The Nonconsequences of COVID-19 on Left–Right Ideological Beliefs
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Scholarship on past major crises, such as wars and depressions, argues that these events transformed mass attitudes about the role of the state. Motivated by these claims, we theorize reasons why the COVID-19 pandemic might have shifted citizens’ ideological beliefs and investigate whether it has. Using original panel data from the United Kingdom, we find no evidence that the pandemic affected beliefs about the role of government, even for those directly experiencing economic losses or new forms of state relief. In a follow-up survey experiment, we also find that voters do not change their opinions on redistribution or the role of government even when exposed to elite cues that frame the crisis as revealing the need for state expansion. Our findings suggest that crises may more commonly exert their effects on mass beliefs via the long-term feedback effects of elite-driven policy changes than through direct exposure to crisis conditions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it