Alberta Oil and the Decline of Democracy in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the spring of 2012, we had the opportunity to teach an intensive six-week course on oil and democracy.Offered through the University of Alberta's Community Service-Learning program, Class lectures were supplemented by a series of lectures sponsored by the university's Parkland Institute, which conducts research into contemporary social and political issues from the standpoint of political economy.We had recently co-authored an article on the topic of oil's potential to undermine democracy, which appeared in the May 2012 issue of New Global Studies, and we were aware of a number of our colleagues at Athabasca University whose research looked at various aspects of democracy in Alberta, in Canada, and internationally.Given that the following year would mark the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of C. B. Macpherson's seminal work Democracy in Alberta, the time seemed ripe for a collaborative, indepth, interdisciplinary exploration of liberal democracy in Canada, focusing on Alberta as the epicentre of an expanding oil-based economy.By the time this book was completed, in the spring of 2015, the world market for oil was markedly different, with the production of oil in the United States at all-time highs and the volatility of oil prices threatening the economies of oil-exporting countries.In addition, concerns about the state of democracy had become widespread.This volume represents an attempt to examine some of issues arising in this complex milieu.We thank Sara Dorow, of the University of Alberta's Department of Sociology, for inviting us to teach this class, and our teaching assistant, Matt Dow, for helping us to make it a success.
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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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".