In Search of the Qualitative Clear Majority: Democratic Experimentalism and the Quebec Secession Reference
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article attempts to marry direct democratic deliberation with the enforcement of important constitutional norms in the context of a real-life policy question. The question is the secession of Quebec. The author argues that a referendum is neither the most legitimate nor the most effective way to address the issue. The debate over Quebec's future needs to be reoriented by reference to the broad normative framework set out by the Supreme Court of Canada in the Secession Reference, combined with a renewed democratic process. The author introduces an innovative non-Canadian constitutional model called "democratic experimentalism," which seeks to ensure legitimacy, participation, and accountability within heterogeneous, complex democratic systems as a fresh perspective on Canada's troubled federalism debate. The author concludes that democratic experimentalism is compatible with Canada's constitutional values and traditions, and with the standard of the "clear qualitative majority" vote set down by the Supreme Court of Canada. Equally, the Secession Reference approach contains within it an important new understanding of how pluralist democracies globally should approach fundamental constitutional questions.
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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 | 0.025 | 0.032 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| 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".