Stephen Harper, Evangelical Christians, and the Brokerage Tradition in Canadian Politics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The relationship between evangelical Christians and the Conservative government of Stephen Harper is unclear. There is increasing evidence that evangelicals tend to vote Conservative and some argue the government has a hidden Christian Right agenda. But the evidence is open to various interpretations, partly because we lack an adequate understanding of the place of religion in modern Canadian politics and the party system. This paper argues that we must see evangelicals as an element of brokerage rather than ideological politics - that is, not as a monolithic ideological pressure group that may or may not control the government, but a broader social grouping that fits within a more traditional brokerage arrangement under the Conservative umbrella. The paper contrasts the views of former Catholic prime ministers with those of Ernest and Preston Manning to show different conceptions of the relationship between faith and politics, but also argues that the Mannings and most other evangelicals see the relationship as subtle and not all-encompassing. The Harper government appears to understand this relationship in a way previous Liberal and Progressive Conservatives have not, and has successfully cultivated evangelical relationships while largely avoiding the hot buttons of the Christian Right. Instead, it delivers more indirect policies and benefits that bring evangelicals under the party umbrella as part of a larger classic Canadian brokerage strategy.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.033 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".