Participatory Democracy and Decentralization Processes: A Comparison between Marseilles (France), Montreal and Quebec (Canada)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to examine the links between certain processes and forms of decentralization and the emergence of participatory arrangements. More specifically, the paper will address the question: under what conditions are certain forms of decentralization conducive to a genuinely more participatory democracy? The argument rests on a comparison between three participatory designs in Marseille, Montreal and Quebec. Has decentralization encouraged participatory democracy in each of these cases? The comparison deploys two intersecting analytical approaches: - Territorial: These participatory bodies are to various degrees part and parcel of decentralization reforms at different scales (local, regional, and national). Are the participatory bodies explicitly connected to the decentralizing project spelled out in the legislation or are they the consequence of a new opportunity window? What is the interplay of actors (political parties, social movements, civil servants) and at what levels? What strategies does the periphery adopt in order to redesign the projects developed at the centre? How can one explain the fact that they remain at the local or infra-local level, even when they are the product of reforms at the centre? - Historical: the partipatory idea emerged long before the late 1990s. How do decentralizing reforms that offer blueprints of these new sites of participation relate to older projects? Some of the analyses underpinning this paper date back to the 1970s
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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 | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".