Rational Choice and Socio-Psychological Explanation for Opinion on Quebec Sovereignty
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article identifies two schools of thought on why Quebeckers choose to support or oppose sovereignty - the rational choice approach that has focused on individuals' assessments of the collective costs and benefits of sovereignty for the Quebec economy and the French language, and the socio-psychological approach that has focused on variables such as resentment, feelings of status denial, ethnic grievances and self-confidence. It has been difficult to resolve disputes between the two approaches due to weakness in available data and a lack of a comparative approach amongst scholars. Using a data set explicitly designed to compare the two schools, this article examines whether previous researchers' conclusions hold even when concepts are operationalized in different ways and when models are specified using different variables. The author examines five general dimensions: the state of the economy, the state of the French language, the state of federalism, respect and recognition, and the perceived quality of relations between English and French speakers. The major substantive conclusion is that the previous scholarship on the motivations for vote choice have significantly overestimated the importance of assessments of the French language, significantly underestimated the importance of assessments of whether Quebeckers are respected and recognized within Canada, and have also underestimated the importance of assessments of federalism and the quality of relations between linguistic groups. These conclusions hold for even the most ambivalent voters.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".