Bibliographic record
Abstract
The thesis presents three papers on electoral competition. In the first chapter, a quantitative measure of political competition is computed for Canadian parliamentary elections over the history of the modern Canadian state from 1867 to 2011. The measure of political competition, electoral risk, measures the probability that the incumbent government will lose the next election. The extent to which the economic indicators can be used in an explanation of electoral success is investigated. Current measures of electoral competition are improved upon and demonstrated to be robust. Amongst conflicting recent literature, this paper offers evidence of the continued existence of the 'economic voter' in Canada. In the second chapter, I examine the length of a Canadian parliament. The methodology employed uses survival analysis, allowing for the estimation of the dynamic probability that an incumbent government will call an election. The analysis incorporates principal components, along with other covariates, such as measures of political competition, to accurately estimate when an election is called. An optimal stopping rule is employed for the election decision and a Cox proportional hazard model is used to estimate the hazard function. The results show that Canadian governments engage in election timing and they are influenced by the prevailing level of electoral competition as measured by the probability of losing the next election. In the third chapter, I examine several indexes of political competition. I consider these indexes as reflecting different dimensions of an underlying degree of competition using a multiple-indicators multiple-causes model (MIMIC). A variety of economic and socio-political causal variables are employed in the models and investigated for significance. The resulting index of political competition for Canada shows that competition was highest from the 1950s to the early 1980s, before the level of competition decreased for 20 years until the early 2000s. In addition, the estimated indexes show that political competition has been elevated for the period of 2004 to 2015.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.053 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.012 | 0.015 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 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".