Building a Better Referendum: Linking Mini-Publics and Mass Publics in Popular Votes
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
Popular votes and mini-publics are both increasingly implemented as elected officials seek to build legitimacy for decisions, although these democratic innovations suffer from their own democratic deficits. Popular votes often do not live up to deliberative ideals while mini-publics may be limited in their capacities for inclusion and decision-making. Pairing these two devices can improve deliberation in referendum campaigns, while tying mini-publics to a clear and inclusive process for decision-making. Empirical studies of this strategy have found both successes and shortcomings. Little attention has been given to the possibility that the success of mini-publics in influencing public opinion is determined, in part, by the underlying design of the popular vote process. I outline how multi-stage popular votes could institutionalize an iterated dialogue between the micro-level mini-public and the mass, voting public to produce distinct democratic benefits. This serves as a model of how a systems approach to democratic theory can guide institutional design to address democratic functions of empowered inclusion, collective agenda and will formation, and collective decision-making.
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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