Bibliographic record
Abstract
A central tenet of democratic theory is that the exercise of governance be both legitimate and accountable. Elections constitute the fundamental means through which these ends are met. Critical to this process is the ability of the citizen to correctly assign responsibility for government action. Institutional arrangements are central to defining the pathways of accountability. In institutional contexts with only one level of government, assigning responsibility is relatively straightforward. However, in situations of multiple and overlapping levels of government, the process of correctly assigning responsibility and ultimately holding governments accountable for their actions is much more difficult. In comparative contexts, there has been and continues to be a long-term trend towards the decentralization of political authority to sub-national levels of government. Despite this widespread current, little is known about the effects these processes have on democratic accountability. The central proposition tested in this dissertation is that decentralized multi-level governance undermines democratic accountability. This proposition is tested through drawing on the reward and punishment calculus of economic voting: incumbent governments are rewarded (punished) for good (bad) economic conditions. When lines of accountability are clear, the individual voter can easily apportion blame (credit) to the government for economic conditions by voting against (for) the government. Where multiple levels of decentralized authority cloud responsibility, accountability for economic outcomes (either positive or negative) is likely to be undermined. This proposition is tested comparatively using cross-national aggregate economic and election statistics as well as cross-national individual-level data. Case studies of institutional change towards multi-level governance in Belgium, Scotland and Spain are examined for the theorized effects on accountability for economic conditions. Finally, a case study of federal and provincial economic voting in Canada is conducted using individual-level data from recent Canadian Election Studies. Both comparatively and in case studies, the findings of this dissertation consistently indicate that accountability for economic conditions is undermined by the presence of decentralized multi-level governance. This dissertation makes an important contribution to the study of multi-level governance, economic voting and comparative politics through uncovering institutional effects of decentralized multi-level governance that undermine political accountability and, ultimately, the health of democracy.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".