Issue Responsiveness in Canadian Politics: Are Parties Responsive to the Climate Change’s Public Salience in Question Period?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Are political representatives responsive to their constituents in determining the issues they address? Our paper takes a novel approach to this critical question using innovative data and state-of-the-art methodology. While most previous research on issue responsiveness has looked at the United States and its unique political institutions, we study a multi-party, parliamentary setting: Canada. We focus our analysis on two prominent issues: the environment and climate change. Using transcripts from the House of Commons’ Question Period from 2006 to 2021, we measure the attention political parties attribute to the various issues. We use Google Trends data to measure policy issues’ public salience. We implement an instrumental variable estimation strategy to identify and estimate how the environment and climate change’s public salience drives elite attention. Our analysis demonstrates that public salience significantly affects political parties’ interest in the environment and climate change but unveils appreciable partisan heterogeneity in this regard.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.030 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".