Limits on deliberative democracy in Canada: a study of political culture and how attitudes towards the United States shape Canadian public policy debates
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Theorists of deliberative democracy point to a number of factors that can affect the potential for deliberation: lack of wealth, marginalization of one sort or another, and insufficient interest in the public good. However, such theorists have ignored another possible influence on deliberation: political culture, itself a result of various factors including historical events, political leadership, and elite and popular discourse. That political culture, including a dominant narrative, will have an effect upon whether a polity is open to a wide-ranging deliberative discussion. If the discourse is self-limiting in some way, say for reasons of a religious taboo on a subject, then deliberation is circumscribed from the outset. In this thesis, I add to the literature on deliberative democracy in four ways: first, I show that the existing literature mistakenly posits private interest as opposite to public interest when the latter is instead a continuum of the former; second, I note how discourse in Canada is rife with references to the United States ( often negative) and how that prevents more thorough deliberation of an issue or policy; third, the narratives of Ontario and Alberta are examined and explored for the possibility that the dominant Canadian narrative (Ontario's survivalist-garrison narrative) was triumphant in the past due to historical events, the subsequent reality of a significant population base and the attendant advantages that brought vis-a-vis the rest of Canada, and political considerations; fourth, I note the prevalence of anti-American discourse in Canada both in history and in the present but conclude that while chronic references to the United States will likely always be part of Canadian discourse, a weakening of the dominant Ontario narrative may produce two results: less consequential anti-American policy (in contrast to past actions), and a more deliberative national discourse as ideas and policies are considered on their merits.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.045 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".