Punctuating the equilibrium: an application of policy theory to COVID-19
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
COVID-19 has taught us that, when inadequately addressed, preexisting policy problems (e.g. weak coordination of healthcare and gaps in income supports) exacerbate the cost of crises (including deaths) and make policy responses more difficult. On a more hopeful note, the pandemic has also revealed that policymakers and bureaucrats, reputed as defenders of the status quo and glacially paced, are capable of moving nimbly when seized with necessity. This manuscript draws on Baumgartner and Jones’ punctuated-equilibrium theory to analyze and demonstrate how policy responses to the pandemic, largely in Canada but also globally, were shaped by preexisting problems (periods of equilibrium). It then raises the question: Will future policy reflect lessons learned through COVID-19, to not only mitigate risks from further crises, but also tackle many other policy challenges? It would seem we can no longer accept the excuse that problems are too complex or time-consuming to tackle.
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.
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 | 0.026 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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 it