Plebiscites, Referendums, and Ballot Initiatives as Institutions of Popular Sovereignty: Rousseau's Influence on Competing Theories of Popular-Vote Processes
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Popular-vote processes — such as plebiscites, referendums, and initiatives — are frequently understood as Rousseauian instruments of popular sovereignty. Yet, Rousseau did not theorize these devices himself. As a result, he has been claimed by proponents of competing theories of popular-vote processes. Theorists of sleeping sovereignty have claimed Rousseau's distinction between sovereignty and government in support of rare, constitutional referendums. Theorists of direct democracy invoke Rousseau's criticism of representation to demand frequent referendums. Plebiscitarianism casts Rousseau's general will as demanding the unification of the nation in one popularly legitimated leader through top-down plebiscites. Lastly, Condorcet's proposal for the “censure of the people” outlines how the sovereign could initiate popular votes itself in order to check the power of the government. I contend that Condorcet's account provides the most compelling link between Rousseau's account of popular sovereignty and the institutional design of popular-vote processes.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it