Interpreting National Trajectories with Gellner, Anderson and Smith: The Case of Quebec
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson and Anthony Smith have had a significant influence in debates and theoretical discussions concerning the understanding of nations and nationalism. However, one should not accept such classic theories ipso facto without questioning their theoretical assumptions. Hence, we find that one way to better understand the way these theories are still relevant (or not) for the understanding of nations and na-tionalism is to confront their explanatory potential with a specific case. This is precisely the main objective, and therefore contribution, of this paper. We thus focus on a “problematic” or “abnormal” case relative to a more general understanding of what a nation and nationalism ought to be. We look at the Canadian province of Quebec, a minority nation that possesses its own independent institutional and societal culture, while evolving within a more encom-passing sovereign state — the Canadian federation. Our goal is less to provide an exhaustive account of socio-historical settings than to use Gellner, Anderson and Smith’s theories to provide a fair interpretation of the way Quebec has evolved as a minority nation within the Canadian federation. To our knowledge, no other study has applied a similar framework — these theories of nationalism and their testing — to the Quebec case.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".