“Citizens As Analysts” Redux: Revisiting Aaron Wildavsky on Public Participation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1979, Aaron Wildavsky published a lengthy paper called “Citizens as Analysts” in which he developed his thoughts on public participation. For today’s scholars and practitioners from the health sector, this paper is intriguing and attractive. It is intriguing because the author is clear that the ultimate goal of public participation is not the exercise of direct political authority, but instead the development of better policies and more sustainable institutions. While people don’t need to participate in every single decision to comply, they need to feel that overall, the process has been designed to take their interests into account. Wildavsky’s paper is also attractive because its author dealt upfront with the normative aspects of public participation research. In his view, public participation is one example of a teleological social process, defined by its ends rather than by its initial conditions. Contrary to some current approaches to public deliberation, we are invited to pay more attention to the outcomes of the process than to the process itself.
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 | 0.029 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.069 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.023 | 0.030 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.013 | 0.023 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".