The Formation and Amendment of Federal Constitutions in a Westminster-Derived Context
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article offers an account of the formation and amendment of federal constitutions in a Westminster-derived or post-Westminster context. The four countries considered are Canada, Australia, India, and the United Kingdom. These countries are chosen for comparison due to their common historical relationship to Britain and the exercise by the British Parliament of sovereign legislative and constitutive authority over their respective territories. While Canada, Australia and India are today constitutionally independent of Britain, and while substantial autonomy has been conferred on the devolved parliaments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom, such independence and autonomy were secured differently in each country. Similarly, the constitutional relationship between the federated polity and its constituent polities in each of these countries has evolved in unique ways. This mixture of “similarity” and “difference” offers an opportunity to isolate the potential effect of particular constitutional features of the four federations and to consider the systemic effect those features might have within federal constitutions more generally. It is argued that the mechanisms of constitutional amendment within the four countries are best understood in terms of competing locations of effective constitutive authority embedded in each system, as displayed in the processes by which each federal constitution was originally established and continues to evolve. Approaching the question this way, the uniquely context-dependent nature of the bargains that underlie the formation of federal constitutions can be incorporated into a comparative theory that offers a general account of the formation and amendment of federal constitutions having broad explanatory power.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".