Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Populism is a particular type of constitutional pathology; a brand of groupthink in which a leader establishes a direct connection with the people and, by virtue of this connection, is able to govern outside the established constitutional processes of the state. This Article reflects on the interaction between populism and political parties. It argues that one of the roles of political parties is to act as a medium between political elites and the people; a medium that can, or should, enable the people to exercise control over this elite through their membership of parties. Populism therefore presents a threat to the proper operation of political parties, and the proper operation of political parties correspondingly threatens populism. This Article begins by reflecting on the nature of populism. It does not pretend to provide a complete account of that phenomenon, but rather aspires to identify one strand of populist rule: A particular type of connection between the leader and her people. Second, the paper reflects on the constitutional role of political parties. Whilst political parties have often been treated critically in British constitutional scholarship, it will be argued that they are essential to the success of the democratic process: Modern representative democracy cannot function in their absence. Finally, these two sections of the paper will be drawn together: One explanation for the rise of populism is the weakness of political parties, and one way of combating, or mitigating, populism is for the state, and the citizenry, to support and facilitate parties. This Article suggests a correlation between the decline of political parties and the rise of populism, but it cautiously avoids making claims of causation. It could be that the decline of political parties leads to the rise of populism, as voters who are faced with a choice of superannuated parties turn, instead, to charismatic individuals. Or it could be that the rise of populism leads to the decline of political parties, as voters develop a direct relationship with leaders and, as a result, cease to engage with each other within the context of parties. Or, perhaps, these interactions might occur together, forming a feedback loop, with the decline of parties leading to the rise of populism which, in turn, hastens party decay.
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.
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 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".