Do politicians keep their word? Political pledges and their redeeming as a research object of political science and media studies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The question whether politicians keep their promises, in fact, concerns the functioning of representative democracy, respect of political elites for the needs and aspirations of society and, finally, the efficiency of the whole process of political communication, in which the media play an important role. Seeking the answer to this question is one of the constitutive features of the mass media, also called the Fourth Estate. On the basis of the findings of French, British and Canadian researchers, this article attempts to propose a particular set of research methods that would answer whether and how a particular political class keeps promises. According to the author, it is the media that are (should be) the entity – acting on behalf of society – which holds politicians accountable for the promises made. If this assumption is correct, then the methodology of research on how political commitments are translated into political practice (pragmatics of governance) in the light of social expectations (public opinion) should be a fundamental research problem for political scientists, sociologists and media experts. The author cites the results of a research project which analyzed the commitments made by Donald Tusk’s government in 2007 and 2008, and compares them with the content of articles published in “Rzeczpospolita” and “Gazeta Wyborcza” during the first 100 days as well as the first year of government by the Civic Platform (Platforma Obywatelska) and the Polish Peasants’ Party (Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".