Riding style, party ethos : nominations, candidates and local campaigns in Canadian federal elections
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite having the appearance of a single event, federal elections in Canada concatenate nearly 300 individual constituency contests. Yet little is known of how constituency campaign teams operate, or how they interact with each other. In order to provide a better understanding of local campaigns, this thesis describes and explains the nature of local riding associations, the candidates they select, and the environment in which they operate. In so doing, it traces the impact of both riding and partisan forces on the character of constituency politics, and on Canadian politics more generally. The thesis focuses on major party campaigns in seven ridings in British Columbia in the 1988 federal election. It begins with a socio-political profile of each riding, including the media resources available to local campaigns. The dynamics of the local association, nomination, and campaign are then reconstructed using information gleaned from interviews with candidates, campaign managers, party strategists, and volunteers. Similarly, personal interviews with journalists who covered each of the local contests give further insights into the nature of constituency politics, and the methods by which local campaigns communicate with voters. Information on ridings and associations is then used to develop a typology of candidates and campaigns. This typology suggests that there are four archetypal candidates: local notables, party insiders, stopgaps, and those with a high profile. Each tends to be selected by a certain type of association, and to run a distinctive campaign. This typology is then applied to a number of the actual campaigns from 1988. The patterns of politics identified by this typology suggest that local associations are central to the nature of Canadian politics and democracy. Each association combines riding and partisan forces together in idiosyncratic ways. Associations are also distinctive in a comparative sense. Unlike local party organizations in other countries, they are neither beholden to their party, nor to the personal politics of a particular candidate.
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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 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 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".