A Genealogy of Political Constitutionalism in the U.K., and Why Canadians Might be Interested (and What the British Might Learn from Canada)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This essay traces the genealogy of political constitutionalism in Britain, and then reflects on what political constitutionalism might mean in Canada and the UK today. It sketches three main versions of the political constitution within the UK, all associated with a particular account and justification of parliamentary sovereignty – the mixed constitution, parliamentary government, and representative democracy, with which it is mainly identified today. However, this third version currently confronts three challenges: i) the emergence of a fourth version, based on popular sovereignty; ii) multiculturalism and plurinationalism within and globalisation without, producing the fragmentation of the national demos into multiple demoi; and iii) the growing hegemony of legal constitutionalism, not least internationally. In a final section, the essay compares and contrasts in the light of these three challenges debates around the patriation of the Canadian constitution, on the one hand, and Britain’s withdrawal from the EU, often portrayed as a vain attempt to save the political constitution, on the other. Whereas many contend political constitutionalism cannot hope to meet the three challenges and a shift to legal constitutionalism is inevitable, a genealogy allows one to see how at different times this idea has been composed by different elements and has always been subject to contestation and debate. The essay concludes by suggesting a return to the version associated with mixed government offers a way of rethinking the political constitution today.
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".