Why mission-directed governance risks authoritarianism: lessons from East Asia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Recently, scholars have advanced an ideal of the entrepreneurial state in which industrial policy is pursued in a mission-directed manner. Crucially, this perspective does not merely call for the heavier use of industrial policy, but envisions the state as a central focal point, mobilising society around the pursuit of a common mission. Using the historical example of East Asia's developmental state, which closely resembles its contemporary variant, I demonstrate that mission-directionality – should it be consistently applied – tends towards the pursuit of a singular overarching mission, and could require the use of authoritarian and disciplinary mechanisms to sustain mission focus in an environment of uncertainty. In turn, this potential risk arises because mission-directionality seeks to transcend the otherwise directionless nature of market-based and democratic decision-making through the use of bureaucratic discretion, to align the behaviour of social actors in a cohesive and directional manner.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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".