Conceptualizing social policy as development domestically: An exploration of Employment Insurance in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Existing academic literature describes that domestic social program spending is comparable with foreign development aid contributions but no conceptual connection between the two kinds of spending is made explicit by the Government of Canada. This paper analyzes literature on social policy and two international development studies (IDS) concepts - development economics and dependency theory - for conceptual similarities in the Canadian context. The paper then examines the case of Employment Insurance (EI) and Atlantic Canada’s experience with EI. Atlantic Canada was selected as a case because it has comparatively high levels of unemployment and high rates of EI use. This is a small-scale qualitative case study. Methodology is two-pronged. The first prong includes document analysis and triangulation of five Government of Canada documents. The second prong consists of data from 14 semi-structured interviews with policy professionals who have familiarity with development, EI, and Atlantic Canada. Interviews indicate some evidence for conceptual similarities between international development and social policy. While the paper’s hypothesis that Canada does not call its social policies ‘development’ policies because we are a ‘developed’ country was not supported, findings illuminate some dependency between EI and its recipients in Atlantic Canada which supports the paper’s secondary hypothesis that rural and urban dynamics in Canada echo dependency theory from IDS
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".