Presidents, Parliaments, and Legal Change: Quantifying the Effect of Political Systems in Comparative Environmental Law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent frustration with the scope and pace of environmental legislative reform in the United States has prompted suggestions that the federal government incorporate parliamentary methods, like those used in Canada, to decrease the number and scale of veto points and more readily pass environmental protections.This Article argues that the United States should be extremely cautious about adopting such reforms.While the Canadian approach to legislating in this field may be more certain and efficient than that of the United States, that approach can just as easily be used to diminish environmental protections as to enhance them.Advocacy for such reforms assumes that the central characteristics of environmental legislation in the United States-specific legislative commands, limits on executive power, and agency accountability-are a product of cultural norms resulting from political distrust and will therefore remain stable influences in legislative drafting.The authors argue that it would be more accurate to attribute these central characteristics to endogenous factors related to the U.S. presidential system, rather than political culture.Using both a quantitative and qualitative comparative assessment of Canadian and U.S. legislation, the authors conclude that while both countries use similar types of statutes to ensure environmental protections, their unique political systems structure their content and use differently.I.
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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 | 0.018 | 0.085 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".