Democracy, Community, and Federalism in Electoral Apportionment Cases: The United States, Canada, and Australia in Comparative Perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We speak often of 'representative democracy' and we tend to regard it as the dominant form of government in the modern West. But who or what is represented by the electoral systems of the modern democratic state? Although we may be tempted to regard contemporary democracies as embodying essentially the same underlying conceptions of representation, a careful examination of constitutional texts, legislative frameworks, and judicial interpretations reveals important differences from one country to the next. In particular, the problem of electoral apportionment has produced a line of constitutional cases in the United States, Canada, and Australia that raise very similar sets of issues, but with strikingly different results. This article compares the case law in the United States, Canada, and Australia on the question of electoral apportionment. While the ideas appealed to in each country are complex and contain sometimes overlapping elements, it is argued that they can be classified into three general types, which the article calls 'individualist,' 'communitarian,' and 'federalist.' Each approach presupposes a distinct conception of the political identity of the human person and has distinct implications for design of a democratic electoral system. And, while each conception finds a place in each of the three countries under examination, there is an important sense in which individualist conceptions have dominated much of the American jurisprudence, communal approaches have influenced most of the Canadian case law, and federalist conceptions have shaped the Australian cases at several decisive points. The article concludes by arguing that, although factors such as modalities of interpretation and conceptions of the relationship between the courts and the political branches of government have been important, significantly different underlying conceptions of democracy and of the political identity of the human person have been ultimately determinative of the results.
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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 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| 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".