Incapacitating, or something else? Unpacking Australian amendment culture in the First Nations Voice Referendum
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract On October 14, 2023, Australians participated in a once-in-a-generation constitutional referendum to consider establishing a First Nations advisory body in the Constitution. The proposal was rejected, meaning that only eight of the forty-five amendments put to the Australian people have been approved since 1901. This article tests the viability of amendment culture as an explanation for Australians’ reluctance to change the Constitution. Using original large-n survey data from the Australian Constitutional Values Surveys (2008–21), the article examines Australians’ openness to constitutional change over time, highlighting that despite a long history of rejecting constitutional amendments, Australians are not inherently opposed to constitutional change. Instead, a tendency to emphasize the Constitution’s practical role makes Australians susceptible to technical arguments designed to stifle support for change. In addition to providing insight into the Voice referendum result, the article makes three contributions to the amendment culture literature. First, it presents a model for case-study analysis of constitutional change, offering a detailed examination of amendment culture. Second, it provides a long-called-for large-n survey of attitudes toward constitutional change. Third, it demonstrates the importance of contextualizing amendment culture within broader studies of political culture.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".