The Prohibition of Alcohol Revisited: the US Case in International Perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The 13-year American episode of the prohibition of alcohol (1919-1933) is so notorious and has been so extensively studied that there would not seem to be much to add. However, very little of this work has been done in a comparative and international perspective. Yet, the prohibition movement was international and quite a few countries, particularly the ones with a significant Anglo-Saxon Protestant majority, went through a long lasting and vigorous struggle over the issue. While some of them came quite close to a total ban, they finally adopted different regimes and none went as far as the U.S. Why was it? This is the question addressed in this paper. Using a political economy approach, we try to compare the strength and stakes of the supporters and opponents of prohibition in the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand. As these countries shared many socio-cultural features with the US, this international exploration should shed new light on the American experiment with prohibition, an episode which has always been somehow a paradox in the land of individual freedom and minimalist government.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".