Representative claims in practice: the democratic quality of decentralized social and healthcare policies in the Netherlands
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Any assessment of the democratic nature of representation should look at both electoral and non-electoral representation yet few empirical studies have looked into the latter. To increase our understanding of non-electoral representation we use Saward’s concept of representative claims, which helps bring into view a broad variety of representatives. Our empirical study of decentralized social and healthcare policies in the Netherlands describes the actors making representative claims at the local level, including elected, appointed non-elected, and self-appointed non-elected representatives working on a variety of bases, such as elections, expertise and shared experience. Their democratic nature is assured by authorization and accountability mechanisms, including but not only election. However, a number of difficulties are encountered in assuring responsiveness in practice. We conclude that non-electoral representation can and does strengthen democratic representation at the local level. This study reflects on the strengths and weaknesses of the representation practices found and on what our findings mean for future studies of representation.
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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 | 0.097 | 0.229 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".