Do Service-Providing Nonprofits Contribute to Democratic Inclusion? Analyzing Democracy Promotion by Canadian Homeless Shelters
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Nonprofits are key social service providers in many Western welfare states. Yet the nonprofits that deliver government-funded public services are also an important part of civil society and, in theory, promote democratic inclusion through their democratic civil society function. But to what extent do welfare-providing nonprofits carry out democracy-promoting activities in reality and what do these activities include? Using a survey distributed to Canadian charities that operate government-funded homeless shelters, we find evidence of activities falling within three areas of democracy promotion: support for political participation, internal democratic governance, and representative voice. The variation amongst different activities is presented in ideal types, which can inform future studies of the democratic function of nonprofits. Our empirical results point to a vital role of homeless shelters that extends beyond the provision of basic needs and contribute to a better understanding of the modalities of democratic inclusion for excluded populations.
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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 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".