Bibliographic record
Abstract
Global levels of democracy are higher than ever before, and democratic principles are now institutionalized as a world cultural norm. Nevertheless, a number of countries continue to feature governing systems that restrict political rights. Against this backdrop, I revisit traditional claims by world-system theory regarding the impact of the core/periphery hierarchy on national political systems. In doing so, I draw attention to the uneven character of democratic growth across world-system zones. Using an updated trichotomous measure of world-system position, and drawing from Freedom House and Polity IV ratings of democracy, I construct an annual time-series dataset producing a maximum of 5445 observations across 161 countries during the 1972–2008 period. Employing a series of random-effects tobit models with year-by-covariate interaction terms, I compare democratic growth among nations in the core, semiperiphery, and periphery. The results indicate significant gaps in democracy between core and non-core nations that are not dissipating over time, and that are perhaps growing slightly larger. In a series of robustness checks, I find that using an alternative measure of world-system position, an alternative measure of democracy, and an alternative estimation strategy produce similar results. In sum, despite the global spread of democracy, world-system boundaries remain fundamental in hindering cross-national convergence.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".