Evaluating the “Trenton Effect”: Canadian Public Opinion and Military Casualties in Afghanistan (2006–2010)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Is the public perception of Canadians influenced by military losses in Afghanistan? Many commentators, academics, and members of the media have taken for granted that growing popular discontent toward Canada's involvement in Afghanistan has been influenced by the human costs of military operations. However, without an empirical examination of the question, such a claim remains assumed. This article assesses the influence of Canada's military casualties suffered in Afghanistan between 2006 and 2010 on Canadian public opinion. In looking at both aggregate and gendered data, I find that mounting military casualties in Kandahar had no significant impact on public opinion. However, in analyzing Canadian public opinion following regional divisions, I find that Quebec's and Alberta's public attitudes were surprisingly casualty-tolerant. Public opposition to the Afghanistan mission in other regions – that is, Ontario, British Columbia, Manitoba/Saskatchewan, and the Atlantic provinces – was shaped to a lesser degree by casualties suffered by the Canadian Forces.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".