The Citizens' Assembly of British Columbia: A Model for Electoral Reform
Bibliographic record
Abstract
divide democratic reform into four areas: electoral, institutional, constitutional (which very much includes freedom of information), and direct democracy.We don't talk much about direct democracy.I'm going to talk about it today because in British Columbia we have invented a new addition to the direct democracy toolkit, and it is quite astonishing.I'll be talking about electoral reform as well, because that's the exercise that we've gone through.Our Citizens Assembly is a thing of tremendous significance-certainly in British Columbia.I think it will also be that in Canada, and in the world because it's a first in the world.As for its characteristics, it's representative of the province in ways I'll describe, it's got very high credibility with the public, it's non-partisan, it's objective, and it's empowered.It's empowered because the recommendation of the assembly is guaranteed to go without a comma changed to the public in a referendum.This single fact symbolizes the most astonishing transfer of power-a voluntary transfer of power-from politicians to a group of ordinary people that I've ever seen, watching politics all my life.This all began, I suppose, the day that the B.C. Liberals lost the 1996 election in terms of seats, even though they got more votes.That has to have a searing impact on the soul of any politician.At that point, the now Premier Campbell no doubt started thinking about electoral reform and cast about for how this might be arranged.And in their so-called New Era document (their platform for the election of 2001), the Campbell Liberals promised that there would be electoral reform, brought about by a Citizens' Assembly.That was the concept.There was no flesh put on those bones, but that was the promise.(They also
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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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.022 | 0.002 |
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".