Explaining Multiculturalism's Survival: Electoral Outcomes, Policy Design, and Veto Players
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Multiculturalism, by which I mean the recognition and accommodation of cultural minorities borne out of individual and familial immigration, is a political project of the old political left, one that is logically inconsistent with the ideological positions of the political right. Due to this inconsistency, we should therefore expect multiculturalism to retreat following an ideological shift to the right in national level politics. However, this study shows that this does not always happen: sometimes multiculturalism survives an ideological shift to the right. This study argues that the likelihood of multiculturalism surviving an ideological shift to the right in national level politics is affected by electoral outcomes, by policy design and by the actions of critical veto players. More precisely, it argues that multiculturalism is more likely to survive an ideological shift to the right in national level politics when (1) parties of the political right secure enough votes in national level elections to govern but not to decide unilaterally (i.e. when they fail to form a minimum winning coalition), (2) failing that, when multiculturalism policies have been written into formal rules, have multiple stakeholders, or are ‘locked-in’ and therefore immune to the vagaries of electoral competition and (3) if multiculturalism policies are either de-institutionalized, have a single stakeholder, or are ‘open’ to re-examination, when critical veto players intercede to maintain the status quo despite strong partisan opposition to multiculturalism. Ironically, when the fate of multiculturalism rests in the hands of veto players their decisions to maintain the status quo seems to have little if anything to do with a genuine belief in the recognition and accommodation of cultural minorities. This study’s hypothesis of multiculturalism’s survival is developed through a step-by-step comparison of recent policy developments in three immigrant-receiving countries: Canada, Britain, and the United States. These countries share three things in common. Firstly, they were all part of a vanguard of immigrant receiving countries that turned towards multiculturalism during the latter half of the 20th century. Secondly, they have each recently experienced an ideological shift to the right in national level politics resulting from the electoral victories of center-right political parties. Thirdly, each of these cases demonstrates that multiculturalism has survived, albeit to varying degrees and in different ways, following an ideological shift to the right in national level politics. Due to these similarities, we can control for a stimulus that should have, all things being equal, entailed multiculturalism’s retreat across the three cases and, in so doing, identify the factors that provide the basis for a plausible explanation of multiculturalism’s survival.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
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".