Any Swing in Their Steps? Partisan Representation by Federal Political Parties in Canada, 2004-2008
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper, I provide an initial descriptive account of the characteristics and policy attitudes of the core supporters and swing voters of the major federal political parties and the position taking of the parties with respect to these groups. In particular, I ask: (1) who are these core supporters and swing voters? (2) what kinds of policies do they want? and (3) what policy positions do the parties take relative to these groups? Drawing on a pooled dataset of the 2004, 2006, and 2008 Canadian Election Studies and the voting records of the party leaders in House of Commons roll calls over the same period, I find that while swing voters in general (as well as the swing voters associated with each party) tend to largely reflect the characteristics of the broader adult population, the core supporters of each party often differ substantially from the mass public. I also find that, on several selected salient policy debates during this period, the Conservative Party, the Liberal Party, and the Bloc Quebecois often faced tension between the policy preferences of their respective core supporters and swing voters, although these differences – with the partial exception of the Conservative Party – were typically modest in scope. In virtually all situations in which a party’s core supporters and its swing voters noticeably differed, I find that the party’s leader favored the aggregate position of its core supporters.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".