Grounding the political spectrum: how three Canadian think tanks integrate social space
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Building on Bourdieu’s Field Theory and on Thomas Medvetz’s study of American think tanks, this article introduces the concept of modalities of integration to examine how a selection of three Canadian think tanks have emerged and endured to promote specific views. Results show that the political identities of these think tanks are mediated by the communities they maintain and the forms of power these represent. These findings suggest that it is the way think tanks mediate the power structures of modern societies that can explain the convergence and cohesion of their policy ideas and political identities. The centrist think tank achieves its ‘centrism’ by catering to dominant interests and the state while extending a hand to ‘middle powers.’ The more activist think tanks maintain more homogenous communities by securing ties to specific interests and particular intellectual/ideological commitments.
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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 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.040 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".