Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Canadian political science, Member of Parliaments’ (MP) staff are rarely studied. When mentioned, research only examines staff in relation to MPs’ interaction with their constituency office. As an understudied, poorly understood group, this thesis investigates who works for an MP and why they do so. I argue MP staff are important to study due to their direct interaction with constituents dealing with federal government issues. Using two unique datasets, – the Government Electronic Directory Services dataset and data collected in November and December 2018 from a survey of MPs’ employees across Canada - this study addresses four main research questions: who works for an MP and why; who uses their staff position to advance their political ambition; what are the main benefits and drawbacks for working for an MP; and how are these processes gendered? Results show that across Canada, regardless of political party, the gender of the MP and region, more women are employed by MPs than men. Helping constituents and their communities are rewarding aspects of working for an MP, though women report different, more rational motivations for their work than do men. Staff report poor office management, long hours, and low compensation as consistent drawbacks. Approximately one in four staff experience harassment within their jobs, the majority being women. As a starting point, this thesis aims to ignite future research about staff’s role in representation in Canada, our understanding of how gender influences this process, and staff’s overall involvement in Canadian politics.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 teacher head, 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".