The Patronage Effect: Civil Service Reforms, Job-Seeking, and State Formation in Victorian Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Patronage, in the mid-and late-nineteenth century, was central to Canadian politics.This period also witnessed a series of debates concerning the civil service and a range of reforms that attempted to eliminate patronage.This dissertation argues that, more than debates about administration and appointments, these were also struggles over how to construct the ideal civil servant and civil service.These were highly political issues that were beset by processes of inclusion and exclusion, especially with respect to gender, class, and race.In short, these were debates about the many facets of liberal governmentality and state formation in early modern Canada.This dissertation also analyzes letters to federal politicians asking for appointments.Among other things, these documents expressed a range of opinions on how the bureaucracy should be managed, staffed and constructed.Letters asking for patronage also demonstrated how aspiring public servants understood and expected the appointment process to work.These letters reflected what type of people should have access to the civil service, and what type of people the applicants thought they were.As such, they informed and were themselves informed by broader political and administrative debates.These politics of Canadian patronage, I argue, were central to the everyday processes of state formation.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".