano writ large, Putnam compared the “unsuccessful” South with the civic-minded North, where a density of associations and an abundance of “social capital” not only made “democracy work,” but also contributed to economic prosperity. Putnam later extended this analysis of associability and social capital to the United States, most famously in his work on “bowling alone.”
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.006 |
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".