The Credibility Chasm in Policy Research from Academics, Think Tanks, and Advocacy Organizations
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
How do key policy professionals inside government view various sources of policy research? Are there systematic differences in the perceptions of the quality and credibility of research derived from different sources? This is a replication of and expansion on Doberstein (2017), which presented a randomized controlled survey experiment using policy analysts to systematically test the source effects of policy research. Doberstein's experimental findings provide evidence for the hypothesis that academic research is perceived to be substantially more credible to government policy analysts than think tank or advocacy organization research, regardless of its content, and that sources perceived as more ideological are much less credible. This study replicates that experiment in three additional Canadian provincial governments to verify whether the relationship found in the original study persists in a larger sample and in conjunction with further randomization procedures. This study corroborates the original study's findings, confirming that external policy advice systems are subject to powerful heuristics that bureaucrats use to sift through evidence and advice.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.031 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 it