Citizens and federalism. Federal perceptions and preferences in Belgium and Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This doctoral dissertation aims at studying the relationships between the perceptions of federalism and the preferences for its future, through deliberative citizens panels which offer beter informed opinions and through a comparison of four fields of investigation whose dynamics converge and diverge. The rationale of this endeavour is twofold. On the one hand, studies – which are usually quantitative – on the opinions about federalism focus mainly on a few dimensions, leaving aside a deeper investigation of all the factors at stake. A qualitative approach may therefore offer a more comprehensive understanding of the relations between perceptions and preferences. On the other hand, such an analysis of the citizens’ opinions and especially of the diversity of their positions on this issue bears the potential to shed light on the federal dynamics in their country. This endeavour seems even more fruitful that it compares four political contexts where the future of federalism is persistently a hot topic. To fulfil this objective, a specific method – the deliberative citizens panels – was developed in order to collect beter informed opinions through a dual process of information and interaction, across the four different fields: Liège in French-speaking Belgium, Antwerp in Dutch-speaking Belgium, Kingston in English-Canada and Montréal in Québec. To do so, the thesis is divided in three parts. The first part puts forward the general and the methodological framework of the research. Thus, chapter 1 presents the origins, the formation and the evolution of federalism in Belgium and in Canada. On this background, chapter 2 builds the method and the methodology behind the deliberative citizens panels. The second part explores each specific field in order to draw from the empirical data several ideal types which summarize the different visions of federalism. Chapters 3 and 4 present the results respectively of the French-speaking Belgium panel and the Dutch-speaking Belgium panel while chapters 5 and 6 analyze the data gathered in the English-speaking Canada panel and the Québec panel. The third and last part concludes the dissertation. Chapter 7 compares the ideal types and offers a rich four-faced comparison. The conclusions assess the methodology of the research as well as its results. Finally, on this basis, new avenues of research are highlighted.
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 | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".