Bibliographic record
Abstract
For more than a century, many practitioners and researchers have argued that municipal politicians are more ideologically moderate – that is, closer to the centre of a unidimensional left-right ideological scale – than their national counterparts. Testing this claim requires direct comparison of politicians who represent similar constituents but who are elected at different levels of government, but comparative data of this sort are rarely available. Here, I use new data from surveys of Canadian municipal, provincial, and federal politicians to rigorously test the “municipal moderation” thesis. Comparing politicians' symbolic ideological self-understandings N ≈ 3,000 and their latent policy ideologies N ≈ 775 , I find strong evidence that municipal politicians think of themselves as more ideologically moderate, but are not more moderate in their policy beliefs. Further, I leverage variation in the partisan identities of Canadian municipal politicians to show that differences in ideological moderation across levels of government disappear when we remove municipal non-partisans from the analysis. My results reinforce the view that municipal politicians hold non-ideological cultural norms but are embedded in an ideological electoral and policymaking context. My analysis also illustrates the analytical potential for “vertical” rather than “horizontal” comparative research designs. • Municipal politicians are said to be more ideologically moderate than provincial or federal politicians; this article tests this claim. • Municipal politicians do consider themselves more ideologically moderate. • Municipal politicians are not more moderate in their actual policy preferences. • Differences between municipal and other politicians disappear when we focus on partisan politicians. • Vertical comparisons are a valuable tool for understanding contemporary cities.
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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 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".