On the ‘residuum of powers’ in the great Anglo-American Federations: a neo-Bagehotian-Coasean gloss \n \n
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In some constitutional designs, federation is based on the doctrine of ‘residuum of powers,’ where one level of government is privileged vis-à-vis the other, and where a concomitant enumeration of powers gives rise to a presumption of a restricted capacity to legislate outside powers so specified. The quintessential examples of this approach are the Federal Constitutions of the United States, Canada and Australia. The Coase theorem explains how and why efficiency in the allocation of these powers emerges regardless of the initial allocation of residuum powers. The analysis confirms this Coasean proposition in an evolutionary context. In all three jurisdictions, regardless of the initial allocation of powers, there is a neo-Bagehotian (evolutionary) shift from the canonical constitution and towards an ‘efficient constitution’—an institution that avoids (transaction) costs. Bargaining between general and special purpose governments allocates powers such that transaction costs are avoided. The paper provides an efficiency definition based on the distinction between symmetric federalism (as seen in the United States and Australia) and asymmetric federalism (as seen in Canada). On aggregate, the locus of this efficiency is either central (as in the case of the United States and Australia), or distributed (as in the case of Canada). Specific examples from all three jurisdictions provide further illustrations. Normatively, further efficiency gains could come from developing (constitutional) legal doctrines that dialogue directly with this evolution.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".