Conceptual stretching and the foreign imposition of democracy: lessons from Venezuela
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper addresses the conceptual stretching of democracy by its foreign imposition and is unpacked in three sections. The first includes a brief historiography of the conceptual debate surrounding democracy, in which two main schools of thought will be sketched. Minimal definitions are explored through the work of Joseph Schumpeter and maximal ones through that of Robert Dahl. The second evokes Venezuela’s recent political history to illustrate how the United States has, at different times, employed various definitions and standards of democracy in intercourse with the Venezuelan regime. In particular, el Caracazo and the failed 2002 coup attempt are considered. The third seeks to establish how US oscillation between standards erodes the value in democracy’s reference points, and draw out some of the implications of this for academics in terms of the broader crisis in meaning brought on by globalization and intimated by Giovanni Sartori’s concerns over conceptual stretching. By way of conclusion the paper considers Piki Ish-Shalom’s call for a recommitment to Gramscian hegemony by academics, and the establishment of a “criteria of reasonableness” for assessing definitions of democracy. The extent to which academics are capable of contributing to Gramscian hegemony, or normativity, is briefly contemplated. It is argued that by insisting on the common will as the basis of democracy, as opposed to circumnavigating it with a naïve proceduralism inherent to minimal definitions, maximal concepts of democracy are better suited to contribute to the establishment of such a “criteria of reasonableness”.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| 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".