Federalism and the Politics of Bottom-Up Social Policy Diffusion in the United States, Mexico, and Canada
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
THE FORMATION OF SOCIAL POLICY IDEAS and instruments is a fundamentally spatial process.1 After achieving their goals in one site of policymaking, change agents often actively work across scales and jurisdictional boundaries to enroll new adherents, construct policy “movements,” and consolidate policy norms and paradigms.2 Yet studies of social policy diffusion carry a number of implicit biases about how and where such movements occur. Consistent with the often-employed metaphor of “policy diffusion,” many studies assume that social policy transfer is a horizontal process in which structurally equivalent jurisdictions—national governments, subnational territories, or municipalities—adopt efficient or politically congruous social programs.3 This focus ignores the role of policy actors in mobilizing ideas and instruments across jurisdictions with heterogeneous structural features. A growing number of studies of federal systems, however, suggest that policies pursued by lower levels of government, such as municipalities and states, can diffuse to higher levels of government, including national governments.4
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.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it