"Harper's New Rules" for Government Formation: Fact or Fiction?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When the minority government of Stephen Harper faced a non-confidence motion and likely defeat by an opposition coalition shortly after the 2008 election the Prime Minister argued that a coalition could not legitimately take power without an election. The impending defeat was staved off by prorogation and subsequent events but the so called �New Rules� of the Prime Minister were criticized by constitutional experts who saw them as infringing the established principles of responsible government which allow the Governor General to appoint a new government following an early vote of non-confidence. The Prime Minister�s later claim that the 2011 election was a choice between a Conservative majority or coalition � seemed to reject his own �New Rules� and was seen as evidence of his political expediency. This paper considers the constitutional politics concerning coalition governments that arose, first in 2008 and then again in 2011. It focuses on the question whether, and if so under what circumstances, a coalition can displace a minority government without holding new elections. It surveys the work of both critics and supporters of the �New Rules� and argues that Mr. Harper�s 2008 and 2011 positions are not inconsistent or contradictory.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.010 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".