The Crown as Proxy for the State? Opening up the Black Box of Constitutional Monarchy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite its centrality to the constitutions of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, the Crown remains enigmatic, misunderstood and difficult to define. Is it the government, the state, the Queen, a ‘corporation sole’, an illusory construct and mask for executive power, or a shapeshifting entity that combines all these features? Legal scholars and social scientists have written extensively on the problems of theorising the state yet these literatures tend to work in isolation. This article brings together different disciplinary and empirical perspectives to analyse the Crown as an embodied form of statehood. While the Crown is typically seen as a metonym for the state, I argue that these concepts do not map the same semantic terrain. Moving beyond the ontological question of ‘what is the Crown’, I suggest we focus instead on what the Crown does, and what the Crown idea makes possible politically and constitutionally. Borrowing from Mitchell (1999), I call these ‘Crown effects’. If the state is the ‘greatest of artificial persons’, as Maitland famously argued, what can be said for the Crown? Using examples from New Zealand, I illustrate why personifying the state in the figure of a monarch is both problematic yet expedient.
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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 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.049 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".