From “Restricted” to “Besieged”: The Changing Nature of the Limits to Democracy in Colombia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Colombia's democracy has always been a democracy with adjectives. Recently, references to its “controlled” or “restricted” nature have been replaced in the literature with descriptions of this democracy as “besieged” (Archer 1995) or “under assault” (Kline 1995). The shift in semantics is revealing. In this chapter, we argue that democracy in Colombia is still limited by a series of characteristics that merit the continued use of adjectives. Nevertheless, given that these limits have changed in nature, any adjectives used to characterize the current political regime in that country must be fundamentally different from those employed during the three decades spanning 1958 to 1991. As Collier and Levitsky have pointed out (1997: 432), a good description is indispensable to evaluating the origins and consequences of any political regime. We have adopted the term “besieged” to describe the current state of democracy in Colombia. While previous adjectives emphasized internal or endogenous limits on the political regime, this definition highlights exogenous factors – that is, external forces that make it difficult for democracy to function adequately. During the National Front period, democracy's limitations resulted from restrictions on political participation and political competition. In the present era, its limitations are rooted in the impact of various forces on democracy: the erosion of the state, the expansion of violence, and the rise of powerful extrainstitutional actors who constrain the space needed to consolidate a free democratic playing field.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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".