The Extent of Clientelism in Irish Politics: Evidence from Classifying Dáil Questions on a Local-National Dimension
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The availability of the full text of Irish parliamentary questions offers opportunities for using machine learning techniques to examine the currently much discussed role of elected representatives (TDs) in the Irish parliamentary system. Bluntly, are TDs mainly national legislators or “constituency messenger boys”? This paper presents an initial investigation into the use of automated text classification techniques to categorise parliamentary questions from 1922 up to 2008 as national or local. The approach uses a bag of words representation, standard feature reduction methods and an SVM classifier. Initial results show there is very little evidence in the corpus of parliamentary questions in Dail Eireann to support the view that the role of the TD is determined by mainly clientelist/parochial imperatives.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it