Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this thesis is to test the ‘rational public’ theory first espoused by Page and Shapiro (1988) for the Australian case. I aim to ascertain whether the Australian public, at the aggregate level, has the capacity to form ‘rational’ opinions on foreign policy issues. I do this by testing three major hypotheses using collective opinion data from the Australian Election Study (AES) 1987 – 2010: 1) opinion will be durable, or stable over time, 2) opinion will be coherent, and 3) opinion will respond reasonably, as predicted, to such triggers as changing international situations, elite cues, and particular events or trends. I found considerable support for all three hypotheses. Aggregate Australian opinion was as stable as US, Canadian, German, French, Italian, and Dutch opinion when using comparable measures, and more stable when using methods specific to the AES dataset. Opinion was also coherent, and, in most cases, responded to available directly and indirectly experienced triggers, as posited. I also performed a sub-set of tests for all three of these major hypotheses on the group of respondents who professed to have ‘no interest’ in politics, often referred to as the inattentive public, and found they held slightly less stable and coherent opinions overall, but were more responsive: results which lend further weight to the overall ‘rational public’ hypothesis. These results for the Australian case enable cross-national comparison to determine whether the ‘rational public’ thesis is generalisable, or whether it is dependent on such factors as a state’s position in the international system, its political institutions, or its political culture. I also envisage this thesis as providing a basis for further research into the functioning of Australian democracy as regards the public opinion, media, and policy-making nexus, incorporating further cross-national comparison. PAGE, B. I. & SHAPIRO, R. Y. 1988. Foreign policy and the rational public. Journal of conflict resolution, 32, 211-247.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
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".