Federalism and democracy: Comparative empirical and theoretical perspectives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Relationships between federalism and democracy can be examined empirically and theoretically; that is: how democratic are federal systems compared to other political systems, and is federal democracy, in theory, more democratic than non-federal democracy? This essay explores both perspectives, concluding that, empirically, federal polities compare well with non-federal systems on democracy and rights protection, but much better than other systems on quality of life. Furthermore, federal polities achieve these levels of political and economic performance under much more adverse demographic circumstances than those faced by non-federal polities. Theoretically, moreover, federal democracy is more democratic than non-federal democracy. Federal polities are defined broadly here as polities having constitutionally recognized constituent political communities that exercise exclusive and concurrent powers of self-government through legislative powers of their own and are also represented in the federation’s legislature. The following 24 polities are thus classified as federal for the analysis below: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Canada, Comoros, Ethiopia, Germany, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Micronesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Russia, St. Kitts and Nevis, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, United States of America, and Venezuela. One might, of course, quibble about the countries included in and excluded from this list. For example, Serbia and Montenegro has been excluded because it is too new (2003) to be useful for comparative empirical analysis, and it did not last long (Wood 2006). One might argue that such autocratically ruled countries as Ethiopia, Malaysia, and Pakistan do not belong on the list and that such countries as South Africa (cf. Steytler 2005) and Spain (cf. Agranoff and Gallarin 1997; Moreno 2001) are not truly federal. These countries have been included, however, because they are commonly classified as federal (cf. Watts 1999; Hueglin and Fenna 2006) and because this inclusive approach carries less risk of appearing to bias the comparative empirical analysis in favor of federalism.
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 | 0.012 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.015 | 0.019 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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".