<i>Comparative Federalism and Intergovernmental Agreements: Analyzing Australia, Canada, Germany, South Africa, Switzerland and the United States (Routledge Series in Federal Studies)</i>, by Jeffrey Parker.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Federalism is intrinsically a political landscape of intergovernmental agreement. While study of the reasons for, and dynamics and values of federalism is rich, ongoing and often deeply and productively contested, it can be taken for granted that at their heart, the defining histories of federations mean they are based on some form of foedus or compact between different political communities and territories. This makes it all the more surprising, as argued by Jeffrey Parker in this clear and accessible translation of his University of Western Ontario doctoral thesis, that there have been few efforts to study intergovernmental agreements and their formation, as a general phenomenon and in a systematic, comparative way, across modern federations. As a result, Comparative Federalism and Intergovernmental Agreements provides a new, rich baseline for understanding and comparing some key factors bearing upon the numbers and types of intergovernmental agreement being forged in federal systems today. It is a valuable addition to any library on federalism and a worthy inclusion in the Routledge Series in Federal Studies. The study seeks to make sense of the different quantities and patterns of agreement-making across six well-known but important federations (Australia, Canada, Germany, South Africa, Switzerland, and the United States), by mapping the number of “national agreements” formed between 1945 and 2008, against seven different institutional variables that are theorized as having explanatory relevance for country differences in the amount of agreement formation. Importantly, national agreements as defined for this study include horizontal agreements (purely between subnational governments, without central government involvement) in addition to vertical ones (p. 8); they are defined as a formal, written agreement involving at least 90 per cent of the country’s subnational governments, and concerned with a “single policy project”.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.016 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".