Party Structure and Backbench Dissent in the Canadian and British Parliaments
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract. In this paper we analyze intra-party determinants of dissenting behaviour using samples of British and Canadian government backbenchers. Controlling for the range of factors traditionally considered to be important predictors of dissenting behaviour, we find that the major factor determining cross-voting, next to MPs' tenure, is perceptions of isolation from party communication and influence channels. This effect is particularly visible among Labour MPs with long tenure, as their ideological position is more extreme than that of party leaders, which reinforces the effect of isolation. The results suggest that the difference of dissent levels between the Canadian and British Houses of Commons can be explained by the frontbenchers' approach to managing the major resource of the party, i.e., the backbenchers. Résumé. Cet article traite des déterminants intra-partis du comportement de dissidence en examinant des groupes de députés d'arrière-ban des gouvernements britannique et canadien. En contrôlant pour la gamme de facteurs qui sont traditionnellement considérés comme étant les prédicteurs importants du comportement de dissidence, nous trouvons qu'à part la durée de service du député, la perception d'isolement des voies de communication et d'influence du parti constitue le principal facteur incitant le député à voter pour un autre parti. Cet effet est particulièrement visible parmi les députés du Parti travailliste ayant de longs états de service, car leur position idéologique est plus extrême que celle des chefs du parti, ce qui renforce l'effet d'isolement. Les résultats suggèrent que les différences de niveaux de dissidence entre les Chambres des communes canadienne et britannique s'expliquent par la façon dont les députés de premier plan gèrent la ressource principale du parti, c'est-à-dire les députés d'arrière-ban.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".