The Conceptual Politics of Democracy Promotion: The Venezuela Case
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1970 Giovanni Sartori articulated what he saw as the greatest challenge to political science in an increasingly globalized worldconceptual stretching. Sartori was referring to the traveling of western concepts eastward and proposed the use of a conceptual ladder to help inform the decisions political scientists make regarding the concepts they wish to travel. This paper seeks to push the boundaries of Sartori’s critique beyond academia to include policy; a subject where a dynamic and informative relationship between academia and policy should exist, but are instead faced with a one-dimensional arrangement. In that vein, this paper consists of three main parts. The first employs a brief historiography of the conceptual debate between, largely, Schumpeterian and Dahlian definitions of democracy where two main schools of thought will be sketched. The second evokes Venezuela's recent political history to illustrate how the United States Government has, at different times, employed various definitions, and standards, of democracy to describe the Venezuelan regime. The third seeks to establish how American oscillation between standards erodes the value reference point of democracy and draw out the implications of this. In particular, the third part unpacks what this erosion should mean moving forward for academics engaged in the conceptual politics of democracy. In sum, the instrumentalizing of the ambiguity of the concept—democracy—by oscillating between Schumpeterian and Dahlian standards devalues the concept. And unless the academic debate regarding democratic theory begins to account for this devaluation, democracy may well be emptied of its substance.
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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".