Senates and sensibility: an analysis of upper house reform attempts in the United Kingdom and Canada, 1906-2014
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines the upper house problem in the United Kingdom and Canada, asking why the types of reform sought by institutional reformers have proven to be so elusive. It is the intention of this work to account for a government's success or failure in achieving their desired objectives, and not simply in passing reform legislation. Distinguishing between reform which is technically successful but does not achieve the outcomes intended by reformers, and change which achieves their objectives, defined as meaningful reform, this work examines each instance of credibly attempted significant upper house reform in either country since the start of the twentieth century. It argues that there are two factors which are necessary for reform to be of the meaningful variety: elites must have a correct understanding of both the written and unwritten rules for reform, and they must have a contextualised understanding of the institution they are reforming, including proper identification of causal links between their planned changes and desired outcomes. This study includes six cases from the United Kingdom, and two from Canada. In the United Kingdom, this includes the 1911 and 1949 Parliament Acts, the 1958 Life Peerages Act, the 1963 Peerage Act, the 1968-69 Parliament (no. 2) Bill, and the 1999 House of Lords Act. In Canada, this includes the 1980-92 era of megaconstitutional politics, and the 2006-14 attempts at unilateral reform by the federal government. In all but two of the eight cases, one or both of the necessary factors for meaningful reform were absent, even though five of the eight cases resulted in some sort of significant change. Only the 1958 and 1963 reforms were both technically successful and produced the desired results, while in 1911, 1949, and 1999, changes actually produced results which were contrary to reformers' objectives. Most of the time, reformers are good at identifying the written and unwritten rules for reform, but are less capable of identifying what they need to change to produce their desired outcomes.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.015 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".