Understanding the Dynamics of Political Dysfunction: A Comparative Analysis of Legislatures in Canada and the United States
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the primary categories of dysfunction in the Canadian and American legislatures. The central purpose of this comparative analysis is to explore the range of phenomena associated with legislative dysfunction in both the Canadian Parliament and the United States Congress. The Canadian and American cases are compared for the insights that two different institutional settings and political cultures can provide into the emergence of an interplay among dimensions of dysfunction. My intention is to fill the void of thorough literature on this subject, most specifically in Canada, by categorizing the wide scope of sources of legislative dysfunction into three main classifications - Institutional, Ideological, and Sociological. Two central findings emerge from the analysis. First, the differentiation of institutional mechanisms and legislative processes between Canada and the United States produces distinct sources of national-level legislative dysfunction. Second, despite these institutional differences, the two nations largely share ideological and sociological sources of dysfunction. Evidence from the literature suggests that despite utilizing two distinct systems of government, the two countries exhibit some noteworthy similarities in this regard. The analysis will make use of many sub-variables and contemporary issues that are present in the legislatures in order to illustrate the extent to which dysfunction persists. After providing background and justification for these three main categories, I examine how they interact, and their effect on the functionality of the legislatures in both nations.
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 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 | 0.004 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.017 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".