Bibliographic record
Abstract
The difficulty of formal amendment in constitutional democracies has given rise to an increasingly common phenomenon: quasi-constitutional amendments. These are sub-constitutional changes that do not possess the same legal status as a constitutional amendment, that are formally susceptible to statutory repeal or revision, but that may achieve constitutional status over time as a result of their subject-matter. The impetus for a quasi-constitutional amendment is an intent to circumvent onerous rules of formal amendment in order to alter the operation of a set of existing norms in the constitution. Where constitutional actors determine, correctly or not, that the current political landscape would frustrate their plans for a constitutional amendment to entrench new policy preferences, they resort instead to sub-constitutional means whose successful execution requires less or perhaps even no cross-party or inter-institutional coordination. This strategy sometimes results in significant changes that have the functional effect though not the formal result of a constitutional amendment. In this Chapter, I illustrate this phenomenon with reference to the Constitution of Canada, though I stress at the outset that we can observe this phenomenon elsewhere in the world.
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 | 0.016 | 0.028 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.003 |
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".