Bibliographic record
Abstract
“Myths, Damn Myths, and Voting System Change” argues that the debate over voting system reform in Canada is all wrong—and that political scientists must bear most of the blame. Academics have framed the debate on the issue as a kind of popularity contest, one where the public is encouraged to take sides on the basis of the values they prefer their institutions embody. They claim that different voting systems reflect value tradeoffs on issues like simplicity, stability, local representation, and accountability. But these are myths. This essay examines each of these claims as well as arguments that insist referenda should be required to effect change, and finds that all lack compelling evidence. By contrast, “Myths, Damn Myths, and Voting System Change” argues that voting system reform is really an attempt to apply democratic values of inclusion, equality, and equity to Canadian electoral institutions, and offers a sounder, historically informed, evidence-based way to do it.
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 | 0.017 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.091 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".