Definitional Debates, Mechanisms and Canada: Comment on Will Kymlicka’s article: “Solidarity in Diverse Societies”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Does immigrant-origin diversity undermine states' willingness to engage in broad social redistribution, from enacting "living" minimum wage laws and progressive taxation, to providing public benefits in order to mitigate economic inequality?In asking this question, Will Kymlicka (2015), one of the staunchest defenders of multiculturalism, takes seriously the question of whether recognition of cultural, ethnic and religious diversity comes at the expense of redistribution.Not surprisingly, Kymlicka makes a strong pitch for a multicultural welfare state, which he distinguishes from neoliberal multiculturalism, exclusionary welfare chauvinism or assimilatory neoliberalism 1 (Kymlicka, 2015).My own normative viewand my empirical researchis in strong support with Kymlicka's (2015), position on the value of combining recognition and redistribution.I also agree with his skepticism as to whether existing data reveal any evidence that multicultural policies generate or exacerbate welfare state retrenchment, and in his prescription, namely, the construction of multicultural, liberal nationalism (Bloemraad, 2006; Bloemraad, 2012).Multicultural nationalism is presumably distinct from alternative national solidarities around more exclusionary, homogeneous cultural identities, or a neoliberal, cosmopolitan approach to global membership that urges the erasure of nationalism altogether.Given my sympathies, this commentary is not so much a challenge to Kymlicka's (2015), normative argument as a social scientific appraisal of how he does not go far enough in elaborating the mechanisms presumed to produce the progressive's dilemma.This is problematic, because it means that Kymlicka also does not theorize sufficiently an answer to the question of why multicultural, liberal nationalism might address the mechanisms that erode the welfare state in a context of diversity.I will attempt to sketch out some possible answers and, in doing so, I will quibble with the terminology of "solidarity" as compared to "social membership," both terms used by Kymlicka in his article.I engage in this definitional debate not to split hairs, but to elucidate some silences in the redistribution/recognition trade-off that need to be addressed moving forward.I finish by speculating how much experience with the Canadian case, the epitome of solidarity through multicultural nationalism in the global North, shapes (and perhaps blinds) the views of both Kymlicka and myself on what is possible elsewhere.
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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 | 0.015 | 0.032 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.028 |
| Open science | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.036 | 0.045 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.004 |
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".