Equalization transfers and convergence between federal and unitary systems: a contribution to their historical analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Equalization transfers, or grants, are a crucial component of modern federal and unitary countries. They also shape the evolution of different political systems promoting convergence in their effective working. The literature does not provide studies with a long-term and comparative perspective despite the relevance of this approach to the study of intergovernmental relations. The paper provides a contribution aimed at filling this void. It considers a small set of countries, including two unitary systems, Italy and the UK with a focus on English local government and three federal countries, Australia, Canada, and the United States. Federal systems are now paying more attention than initially to uniformity of policies and equality of access to the benefits of public policies, while unitary systems show much more attention than in the past to reaching equality of access and benefits from policies through local autonomy and use of transparent intergovernmental grants, rather than with hierarchical command. Another way of illustrating this process is stressing the growing recognition of common citizenship in both federal and unitary states.
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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 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".