The Influence of Institutions on Issue Definition: Children's Environmental Health Policy in the United States and Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article seeks to explain why US environmental policy has increasingly focused on children's environmental health while this frame has not had the same impact on either the political agenda or policy outputs in Canada. This contrast is striking since the literature on issue definition and agenda setting suggests that redefining environmental issues in terms of a valence issue like children's health should be a promising strategy for politicians in both countries. We argue that Canada's less enthusiastic embrace of children's environmental health is a function of the institutional context, in particular fewer opportunities for policy entrepreneurship in a parliamentary government than within the US separation of powers; distinctive policy legacies in the two countries that created an opportunity to advance children's environmental health in the US but deterred it in Canada; and different opportunity structures for non-governmental actors, which prompted US environmentalists to frame their campaigns in terms of children sooner than did their Canadian counterparts. The study illustrates the value of cross-national studies of agenda setting in highlighting the influence of political institutions on issue definition.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".