Public Opinion and the Public Policy Making Process in Nigeria: A Critical Assessment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The process of making public policies is often influenced by a number of factors and considerations, one of which is public opinion. But the relationship between public opinion and the public policy-making process is a difficult one. This essay critically assesses the role of public opinion in the policy-making process in Nigeria, and while it is acknowledged that responsive and genuinely democratic governments are hugely sensitive to the opinions of the citizens on issues of public policy, it is argued that this is not the case in Nigeria. With the aid of the elite and class analytical models, it is contended that the opinions of the Nigerian masses hardly impinge on the policy-making process, and the “public” policies churned out of this process are often designed to promote and protect the class interests of those who control the Nigerian State. It is concluded that the extreme poverty and illiteracy which pervade the Nigerian society have emasculated and disempowered the majority of the people and made them inconsequential observers in the policy-making process in the country.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.030 | 0.026 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".