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Record W2063312367 · doi:10.1177/0010414008325283

How Do Ideas Matter?

2008· article· en· W2063312367 on OpenAlexaff
Alan M. Jacobs

Bibliographic record

VenueComparative Political Studies · 2008
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicElectoral Systems and Political Participation
Canadian institutionsUniversity of British Columbia
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPoliticsArgument (complex analysis)GermanPositive economicsCognitionMechanism (biology)Affect (linguistics)Causal modelSocial psychologyEpistemologySociologyPsychologyPolitical scienceEconomicsLaw

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

How do ideas affect political decision making? Despite much evidence that ideas matter, relatively little is known about the specific mechanisms through which they influence actors' beliefs, goals, and preferences. Drawing on psychological findings, the article elaborates a cognitive mechanism through which ideational frameworks shape political elites' preferences among options. It argues that actors' mental models of the domains in which they are operating systematically guide their attention within processes of decision making. By leading them to reason about certain causal possibilities and data and to ignore and discount others, politicians' and policy makers' mental models can powerfully shape their causal belief sets and, in turn, their policy preferences. Furthermore, these attentional effects help explain why ideas persist under some conditions but change under others. The argument is empirically probed through an examination of key episodes in German pension politics over seven decades, drawing on detailed records of high-level policy deliberations.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.007
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.031
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.009
Threshold uncertainty score0.037

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0070.031
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.002
Science and technology studies0.0030.014
Scholarly communication0.0090.011
Open science0.0010.002
Research integrity0.0020.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0070.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.314
GPT teacher head0.464
Teacher spread0.149 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations109
Published2008
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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