Bibliographic record
Abstract
Increasingly, governments communicate strategically with the public for political advantage, seeking as Christopher Hood describes it to “avoid blame” and “claim credit” for the actions and decisions of governance. In particular, Strategic Political Communication (SPC) is becoming the dominant form of political communication between Canada’s executive branch of government and the public, both during elections and as part of a “permanent campaign” to gain and maintain public support as means to political power. This dissertation argues that SPC techniques interfere with the public’s ability to know how they are governed, and therefore undermines the central right of citizens in a democracy to legitimate elected representation by scrutinizing government and holding it to account. Realization of that right depends on an authentic political communication process that provides citizens with an understanding of government. By seeking to hide or downplay blameworthy actions, SPC undermines the legitimation role public discourse plays in a democracy. The central questions that shaped this dissertation are first, why citizens in a democracy have a right to understand government and second, what role does communication play in realizing that right? The arguments rely on national and international rights jurisprudence; communication rights theory, in particular concerning communicative action (Habermas); authentic deliberation (Dryzek); arguments for and against critical citizenship (Tully, Norris and Schumpeter); and political studies, including deliberative democracy and legitimization of government (Dewey). Methodologies include multi-disciplinary literature reviews; primary records obtained through the Access to Information Act (ATIA); media monitoring; database analysis and process tracking through elite interviews with scholars, government actors and political journalists. Chapter two considers rights history, philosophy, and jurisprudence in arguing that access to authentic information is both a right and is essential to the informed, reasonable public deliberations (Young) central to democratic legitimation (Dunn). Chapter three considers SPC, including the positivity bias of partisan SPC actors, and the countering “negativity bias” (Hood) of political journalists. Chapters four and five examine SPC practices of politically-appointed partisan staff in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) of Stephen Harper. Chapter six concerns secrecy, and resistance to Canada’s ATIA. The conclusion makes recommendations for greater transparency and accountability.
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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 | 0.067 | 0.177 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.032 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.007 |
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".