Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since 1997, the UK constitution has undergone a transformation. This has since become a rolling process which shows little sign of abating. However, some of this constitutional change has been criticised for being rushed, piecemeal and with little consideration of the broader constitution. Yet, despite these criticisms, the underlying methodology of constitutional change has not been discussed in any great detail. This thesis, focusing on formal constitutional change, argues that the methodology to deliver that change should be enhanced to address these concerns. After establishing the limits of formal constitutional change, this thesis then considers how constitutional issues are approached within government and suggests that a Department of Legal Affairs would improve the preparation of proposed changes before being presented to Parliament. The politics of constitutional change are then analysed, with a particular focus on the process of coalition negotiations, which has become a new part of the methodology. The parliamentary process is considered by analysing the parliamentary passage of what became the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 and the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act 2006. Recent changes to parliamentary procedure have allowed Parliament to scrutinise constitutional legislation more effectively, although there are still areas for significant improvement, particularly during the Committee Stage in the House of Commons. The thesis then considers the role of referendums and establishes when a referendum is required either as a matter of law or convention. The thesis then shows how procedural innovations such as the constitutional conventions in Australia and Ireland or the citizens? assemblies in British Columbia and Ontario could be used in the UK. Also, as any recommendations of a constitutional convention or a citizens? assembly are usually put to the rest of the electorate at a referendum, the links between a convention or assembly and the referendum process are discussed. Taken together, these enhancements to discrete aspects of the methodology of constitutional change should ensure that changes are more considered and allow for a more a stable constitutional settlement.
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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 | 0.085 | 0.126 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.002 |
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".