Political Control and Parliamentary Committees of Inquiry: Strengthening the Quality of Democracy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In Austria and Germany’s parliamentary system, committees of inquiry represent the most comprehensive political control instruments. With the help of these committees, members of parliament can gain precise insight into the work of the government. These insights are necessary when suspicious cases are brought to public attention, from which the government’s actions and the abuse of power come to light. Based on a first-ever qualitative case study of investigative committees in Austria and Germany, this article focuses on the results of these parliamentary committees. By scrutinizing these authorities and institutions, the members of parliament acquire extensive knowledge of the actions. This assists in reforms and leads to innovative effects on the democratic quality of the political systems. By comparing these results and with the help of the central analytical framework of Hans Joachim Lauth’s 15-field matrix, this study discovers that committees of inquiry can influence all areas of politics, law, and society. This influence occurs primarily through knowledge generation on real political processes, and provides a significant contribution to knowledge democracy.
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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 | 0.085 | 0.159 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| 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".