Agenda Setting in English Canada in the Age of Minority Government, 2004-2011
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Keywords: Agenda Setting, Informational Politics, Frames Analysis, Network Theory, Political Communication, Policy Formation This dissertation examines the contemporary relationship between agenda setting and frames analysis in Canadian federal politics from 2004-2011. The research project tests Savoie's thesis that the centralization of power has grown with the increasing size of the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) and that the leader of the office has most clearly exerted that power in controlling the government's agenda by applying it to the experience of minority government at the dawn of the 21st century. To test his thesis, textual analyses of the PMO's agenda-setting documents were conducted to identify the key language, frames, and controlled policy announcements that were reflected within the political discourse. How does the discourse represent and reflect the shift in power in a dramatically changed political environment when, at least in theory, a minority government would be at the mercy of opposition parties who hold the balance of power? From 2006 to 2011, the Harper Conservatives stayed in power by cleverly manipulating the agenda through framing and reframing issues to their advantage. The prime minister retained the final executive decision on party and government political communications and was, therefore, the leading arbiter of the messages delivered to represent key party agenda-setting strategies. Harper has often been identified as a shrewd strategist by academics and the media alike, but how different were his agenda-setting techniques compared to previous minority government strategies? This research identifies the communication tactics that the PMO used in 2006 to ensure its unique five key policy frames of “accountability”, “child care tax credits”, “cutting the GST”, “patient wait time guarantees”, and “tough on crime” were consistently delivered and coordinated across media in their platforms, websites, speeches, and outlays. The Harper Conservatives’ new strategies included narrowing agendas, promoting wedge issues, priming voters using distracter frames, and using strict media communication protocols to attract popular support from the key segment of middle class families. Using these tactics, the government set the agenda on the dismantling of the firearms registry, framed the skills and motivations of two opposition leaders as ineffective and weak with attack advertisements, and sold the illusion that coalition governments were undemocratic.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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".