A Process, Not Just an Event: MP Orientation and Representational Styles and Focus in Canada and the UK
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this dissertation I ask two research questions -first, how does structured and informal orientation shape the representational style and focus of Members of Parliament (MPs) in Canada and the UK?Second, what are the implications of this orientation for parliamentary democracy in Canada and the UK?I consider two types of structured orientation: the orientation organized by the House of Commons administration in both countries, the orientation organized by the political parties, along with two types of informal orientation: pre-and post-election socialization.I define structured orientation as the orientation that the House of Commons administration and the political parties deliver to MPs soon after they are first elected.As part of the structured orientation, the House administration and the political parties organize lecture sessions for new MPs.Following Norton's (2018) work on informal spaces in Parliament, I define informal orientation as orientation that is unscheduled and unplanned.The examples of informal orientation I use in this dissertation take place without direct intervention from the House administration or political parties and include the process of learning on the job and copying the behavior of colleagues.Through interviewing 80 MPs and orientation facilitators in Canada and the UK I have found that MPs are more likely to develop their representational style and focus through the party and informal orientation.The orientation from the House of Commons administration provides MPs with the tools to enact their representational style and focus.For example, the House orientation provides MPs with information on the budgets that MPs are allocated to lease a constituency office and hire staff.However, it is not the role of the non-partisan House administration to provide MPs with substantive guidance on how to achieve appropriate and effective representation (Malloy; 2023;Walsh, 2017;Ryle, 1981).This means that new MPs often look to the political parties and their MP colleagues to develop their representational style and focus, along with drawing on their own pre-election experience.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".