Masters of Uncertainty: Social Scares and the Politics of Change in Energy Policy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Social scares are periods triggered by a spectacular, deadly, traumatizing, or otherwise disruptive event.The event produces a sudden, broadly shared perception of insecurity that brings an area of activity to the forefront of public and political attention.In these instances, leading political figures must strike a balance between two objectives: appearing as good leaders to temper the insecurity felt by large segments of their population; and obtaining a policy outcome they are comfortable with.This balancing act Estimated damage (millions of $) Attended physically (within 5 days) a 1977 Beverly Hills Supper Club fire J. Carter 165 (200) N/A No 1979 Three mile island J. Carter 0 1,000 Yes 1981 Hyatt Regency walkway collapse R. Reagan 114 (216) 153 No 1989 San Francisco earthquake G.H.W. Bush 63 (3757) 6,000 Yes 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill G.H.W. Bush 0 3,000-15,000 No 1993 End of Waco Siege B. Clinton 76 0 No 1993 World Trade Center bombing B. Clinton 6 (1000+) N/A No 1995 Oklahoma City bombing B. Clinton 168 (680) 652 Yes 1999 Columbine High School massacre B. Clinton 15 (24) 0 Yes b 2001 September 11 th attacks G.W. Bush 2,996 (6,000+) N/A Yes 2005 Hurricane Katrina G.W. Bush 1,500+ (N/A) 108,000 No 2004 Hurricane Ivan G.W. Bush 57 (N/A) 14,200 Yes 2007 Minnesota bridge collapse G.W. Bush 13 (145) 400 Yes 2007 Virginia Tech massacre G.W. Bush 33 (17) 0 Yes 2007 California wild fires G.W. Bush 9 (85) ?Yes 2008 Hurricane Ike G.W. Bush 135 (N/A) 24,900 Yes 2009 Fort Hood shooting B. Obama 13(32) 0 Yes 2010 BP oil spill B. Obama 11(0) 42,200 Yes c 2011 Tucson shooting B. Obama 6(13) 0 Yes 2011 Tornado outbreak B. Obama 316(2,400+) 4,200 Yes 2012 Sandy Hook Elem.school shooting B. Obama 28(2) 0 Yes 2012 Hurricane Sandy B. Obama 147 (N/A) 50,000+ Yes 2013 Boston marathon bombings B. Obama 3(200+) N/A Yes Note: sources for estimates can be found in the Appendix.a. "Attended" is defined here as instances where the President visited either the exact site of the incident, or a symbolic venue if this was not possible.b.Attended a month later.c.Attended 12 days later.2 "One-time" is defined here as an event that lasted for a short period (a few minutes to 48 hours), which excludes some types of event such as heat waves.Furthermore, I focus here on events with an (at least symbolically) identifiable site, where the President can be seen as "physically attending."This excludes most plane crashes, for instance, but not events such as tornados or wild fires, since the President can attend any site that appears to have been damaged by the event -whereas speaking from an airport after a plane crash could hardly be seen in the same light.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| 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".