Access to information in Canada and the United States : a comparative case study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper compares access to information legislation in the United States and Canada and uses the findings of this comparison to test three theories of policymaking. In particular, the paper uses the comparison to explore the idea that the existence of access to information policies contradicts policymaking theories which stress the autonomy of the state. The paper begins with a detailed comparison of the Canadian and American legislation as it has been interpreted by the courts. This comparison finds that the two policies are very similar but three are some significant differences in the details of the two regimes and that these differences tend to make the Canadian access policy more restrictive than the American. The paper then examines whether these findings can be explained as being consistent with policy making theories which explain policy as being the result of a copying process, of interest group pressure or of institutional forces. In order to better understand the forces behind the legislation the legislative comparison is supplemented by reference to relevant policy papers and evidence from the period of the development of the two acts. The results of the analysis indicate that no one of the three theories is provides an adequate explanation of the two access policies. The legislation was a result of a combination interest group pressure and institutional forces and, in the case of the Canadian legislation, the process of copying also played a key role. The findings also indicate that explanations which stress the role of the state are not inconsistent with a policy that results in weakened state autonomy.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.017 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| 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".