The Problem of the 'Lame Duck' Government: A Critique of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Under the UK Fixed-term Parliaments Act, apart from a motion of no confidence, the only way to obtain a dissolution is by an absolute majority of at least two-thirds of the House of Commons. However, it might be possible for a motion of no confidence to be engineered by the government against itself. This would seem to defeat the purpose of the Act, and ought only to be permitted if the government is no longer capable of acting because of lack of support in the House of Commons. Control on the exercise of this power should therefore lie with the courts. The Canadian Constitution is insufficiently similar here, but the German Constitution offers a possible model for judicial control. It allows for governments feeling themselves unable to act to ask for a vote of confidence, intending to suffer a defeat leading to dissolution of the Bundestag; and this can be challenged in court proceedings.
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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 | 0.020 | 0.033 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.064 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.027 | 0.025 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".