Proximity, Directionality, and the Riddle of Relative Party Extremeness
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using survey data on European countries, this paper examines the degree of correspondence in left-right policy positions between political parties and the citizens who vote for them through the prism of two competing views on what the ideal correspondence should be. The views are proximity theory, which holds that voters prefer parties to be as close as possible in policy terms, and Rabinowitz-Macdonald (RM) directionality theory, which asserts that voters prefer parties to take positions with greater emotional intensity than the voters themselves feel. It is shown that while the correspondence between party and voter is strong, parties tend to adopt positions that are relatively more extreme than those held by their voters and that the voters, perceptual distortions notwithstanding, are aware of it. This is usually taken as evidence for RM directionality but it is demonstrated that this theory does not and, in fact, cannot explain the discrepancy between what voters want and what parties deliver.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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