Authority Migration and Accountability in Canadian Type II Multilevel Governance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In advanced industrial democracies, including Canada, elections act as important mechanisms of democratic accountability. However, the migration of public decision-making responsibility away from elected representatives and toward new governance models may alter accountability relationships. As authority is dispersed horizontally to new governance actors that exist beyond the reach of the ballot box, questions of public input and accountability within the democratic governance process arise.\nThe objectives of the dissertation are: 1) to evaluate the extent to which Canadian provinces have opted to migrate decision-making authority horizontally in response to policy issues and why; and 2) to evaluate the existence and relative strength of the accountability relationships that emerge between new governance actors and both government and society once authority has migrated. It is hypothesized that period in time, political ideology, and government fiscal capacity are predictors of authority migration as a policy tool. Like wise, it is hypothesized that period in time, political ideology, and the geographic scale of the new governance jurisdictions, are predictors of the strength of both government and societal accountability relationships.\nTo test the hypotheses, a mixed method approach is utilized. First, the incidence of decision-making authority migration and strength of accountability relationships are evaluated using regression analysis. This analysis considers these relationships using an original dataset of cases of horizontal authority migration in the provinces of Alberta, British Columbia, Nova Scotia and Ontario, between the years of 1946 and 2005. Second, case studies and qualitative interviews are leveraged to gain greater contextual understanding of the causes and implications of migration of decision-making authority to regional healthcare bodies in the provinces selected.\nWhile horizontal governance arrangements may raise questions over public input and accountability, findings support the hypothesis that their use is not new having existed for the entire post-war period. Furthermore, while the accountability relationship between government and new governance actors has remained dominant, the accountability relationship with society is strengthening as predicted. Perception of accountability relationships by interviewees, however, suggests that a lack of clarity in decision-making responsibility has weakened the ability for citizens to hold decision-makers accountable.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".