Buy-in for Buyouts: Attitudes Toward Compensation for Reform
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
Political reforms are often blocked by concentrated interest groups. An overlooked response is to “buy out” such groups, offering compensation in return for pushing through reforms. We present the theoretical case for and against buyouts and test public support through survey experiments on three policy proposals: phasing out coal energy, simplifying tax filing, and granting dictators amnesty. Buyouts gain majority support, but this depends on partisanship and program design. Buyouts for workers attract more approval than those for firms. Yet the dominant objection is normative: moral aversion appears as a greater concern than moral hazard. Many oppose rewarding actors who obstruct socially beneficial reforms. The results also highlight a credibility problem: those who support reform also support reneging on the compensation once the reform is passed, validating recipients’ fears of reversal. These findings suggest that while buyouts can render stalled reforms politically feasible, their democratic viability depends on careful design.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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